Read his other works first.

books:


	• Happy Death Albert Camus Vintage, 1995 - 208 pages average customer review:based on 19 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

beautiful translation

I am a Camus fan. I've read everything of his, starting with The Stranger and ending with A Happy Death. I must say that A Happy Death is my favorite. I (re-)read it several times a year.

A Happy Death is the most beautifully written, in my opinion. Content aside, the language (albeit in translation) is gorgeous and incredibly evocative. I can't get over it.

Content-wise, I felt that A Happy Death was much more human, we got to know Mersault much better. In The Stranger he is so cold, deliberately almost one-dimensional and I felt it was lovely to get to know a different side of him in A Happy Death. The language and descriptions are lush and vivid, the character has a lot more depth, and above all else, when I read it, I can clearly see why Camus vehemently denied being called an "existentialist". Some of the "existentialist" ideas certainly are present, but there seems to be such a different aesthetic.

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very good

Camus first book, though published after his death and without his consent, is a lens into the mind of the young author. Great imagery, strong philosophy, and a good mystery feel, leaves the reader fulfilled through out the novel. A MUST for those taking on the philosophy of Camus.

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Purpose Imposes Meaning

Those who come to A HAPPY DEATH after THE STRANGER tend to note the similarities in plot and theme that relegate they believe the former to the latter as a juvenile attempt--not bad maybe, but not the real thing either. Such a judgment is overhasty. The Mersault of A HAPPY DEATH may or may not be the Mersault of THE STRANGER. Both live in Algiers and both wander aimlesslessly in life, seeking a philosophical underpinning. Both kill a man, and both suffer for it. But such a facile comparison omits a great deal that suggests when Camus took up the pen again a decade later, he has more in mind than a handy earlier book from which he could self-[...].

The Mersault of A HAPPY DEATH has a first name, Patrice, who is poor and seeks a way to battle a losing effort with time that his poverty proves a hindrance. He finds a rich cripple and kills him, and steals his money, which he uses to work out the details, however bizarre, of a philosophy that involve his finding happiness. The other Mersault seeks happiness too, but with him he already is "happy" in the sense that he knows his place in the universe, which he sees as a disordered self-contained field of entropy from which he concludes that nothing makes sense and everything is meaningless. This Mersault does not need to steal money to reach a higher state. Patrice Mersault seeks to elevate himself to reach a higher state that he feels money is the key and murder is the means. His later counterpart would find it amusing that his namesake would bother to look outside himself for anything. Patrice, could he but jump into HIS counterpart's book, would feel, not amusement, but rage at someone who has no purpose in life except to keep doing what he is doing. Both Mersaults share some surface traits, but in the final analysis, they are no more than two distinct individuals who share a name and a few piddling details of their surface lives. And perhaps this is what caused Camus to take up the pen with his twin Mersaults: to show his readers that the universe cannot mean more than what you put into it or what you don't.

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Camus strikes again !

This novel may be well the best proof about the enormous influence exerted by Dostoievsky in Albert Camus .
When you are inmersed in this intriguing storytelling you will feel the giant and dark shadow of Crime and Punishment covering the unhappy existence of our murderer . The shame will load the soul of this nasty and filthy man all the way .
And you will understand why sometimes you may talk about a suggested suicide .
A crucial text in the Camus universe .

Read his other works first.

If you haven't read Camus yet, read "The Stranger" or one of his other works. "Happy Death" does not really hold its own as well as a stand-alone novel; and The Stranger is a much better read. However, "Happy Death" does provide some keen insight into Camus and his philosophy and is worth reading for that reason alone as well as for a decent number of really thought provoking powerful passages scattered throughout.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

In his first novel, A Happy Death, written when he was in his early twenties and retrieved from his private papers following his death in I960, 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.

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.

Translated from the French by Richard Howard

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