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    A Happy Death
    A Happy Death
    A Happy Death
    Audiobook4 hours

    A Happy Death

    Written by Albert Camus

    Narrated by Jefferson Mays

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJul 5, 2019
    ISBN9781980029090
    A Happy Death

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    Reviews for A Happy Death

    3.5/5

    265 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Thanks for the upload great book to use and contemplqte
    • 3/5
      I remember very little of The Stranger, so I honestly don't know how this compares. But it is an intensely psychological novel, rife with beautiful dedcriptions. This was given as a college graduation gift, and I am glad, almost seven years later, that I did read it.
    • 2/5
      This would be of interest to students of The Outsider. His first attempt at a novel went wrong. He wasn't able to pull it together and he abandoned it. A Happy Death is the publication of the various typescripts, edited into some sort of order. Don't expect a fully working novel. There are many things in it which readers of The Outsider will find familiar, but there they are transfigured into greatness. I might have enjoyed this more if it hadn't been a year since I read The Outsider. As it is, it's pretty boring and I fell asleep a few times. A good resource for students, though. Ironically, I've read quite a few novels of poorer quality that the authors considered good enough to publish.
    • 4/5
      In this early novella, which was only published posthumously, Camus writes of his youth in Algeria, and reflects on the nature of happiness. A strange tale of a murderer who escapes punishment and seeks happiness even in an early death.
    • 5/5
      On November 7, 1913, Albert Camus was born in Algeria. He attended at the University of Algiers, where he was goalkeeper for the university team. He contracted tuberculosis in 1930. He completed his Bachelor’s Degree philosophy in 1935, and in May 1936, he successfully presented his master’s thesis on Neo-Platonism and Christian Thought. During the war Camus joined the French Resistance cell Combat, which published an underground newspaper of the same name. This group worked against the Nazis, and in it Camus assumed the nom de guerre Beauchard. Camus became the paper's editor in 1943. He met John-Paul Sartre at the dress rehearsal of Sartre's play, The Flies, in June 1943. When the Allies liberated Paris in August 1944, Camus witnessed and reported the last of the fighting. Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. In the words of the committee, he received the award for "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times."I have long admired Camus for his thoughtful, provocative, and stimulating novels. The Stranger and The Plague frequently appear on college reading lists in world literature and great books classes. This review will depart somewhat from my usual reviews, because Camus is a serious writer with a decidedly philosophical bent. While Camus is frequently associated with Existentialism, he rejected this label. He broke with his friend Sartre over several issues, but Sartre’s nihilism topped the list. Camus believed that life itself was much too valuable to throw away. He once wrote, “Your duty is to live and be happy.”The posthumously published A Happy Death foreshadows the work he is most known for, The Stranger. As notes in the book reveal, the main difference between A Happy Death and The Stranger lies in the fact that Camus the man is much more present in the former work than the latter. I first encountered Camus back in the 70s. The prose mesmerized me and drove me to dig deeper into his life. In Happy Death he wrote: “Summer crammed the harbor with noise and sunlight. It was eleven thirty. The day split open down the middle, crushing the docks under the burden of its heat. Moored at the sheds of the Algiers Municipal Depot, black-hulled, red-chimneyed freighters were loading sacks of wheat. Their dusty fragrance mingled with the powerful smell of tar melting under a hot sun. Men were drinking at a little stall that reeked of creosote and anisette, while some Arab acrobats in red shirts somersaulted on the scorching flagstones in front of the sea in the leaping light” (8). This reflects Camus’ memory of the working class district he lived in and his job with the maritime commission. The Stranger and Happy Death deal with a murder by the main character, Patrice Merseult. While there are similarities, substantial differences also separate the two stories. Camus expert, Roger Quillot explicated these differences. He wrote, “Mersault is … the younger brother of Mersault’ [in The Stranger] (165). Another critic Jean Sarocchi asserts that Happy Death is a “prefiguration of The Stranger.” This view is based on the comparison of the structure of the two texts. I am inclined to agree with Sarocchi.Thought-provoking, intriguing, splendidly written, Camus A Happy Death validates the judgment of the Nobel Literature Prize committee. 5 stars.--Jim, 10/13/13
    • 3/5
      A Happy Death was Camus's first attempt at writing a novel, which he worked on from 1936-1938 when he was in his early to mid twenties. He (wisely) chose not to submit it for publication, but after his death in 1960, his widow (unwisely) decided to allow the unfinished manuscripts to be corrected and compiled into a book, which was published in 1971.This book is based in part on Camus's early experiences, including his childhood in a blue collar neighborhood in Algiers, his early troubled marriage to Simone Hié, a heroin addict who was unfaithful to him, his travels to central Europe and Italy in 1936 and 1937, his confinement in a sanatorium for treatment of tuberculosis which he contracted as a teenager, and his return to Algeria in 1938. The main character in A Happy Death is Patrice Mersault, a young office worker in Algiers who is bored and unsatisfied with his life. His current lover introduces him to Roland Zagreus, an slightly older man who has accumulated a large fortune but is unable to derive benefit from it due to an accident that led to the amputation of his legs. The two men become friends, and Zagreus shares his philosophy of life with the younger man. In his view, man is able to create personal happiness through money, which allows him time to achieve freedom from responsibility and the drudgery of everyday work:"You see, Mersault, for a man who is well born, being happy is never complicated. It's enough to take up the general fate, only not with the will for renunciation like so many fake great men, but with the will for happiness. Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience. And in almost every case, we use up our lives making money, when we should be using our money to gain time."Mersault decides to test Zagreus's theory, as he murders the invalid and takes his money. Soon afterward he becomes ill with fever and fatigue, but he decides to go to Warsaw. He is miserable there, due to his illness and to the squalid conditions that exist in the depressed city, and he leaves there to travel to Genoa, and eventually back to Algiers. He stays with three younger women in a house overlooking the city, which brings him some degree of pleasure but not contentment, and he marries a woman who he is physically attracted to but does not love. Later he purchases a house in a small village on the Algerian coast, which provides him with security and comfort, but he remains vaguely unsatisfied. His health worsens, and he realizes with the utmost dread that death is slowly creeping upon him:He realized now that to be afraid of this death he was staring at with animal terror meant to be afraid of life. Fear of dying justified a limitless attachment to what is alive in man. And all those who had not made the gestures necessary to live their lives, all those who feared and exalted impotence—they were afraid of death because of the sanction it gave to a life in which they had not been involved. They had not lived enough, never having lived at all.For me, A Happy Death was difficult and, at times, painful to read despite its short length. I found Mersault to be largely inscrutable, and the female characters were poorly developed and portrayed as vain and shallow creatures. It is best viewed as a precursor for his first published novel The Stranger (whose main character is named Meursault) rather than a unique work in itself, and all but the most ardent Camus fans should avoid it, unlike The Plague.
    • 2/5
      There was probably a lot more to this book than I've given credit for, but at the same time I was expecting so much of Camus when I read this, hot on the tails of "The Plague" and "The Outsider," that it couldn't have done anything but disappoint. Here, the author considers the long-term ramifications of committing murder, even if that murder is sanctioned by the murderee.