The remapping of literary value systems proposed by Christie McDonald and Susan Suleiman in French Global has opened a large window onto our assumptions about the role of a language in a national context. Language choice, Suleiman argues in ‘Choosing French,’ her meditation on Beckett and Némirovsky, is a force of history never entirely free of social and political pressures. Language is a potential liberation for writers, but never a guarantee of freedom. Fortunately, linguistic policy alone cannot determine language use. States may well propose an official language, but it is writers—who believe in specific languages and endow them with meaning—who, in their practice and in their choices, bring to literature the sum of their experiences as readers. The Algerian writer Kamel Daoud, in his 2013 novel Meursault, contre-enquête, has achieved what jazz musicians would call a ‘riff’ on Camus's 1942 novel L'Etranger. He has created a powerful new score inspired by an old, familiar melody, a ‘counter-inquest’ into the death of a nameless Arab on an Algerian beach—a fictional death that has fascinated, puzzled, and appalled countless readers.

Three facts are worth considering before we launch into an analysis of Daoud's novel and its relationship to Camus's ‘original.’ First, it is significant that Daoud, educated in Arabic, wrote Meursault, contre-enquête in French, a language he learned largely on his own in a country that has replaced French with Classical Arabic as the official national language. Second, in choosing Camus's L'Etranger as the background or condition of his own novel, Daoud participates in a debate on Camus that necessarily has different contours in France, in Algeria, and in the many countries where L'Etranger remains a familiar representative of French literature. Finally, it is important to remember that when Camus published L'Etranger in 1942, Algeria was part of France, whereas Daoud is writing about an independent Algerian nation. In Daoud's fictional world, insider and outsider are different: the Frenchmen are ‘roumis’ or foreigners; the ‘Arabs’ are Algerian citizens.