CAMUS REVISITED
Catch up on an event which took place at the Institut français on the 24th of June 2015.
Jeremy Harding (London Review of Books), Abraham Ségal (director of Sisyphe se révolte), and Lucie Campos (Institut français) all discussed Kamel Daoud’s book, The Meursault Investigation (published by OneWorld).
There was also a conversation with Kamel Daoud himself via Skype.
Writing for the London Review of Books Jeremy Harding reviewed the event calling Daoud’s book:
"a dazzling appropriation of L’Etranger, sceptical, impatient, yet full of admiration for a canonical little fiction. He is The Outsider’s nerdiest insider. He knows every line (and occasionally quotes or tweaks them in his ‘own’ novel): he has inhabited the text and argued with it for years. Edward Said published Culture and Imperialism in 1993, as the war between Algeria’s Islamists and the ancien régime – still in power today, after half a century – was getting under way. That’s over. But so is the age of postcolonial condescension, a confident, proscriptive age, which threw out Camus’s best work along with a lot of his high-minded anguish. Daoud has reopened the conversation about an interesting novel."
Harding also comments on the fact that Daoud announced 'I am not a Camusian,’ to his audience before going on to talk about the importance of the memory of colonialism. You can read write-up of the event in its enterity here on the LRB website.
Click here to listen to some book extracts.
Click here to listen to more book extracts with part of the discussion.
Click here to listen Lucie Campos and Abraham Ségal talk about Sisyphe se révolte.