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, After the occupation of France by the Germans in 1941, Camus became one of the intellectual leaders of the Resistance movement. He edited and contributed to the underground newspaper Combat, which he had helped to found. After the war he devoted himself to writing and established an international reputation with such books as La Peste ( The Plague 1947), Les Justes ( The Just 1949) and La Chute ( The Fall; 1956). During the late 1950s Camus renewed his active interest in the theatre, writing and directing stage adaptations of William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun and Dostoyevsky's The Possessed. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He was killed in a road accident in 1960.

Like in other works by Albert Camus, in A Happy Death, there is a fine line between life and death and between truly living and living in a way that might as well be a slow death. This explains why the narratives in Camus' works often revolve around a violent and deadly act. Such is the case in A Happy Death. It is one step on his hero's goal to live happily, if only briefly. In fact, recognizing that happiness is transitory is absolutely necessary. Only then can one embrace a happy death. Last time I read A Happy Death, the book grabbed me. Reading it this time, I can still see why I enjoyed it, but much of what I really responded to was in the final sections of the book. Changing my rating from 5 to 4 stars. vi] Camus responds in the imperative, echoing Marcus Aurelius’s many injunctions to himself in his Meditations to “remember!”: “Cultivate one’s memory, immediately.” 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. The major said “Charge!” and we ran down into a kind of gully, only with trees in it. He told us to charge, but no-one was there. So we just marched right on, kept on walking. And then all of a sudden these machine-guns are firing right into us. We all fall on top of each other. There were so many dead and wounded that you could have rowed a boat across the blood in that gully. Some of them kept screaming “Mama!” Christ, it was awful.’

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Oh, you can’t be a bastard with it. This fellow took it while he had it, and he was right. Almost a million francs he had ... Now if it had been me!’ isteyen bir sakata onu öldürerek yardım etmiş, onun mutlu olmasını sağlamış olur ve bir nevi kendi mutluluğunu satın alır. v] Commentators have wondered what to do with these fragmentary and aphoristic reflections, because so much of them is given over not to theoretical or literary developments, but to Camus’ own philosophical practice of trying to actualise, in life, his philosophical principles, just as Marcus Aurelius had done in his Meditations. Camus composed and reworked the novel between 1936 and 1938 but then decided not to publish it. It was eventually published in 1971, over 11 years after the author's death. The English translation by Richard Howard appeared in 1972. Mersault decides he needs solitude and leaves the house and soon enters a pragmatic marriage with a woman he does not love and moves into a house by the sea where he leads an ascetic life, even more so than the one he inhabited in the city. Inexplicably here is where Mersault finds peace – in a state of self-abnegation, alienation and a prone acceptance of the indifference of the universe. In this shrunk down environment, Mersault apparently dies a happy death.

Despite the tyranny of mathematics which would suggest this is a mediocre book, I strongly recommend giving it a read.Once we understand Camus’ sense that he could quite literallydie at almost any moment, we comprehend the urgency of his repeated stress upon the importance of memento mori throughout his work, most famously in the idea of “absurd freedom” in The Myth of Sisyphus. “There is only one liberty: in coming to terms with death,” Camus reflects in his Notebooks, evoking Seneca’s famous maxim: “the person who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”

there is a gain in impersonality in The Outsider and the reason given for the murder is the heat of the sun,the glint of the sun on the blade etc. I think Camus is consciously taking the Origin and his experiences of this representative of non-metropolitan literature in the 1930s dominated influences in his thought and work. Translated from the French, LA MORT HEUREUSE by Richard Howard. Afterword and notes by Jean Sarocchi.Shrewdly focusing on a mother’s death as a revealing touchstone of humankind’s most deeply ingrained social attitudes, these words achieve a double effect: They tell the reader that the son of the deceased mother can speak of her death without any of the expected symptoms of grief, but, at the same time, they remind the reader that the rest of society, having no familial ties with the deceased, habitually masks its indifference under empty rhetorical formulas such as the telegraphic announcement. I am doing away with only half a man. In need cause no problem — there is more than enough here to pay off those who have taken care of me till now. Please use what is left over to improve conditions of the men in the condemned cell. But I know it’s asking a lot.’ 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.

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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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