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Kamel Daoud Biography

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“I find love inexplicable. The sight of a couple always surprises me, their inevitable slow rhythm, their insistent groping, their indistinguishable food, their way of taking hold of each other with hands and eyes at the same time, their way of blurring at the edges. I can’t understand why one hand has to clasp another and never let it go in order to give someone else’s heart a face. 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? I’ve read many books, and I’ve concluded that love’s an accommodation, certainly not a mystery. It seems to me that the feelings love elicits in other people are, well, pretty much the same as the ones death elicits in me: the sensation that every life is precarious and absolute, the rapid heartbeat, the distress before an unresponsive body. Death — when I received it, when I gave it — is for me the only mystery. All the rest is nothing but rituals, habits, and dubious bonding. 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. Have you seen what becomes of people when they split up? They’re scratches on a closed door.”

LoveLoneliness
Book:The Meursault Investigation
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“As a matter of fact, that's the reason why I've learned to speak this language, and to write it too: so I can speak in the place of a dead man, so I can finish his sentences for him. The murderer got famous, and his story's too well written for me to get any ideas about imitating him. He wrote in his own language. Therefore I'm going to do what was done in this country after Independence: I'm going to take the stones from the old houses the colonists left behind, remove them one by one, and build my own house, my own language. The murderer's words and expressions are my unclaimed goods. Besides, the country's littered with words that don't belong to anyone anymore.”

LanguageIndependenceUnclaimed Goods
Book:The Meursault Investigation
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“So Musa was a simple god, a god of few words. His thick beard and strong arms made him seem like a giant who could have wrung the neck of any soldier in any ancient pharaoh's army. Which explains why, on the day when we learned of his death and the circumstances surrounding it, I didn't feel sad or angry at first; instead I felt disappointed and offended, as if someone had insulted me. 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.”

GodPharaohMusa
Book:The Meursault Investigation
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