Algerian writer Kamel Daoud wins the Goncourt

But writing a 'sequel' to The Stranger as a set of questions is difficult. Because of the cult of the 'Camusians', intractable purists (it really is the last straw that a religionless Albert Camus left one to his fervent followers!). One can imagine an Argentinean or a Bolivian approaching Meursault's world to revive his questions, but never an Algerian or a Frenchman.

Camus' universe is poisoned by the colonial question, the difficult relations between Algeria and France, and the always heated controversy over Camus' commitment and disengagement. On the one hand he spoke out against misery in Algeria, he was never a rich settler who exploited the poor colonised, he always defended the human factor in the face of the inexplicable but also in the face of injustice. On the other hand, he was never an Algerian, he did not fight to liberate the country where he was born, he never decided what nationality to have and he made his choice by putting justice and his mother on an equal footing, as explained by the famous sentence uttered by the Nobel Prize winner.

So, writing a sequel to the Stranger if you are French, you risk being treated as a pied-noir, as nostalgic for the colonies, as a criminal or even as a fascist, for the glory perhaps of the extreme right. And to write a sequel to the Stranger if one is Algerian means being destined to react to crime with a cry, to polemicise, to clash, to wage war again, to take up arms against Meursault, to launch an appeal process against Camus.

This is what you would expect from an Algerian writing a counter-inquiry on the Meursault case, and I did not want to do that. Camus fits into my literary genealogy of the greats who posed existential questions about the world and the human condition. I never wanted to link him to our wars of independence or to my anger as a former colonised man or to subsidies to the military. To look at his work in the light of our grudges and memories of bad neighbours is to fail to do it justice.

I wanted to write and dreamed for a long time of a sequel to The Stranger to talk about my condition through a fictitious character. But not to settle the score. And this is difficult to explain to people, both French and Algerian. Everyone expects us to talk about Camus or Meursault in order to give them a trial or take on their defence. Everyone will talk about decolonisation, war, memory, verdicts or unfinished justice. Including my character. But I imagined him oppressed by a rage that will open his eyes and lead him to revolt. Not to ape Camus, but for Camus to help me find an answer to my questions. I did not want to revisit The Stranger, but to immerse myself in it and understand the path I took. I did not write in response to France, but to my need to imagine books, to rewrite them, my desire to find meaning, my ambition to have a voice and to give voice.

The brother of the 'Arab' fights for his brother to be given a name. It is a robinsonnade in which one does not want the black man to be called Friday, a banal weekday. Then, little by little, in the course of his wandering and the vicissitudes of the country, the Arab's brother realises that he too is alone, on a large evanescent island where raids are carried out and where indifference and anger reign, so he feels closer to the murderer Meursault than to Moussa, the murdered Arab. That is all. But for a big book reader like me, it is an enticing and almost endless prospect. I dream of an imaginary library in which the point of view of the great works is improbably turned upside down: The Old Man and the Sea narrated by a swordfish, Of Mice and Men told through the mutterings of an idiot, The Satanic Verses according to Khomeiny, Don Quixote according to the squire, Lolita according to the pretty girl, and so on.

As a child, I missed books terribly. There were none in my village. I read what I could find. And that is why I imagined sequels. I would fantasise by reading the catalogues announcing the publication of books that I could never find in the village. All I needed was a title to write, in my mind, the missing story. Sometimes, later in life, some books disappointed me: they were more fascinating in my mind as a frustrated teenager with little reading than in the reality of libraries. I dreamed of being a 'rewriter', not a writer. Even Meursault, the counter-inquiry I wrote with a playful spirit and a lot of imagination, I wanted it to pose questions but also be escapist reading. I do not answer Albert Camus, I join my weak voice to the convulsive and mute cry of Edgar Munch, whose Meursault is the alphabet and sacred book. I did not answer Camus, I answer my world. That is how I imagined this book: as short as The Stranger, with the same words, sometimes the same phrases, the same images, but tormented by a tacit derailment, narrated through an intrusion; an angry, bad, lying, but inquisitive book. It is the book I dreamed of.

And I also dream of being judged by my own because I feel much closer to Meursault than to his victim.

Translation by Marta Matteini