I have just emerged from a tough read. One which is familiar and has infused the consciousness of many readers for many decades. It will claim another encounter before too much time passes. This is because the effect of the spirit summoned by Camus in 1942 L’Étranger eludes the modern Western, linear measurement of the passage of the human experience, thus lingering on. Reflecting the Classical Greek perspective of an elliptical arrow of life’s unfolding and undoing, refracted by Nietzsche’s perception of humanity relieving itself of its suffering through endless adaptations of its plights of scripts, narratives and scores, in Toni Aquilina’s latest interpretation of this modern classic, Meursault can only relive his struggle with his temporal and spatial dimensions, in order to engage the reader in a blinding walk under a relentless sun.
The Fates have already set out the span of coffee spoons allocated to the main character and narrator in Camus’s tale, before this is brought up short. The thread is strong, but short, intense, and by necessity finite. Meursault is condemned to death by guillotine, the terrible egalitarian scythe that sets free the brotherhood of man, because he readily accepts cups of coffee with milk from the beadle at the old people’s home at his dead mother’s wake, and does so with relish. His recognition of this simple pleasure at what is judged to be an abomination by the prosecutor at his trial is, Meursault further realises, a sore that displays the moral wasteland that lies inside him.
Aquilina’s text does not shy away from drawing us in close on the wounds, at times even allowing us to consider whether the salt thrown by his judges and executors is necessary in order to cleanse the sickness, clear out the rot and stop any spread of the contagion to other members of the community before it becomes a plague. Aquilina’s intertextuality is subtle and a painful joy to perceive, akin to the shimmering light on the waves off the Algerian coast where the main character enjoys innocent yet sensual baths with Marie Cardona so soon, too soon, after the loss of the one he endearingly refers to as maman / il-mamà not simply ma mère / ommi throughout this first person narrative. Another strong, unspoken presence evoked through Aquilina’s language is that of Sisyphus, ploughing the infinite trench of his own sterile existence under the unforgiving and punishing Mediterranean sun.
In Aquilina’s taught language, fraught with tension that is on the brink of possibility, between respite and despair, escape through life and closure through death, the contrasts evoked in the natural surroundings relentlessly emerge through the narration of the characters’ actions like sharp twigs on the shrivelled underbush that somehow persists in surviving. Aquilina’s balanced approach evokes the tension exhibited in Ennio Flaiano’s 1947 Tempo di uccidere, or A Time to Kill, that drew another fragile oasis in twentieth century European existential meandering played out in African sands. This translation of Camus’s work leads us to the episode when the lost Italian soldier and narrator finds comic solace in remembering how his unit had made fun of the official that pinned numbered papers to skeletal branches and jutting rocks every fifty paces in order to trace his way through the boundless, shapeless labyrinth of the Ethiopian desert, only to regret not having thought of doing so himself. Aquilina’s delicate, sensitive, mindful approach even allows for dashes of mirage-like salvation through moments that suggest Meursault may find his own white envelope near the river, as Flaiano’s soldier does, which he recognises as his own because his name is printed on the front. This is described as the most important missive of his life because it is a reminder that he, identified by that name and surname, is the only human being that may respond to it, and that by doing so he is still alive.
The struggle of making sense of a maze without walls, open to ambush from all quarters, with the traps set by free will that however, inevitably, lead one to exclusionary choices, and consequences, recalls the travails of another lover of life, namely that of Gerard Sorme, the writer and narrator in Colin Wilson’s 1970 The God of the Labyrinth. Aquilina’s engagement with Camus’s text displays the reflection inspired by the writings of Apollinaire, namely that a writer should stand apart from the mundane, in order to delve deep into reality rather than be absorbed by daily routine. This may mean being brutal or nihilistic, and risk being ostracised for one’s behaviour that is however striving to live openly and honestly with one’s own natural and social context. Meursault may display callousness and insensitivity, but that is the price he pays for seeking, in Wilson’s words, emotional reality. When Wilson suggests that the coils of the spoils of mortality are eluded when one is immersed in life, rather than by seeking escapist alienation, he invokes Saint Augustine’s reflection that he knew what time was as long as he wasn’t asked to define it.
The beginning is a good place to end, which brings us to Aquilina’s insightful title. A great deal has been written about the different ways in which Camus’s text has been translated into different languages. L-Għarib gestures towards the foreigness and outcast nature of Meursault, a man in an inhospitable land, seeking shelter, l-għarb, from the arid storm, by being true and accountable to his own understanding of life, in thought and in action. While sharing roots yet not the development, the term is suggestive in its proximity to the Maltese word for Arab. Indeed, by taking into account the socio-political dimension, one observes how Meursault is a Frenchman transplanted into the shifting sands of a French Algeria that was witnessing the reclamation of the territory by the Arabs and, at a later stage, the Berbers, in so doing addressing the state of not being at home in one’s own land.
In the novel, the Arabs are relegated to a shadowy, menacing presence, acting as a foil, at best, to the evolution of Meursault’s story. Since Conor Cruise O’Brien’s 1970 sharp criticism of Camus’s orientalism in handling Arab characters as expendable props, the topic of identitarian and political blindness in Camus and other writers, poignantly captured by Meursault’s shooting of an Arab man in the furnace of the sands, has gained in importance. Kamel Daoud’s 2013 Meursault, contre-enquête, or The Meursault Investigation, provided the perspective of Haroun, the now elderly imaginary brother of the killed man, who notes that Meursault seems to have been overwhelmed by the overpowering sun and the too much salt that led to a lack of sight of the Arab community surrounding him. I think it is pertinent to point out here that Meursault (a name evoking death and salt) has a predecessor, albeit spelt slightly different, Mersault (the sea, mother and salt), featuring in Camus’s earlier novel, La Mort heureuse / A Happy Death, which was only published postumously.
Toni Aquilina’s masterfully crafted translation invites us to enter, once again, this vertiginous cycle, because just as searching for an honest, revelatory connection with one’s natural and social context may lead to dishonest truths because, at best, they are always partial, reading seminal tales for our times through inspired, careful writing, is never enough and endlessly necessary.
L-Għarib, written by the French Nobel Prize winner, Albert Camus has been published in the translation series of Faraxa Publishing.
As appear on The Sunday Times of Malta 15 October 2023:
https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/book-review-meursault-stranger-true-oneself.1060338
Cultural Policy 