The Meursault Investigation

"The Mersault Investigation pairs perfectly with [b:The Stranger|49552|The Stranger|Albert Camus|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1349927872s/49552.jpg|3324344]. The story of the brother of the nameless Arab murdered in Camus' book, The Mersault Investigation explores many of the same ideas as the original, but from an opposite cultural perspective and through a very postmodern narrative. The tone is deceptively conversational but is actually a masterwork of subtlety and the sublime. The level of precision and style in this book feels very similar to The Stranger - I read this book before reading The Stranger but I would strongly recommend doing it the right way! My appreciation for this book has gone up considerably since reading the original.<br/><br/>Some of my favorite quotes from the book below.<br/><br/>############################################<br/><br/>What hurts me every time I think about it is that he killed him by passing over him, not by shooting him. You know, his crime is majestically nonchalant.<br/><br/>I think I can guess why people write true stories. Not to make themselves famous but to make themselves more invisible, and all the while clamoring for a piece of the world’s true core.<br/><br/>My brother Musa was capable of parting the sea, and yet he died in insignificance, like a common bit player, on a beach that today has disappeared, close to the waves that should have made him famous forever!<br/><br/>As soon as I learned to read and write, everything became clear to me: I had my mother, while Meursault had lost his. He killed, but I knew it was really a way of committing suicide.<br/><br/>Before I realized how alike we were, he and I, imprisoned in the same cell, shut up out of sight in a place where bodies were nothing but costumes.<br/><br/>I tell myself that after losing their land, their wells, and their livestock, women were all our guys had left.<br/><br/>The story in that book of yours comes down to a sudden slipup caused by two great vices: women and laziness.<br/><br/>The bars still open in this country are aquariums containing mostly bottom-feeders, weighed down and scraping along. You come here when you want to escape your age, your god, or your wife, I believe, but in any case haphazardly.<br/><br/>She lied not from a desire to deceive but in order to correct reality and mitigate the absurdity that struck her world and mine.<br/><br/>That cemetery was the place where I awakened to life, believe me. It was where I became aware that I had a right to the fire of my presence in the world — yes, I had a right to it! — despite the absurdity of my condition, which consisted in pushing a corpse to the top of a hill before it rolled back down, endlessly.<br/><br/>Generally speaking, it takes place in three settings of national importance: the city, whether that one or another one; the mountains, where you take refuge when you’re attacked or you want to make war; and the village, which is for each and every one of us the ancestral home. Everybody wants a village wife and a big-city *****.<br/><br/>But no, he didn’t name him, because if he had, my brother would have caused the murderer a problem with his conscience: You can’t easily kill a man when he has a given name.<br/><br/>I always react that way when I hear someone recite the Koran. I get the feeling it’s not a book, it’s a dispute between a heaven and a creature! As far as I’m concerned, religion is public transportation I never use. This God — I like traveling in his direction, on foot if necessary, but I don’t want to take an organized trip.<br/><br/>I’ll go so far as to say I abhor religions. All of them! Because they falsify the weight of the world. Sometimes I feel like busting through the wall that separates me from my neighbor, grabbing him by the throat, and yelling at him to quit reciting his sniveling prayers, accept the world, open his eyes to his own strength, his own dignity, and stop running after a father who has absconded to heaven and is never coming back.<br/><br/>Well, after I’d killed a man, it wasn’t my innocence I missed the most, it was the border that had existed until then between my life and crime. That’s a line that’s hard to redraw later. The Other is a unit of measurement you lose when you kill.<br/><br/>What’s the point of putting up with adversity, suffering, or even an enemy’s hatred if you can resolve everything with a few simple gunshots? The unpunished murderer develops a certain inclination to laziness. But there’s something irreparable as well: The crime forever compromises both love and the possibility of loving. I killed a man, and since then, life is no longer sacred in my eyes. After what I did, the body of every woman I met quickly lost its sensuality, its possibility of giving me an illusion of the absolute. Every surge of desire was accompanied by the knowledge that life reposes on nothing solid. I could suppress it so easily that I couldn’t adore it — I would have been deceiving myself. I’d chilled all human bodies by killing only one. Indeed, my dear friend, the only verse in the Koran that resonates with me is this: “If you kill a single person, it is as if you have killed the whole of mankind.”<br/><br/>When your hero’s in his cell, that’s when he’s best at asking the big questions.<br/><br/>For a brief while, I knew your hero’s genius: the ability to tear open the common, everyday language and emerge on the other side, where a more devastating language is waiting to narrate the world in another way. That’s it! The reason why your hero tells the story of my brother’s murder so well is that he’d reached a new territory, a language that was unknown and grew more powerful in his embrace, the words like pitilessly carved stones, a language as naked as Euclidian geometry. I think that’s the grand style, when all is said and done: to speak with the austere precision the last moments of your life impose on you. Imagine a dying man and the words he says. That’s your hero’s genius: He describes the world as if he’s going to die at any moment, as if he has to choose his words with an economy of breathing. He’s an ascetic.<br/><br/>How do people who love each other do it? How can they stand it? What is it that makes them forget they were born alone and will die separate?<br/><br/>To tell the truth, love is a heavenly beast that scares the hell out of me. I watch it devour people, two by two; it fascinates them with the lure of eternity, shuts them up in a sort of cocoon, lifts them up to heaven, and then drops their carcasses back to earth like peels."

"I enjoyed this book because Harun (the main character) is answering back to Meursault who has killed his brother. We get to see the other side of the murder when in (The Stranger by Camus), is so nonchalant about murdering someone. If you read The Stranger, read this book right afterwards!"