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A Happy Death (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Central to the idea of The Plague, certainly, is the theme of man’s encounter with death rather than the theme of man’s interpretation of life, which dominates The Stranger. Indeed, with The Plague, Camus was returning to the preoccupation of his earliest work of fiction, A Happy Death, but with a major new emphasis. The Plague concerns not an individual’s quest in relation to death but a collectivity’s involuntary confrontation with it. In The Plague, death is depicted as a chance outgrowth of an indifferent nature that suddenly, and for no apparent reason, becomes an evil threat to humankind. Death in the form of a plague is unexpected, irrational— a manifestation of that absurdity, that radical absence of meaning in life that is a major underlying theme of The Stranger. In The Plague, however, Camus proposes the paradox that when death is a manifestation of the absurd, it galvanizes something in a person’s spirit that enables the individual to join with others to fight against death and thus give meaning and purpose to life. From evil may come happiness, this novel seems to suggest: It is a painful irony of the human condition that individuals often discover their own capacities for courage and for fraternal affection—that is, for happiness— only if they are forced by the threat of evil to make the discovery. The first novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author lays the foundation for The Stranger, telling the story ofan Algerian clerk who kills a man in cold blood. 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. I agree that the writing in Happy Death is less organised than in The Outsider,but it is livier and fresher and seems more autobiographical and depicts a lot more of Camus' lived life.It sets out its stool,has an agenda:how to get happiness? get money to buy the time that can lead to greater happiness.Because it's more of a willed performance,the structure is more improvised and awkward and deliberate but you don't get the excisions of The Outsider where the information surrounding the characters has been stripped away and it becomes mysterious and portentous.The character of Mersault seems more human in A Happy Death and we don't get the darkness of 'the arabs' or 'killing an arab' which makes Camus' position closer to the French colonists.In A Happy Death isn't he more of the working class l'homme moyen sensuel,hedonistic,believable,still able to murder,but the murder has a lighter tone to it and has a purpose,possibly aided by the victim,Roland Zagreus.This book,published after his death in 1972 is hardly ever spoken of.As you say it deserves to be better known.Incidently, 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 ...’

The beautifully economic yet evocative writing extends beyond the physical to Mersault’s interior world. Mersault has a sexual relationship with Marthe whose “beauty she offered him day after day like some delicate intoxication” but, as in other sphere’s of his life, Mersault vacillates between fully engaging in the sensual world and trying not to be controlled by it. When a trip to the cinema reveals one of Marthe’s ex-lovers, Mersault’s mood, which had been exultant, turns to ash in his mouth and the moment makes him forget his dignity. He asks Marthe if the man they saw was once her lover.

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The hint of optimism in this paradoxical theme— happiness is, after all, possible for some if the circumstances are dire enough—is, however, insufficient to offset the fundamental pessimism of The Plague. Aglance at the fates of the main characters will make the basic bleakness of this work manifest. At the center of the action is Bernard Rieux, a doctor who risks his life every day to lead the fight against the plague and who, more than anyone else in the novel, experiences the satisfaction and the joy of finding himself equal to a heroic task and feeling with others a fraternal bond engendered by their common struggle. His satisfaction is brief and his joys few, however. He knows that he cannot cure victims of the plague and must suppress his sympathy for them if he is to be effective in palliating their suffering and in keeping them from infecting others. The result of this bind is that Rieux strikes his patients and their families as cold and indifferent; he ends up being hated by those he is trying to help. The fraternal bond with others who are trying to help develops in only a few instances, since most of his fellow citizens are too frightened or egocentric to join him in the effort. Moreover, where the bond does develop, it proves too tenuous to penetrate his natural isolation.

I was particularly dissatisfied with, even confused by, many weaknesses of transition. After killing Zagreus and going off to Prague and later Vienna, Mersault has a miserable time since he lives so poorly and in miserable dives. But why would he do so? He has a great fortune -- the money stolen from Zagreus -- and just a few short months later in Algeria he buys a glorious home overlook the sea and lives quite well. The entire episode of Zagreus' murder is confusion. It seems Zagreus strongly suggested his own murder to Mersault and wants Patrice to have the happiness he cannot achieve. Yet this is ambiguous. Is this a humanitarian act from which he dramatically benefits, or is this purely and simply a murder of greed? Again, the writing is not clear.

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We see the philosophical, existential preoccupations of Camus from the first, short chapter. But the questions raised don’t receive the recondite and cold-handling of a Sartre, they are thoroughly imbued and entangled with the sensual world of a most physical man inhabiting a physical world. The question confronting Mersault after shooting Zagreus is can he extract a happiness from the freedom this money now affords him. There is also a Nietzschean transcendence of Christian morality, a sense that man – as represented in the tragic figure of Zagreus and the latent figure of Mersault – is a self-constructing being who must risk failing and falling into ditches to pursue a world of Olympian cloudlessness. A world of repose is no place for a man such as Mersault, seemingly. Camus continues his Nietzschean themes in being able to will the eternal recurrence as proof of one's sincerity or authenticity. Mersault tell Catherine: A Happy Death is Camus’ first attempt at The Outsider,its the chrysalis and matrix of the later book. In it Patrice Mersault thinks in terms of Time Lost and Time Gained with money rather than madeleines to effect that transition.There is a murder,planned Söz konusu Albert Camus olunca her cümlesi ayrı ayrı düşünülüp saatlerce üzerinde kafa yorulacak kitaplar ortaya çıkıyor. Bir defa okumak yetmeyip aynı zamanda kitaplığın en güzel bölümünde yer alan oluyor. The answer to life for Camus is not that humans are Superman or Superwoman because there is no God, but that any human man or woman can choose, or not choose, to have purpose in life. Camus views the world as an absurd place where anything can happen but that does not mean one cannot choose a purpose in life.

Part 2, titled "Conscious death", follows Mersault's subsequent trip to Europe. Traveling by train from city to city, he is unable to find peace and decides to return to Algiers, to live in a house high above the sea with three young female friends. Everybody here has only one goal: the pursuit of happiness by abandoning the world. Yet Mersault needs solitude. He marries a pleasant woman named Lucienne whom he does not love, buys a house in a village by the sea, and moves in alone. "At this hour of night, his life seemed so remote to him, he was so solitary and indifferent to everything and to himself as well, that Mersault felt he had at last attained what he was seeking, that the peace which filled him now was born of that patient self-abandonment he had pursued and achieved with the help of this warm world so willing to deny him without anger." There is little question that The Stranger is a better written novel. Camus' organizational structure, singular tone and compelling unity of the whole creates a powerful case for meaninglessness. A Happy Death on the other hand, while dealing provocatively with a fascinating theme -- money as necessary condition of happiness -- is not as flowing and unified as The Stranger.Mama died today. Or perhaps yesterday, I don’t know. I received a telegram from the home: “Mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Yours truly.” That doesn’t mean anything. Perhaps it was yesterday. Manufactured in the United States of America B9876543 The publication of the Cahiers Albert Camus has been decided upon by the writer's family and publishers, in answer to the wishes of many scholars and, more generally, of all those interested in his life and thought. It is not without some scruple that this publication has been undertaken. A severe critic of his own work, Albert Camus published nothing heedlessly. Why, then, offer the public an abandoned novel, lectures, uncollected articles, notebooks, drafts? Simply because, when we love a writer or study him closely, we often want to know everything he has written. Those responsible for Camus* unpublished writings consider it would be a mistake not to respond to these legitimate wishes and not to satisfy those who desire to read A Happy Death, for example, or the travel diaries. Scholars whose research has led them—on occasion during Camus' lifetime—to consult his youthful writings or later texts which remain unfamiliar or even unpublished, believe that the writer's image can only be clarified and enriched by making them accessible. The publication of the Cahiers Albert Camus is under the editorship of Jean-Claude Brisville, Roger Grenier, Roger Quilliot and Paul Viallaneix. Contents 1 Part One Natural Death 2 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.

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