A Happy Death (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Part two of the book, ‘Conscious Death’, is where we run into trouble, but in my view not one of structure necessarily, nor of phrasing or philosophy, but of tone and event. Part one has set up Mersault’s unsatisfying life and his intention to take the cripple Zagreus’ money and pursue a happy life but part two isn’t equal to the set-up. Camus’s story about Absurdism only begins with a suicide. The person who plans his suicide has a gun to end his life but by someone he chooses. The choice is made by Camus's main character, a person wandering through life with no purpose. Camus's main character explains he lived a life that earned him two million dollars. It was earned with purpose, by any means necessary. His purpose in life is to become wealthy. He achieves that purpose, but now as an amputee, he feels he can no longer pursue that purpose. The main character of the story is given two million dollars to shoot the amputee and make it look like a suicide with a note written by the amputee. rather than spontaneous,to come upon the happiness he seeks,whose vehicle is his will. As in The Outsider,there are two parts:the life before and a life after,where a happy life leads to a happy death in a world that is absurd. As the novel follows the protagonist, Patrice Mersault, to his victim's house -- and then, fleeing, in a journey that takes him through stages of exile, hedonism, privation, and death -it gives us a glimpse into the imagination of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. For here is the young Camus himself, in love with the sea and sun, enraptured by women yet disdainful of romantic love, and already formulating the philosophy of action and moral responsibility that would make him central to the thought of our time.

A Happy Death is a young and imperfect novel, but Camus the philosopher is already well-formed. I think this novel deserves much more attention than it typically receives. AN INTERNET READER COMMENTS: John Sharman The time demanded his response, chiefly in his activities, but in 1947, Camus retired from political journalism. El primer libro conocido de Camus pero publicado póstumamente, aquí encontramos un antecedente del protagonista y a la historia de “el extranjero” con tintes muy similares y un primer esbozo de lo que sería más adelante su mejor obra, se refleja muy bien el talento de Camus para plasmar escenarios y sobretodo pensamientos y sensaciones, el problema del libro, que al ser el primero o de los primeros trabajos de Camus se notan todas las carencias de “el extranjero” que obviamente perfecciono con el tiempo y por eso se convirtió en unos de los grandes autores del siglo XX, pero en este libro las descripciones son en demasía y muy aburridas y pesadas, la verdad es que transmite muy poco, salvo algunas expresiones muy buenas el libro carece de mágica, habla mucho y dice poco y si se puede terminar es por su corta extensión, que aún así para lo que nos cuenta es muy largo, básicamente ese es el problema del libro, lo sumamente descriptivo que resulta y aunque sabemos que la narrativa de Camus más allá “de lo que te cuente” se trata sobre “cómo te lo está contando” en este libro no hay ese encanto, pero a pesar de todo eso resulta agradable poder leer este libro y compararlo con “el extranjero” y notar como el autor pudo mejorar su calidad para entregarnos una de las mejores obras del existencialismo. Yazarın gerçek hayatından izler taşıyan, onun kişiliğini anlamak için bile okunması gereken ve yazarın aşk hayatı hakkında en çok bilgiye sahip olabileceğimiz kitap olma özelliği de taşıyan Mutlu Ölüm en başta Suç ve Ceza’yı akla getirse de ondan çok farklıdır.

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In his first novel, A Happy Death, written when he was in his early 20s and retrieved from his private papers following his death in 1960, Albert Camus laid the foundation for The Stranger, focusing in both works on an Algerian clerk who kills a man in cold blood. But he also revealed himself to an extent that he never would in his later fiction. For if A Happy Death is the study of a rule-bound being shattering the fetters of his existence, it is also a remarkably candid portrait of its author as a young man. Wherever it is possible to live, it is possible to live well.’ ‘What prevents a work being completed becomes the work itself.’ ‘What bars our way makes us travel along it.’ tribute to the power of his post-war political thinking and example. Other voices blame Camus for his failure to The product of a troubled time in Camus’s life, The Fall is a troubling work, full of brilliant invention, dazzling wordplay, and devastating satire, but so profoundly ironic and marked by so many abrupt shifts in tone as to leave the reader constantly off balance and uncertain of the author’s viewpoint or purpose. This difficulty in discerning the book’s meaning is inherent in its basic premise, for the work records a stream of talk— actually one side of a dialogue—by a Frenchman who haunts a sleazy bar in the harbor district of Amsterdam and who does not trouble to hide the fact that most of what he says, including his name, is invented. Because he is worldly and cultivated, his talk is fascinating and seizes the attention of his implied interlocutor (who is also, of course, the reader) with riveting force. The name he gives himself is Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a name that evokes the biblical figure of the prophet John the Baptist as the voice crying in the wilderness (vox clamantis in deserto) and that coincides neatly with the occupation he claims to follow, also of his own invention: judgepenitent. One needn’t be a Stoic to appreciate what a profound effect this latter experience had on Camus. The young man himself turned at this moment of crisis to Stoicism, reading Epictetus in the hospital as he convalesced. [i] Years later, confronting one of the many adversities that defined his life, he would cite Marcus Aurelius as a source of strength in his Notebooks:

Mersault ate quietly until Emmanuel started to tell Celeste how he had fought the battle of the Marne. ‘See, they sent us zouaves out in front ...’As a major influence on the 20 th century French literary scene, it’s sometimes forgotten that Albert Camus was a Pied-Noir – a French Algerian whose formative years were spent surrounded not by the cold beauties of Paris but the sensorial world of Algiers, where Camus studied philosophy and played sport until a tubercular condition eventually sent him for the first time to Europe for treatment – the French Alps more specifically – in 1936. Mutlu ölüm, Yabancı’da olduğu gibi yine varoluşçuluk üzerine dayalı ve bu düşünceleri karakterin ağzından aktaran, sürükleyici ve etkileyici bir roman.