A Happy Death
Translator Richard Howard
Pages: 144
Genre: Fiction
Book description (from Good Reads): Is it possible to die a happy death? This is the central question of Camus's astonishing early novel, published posthumously and greeted as a major literary event. It tells the story of a young Algerian, Mersault, who defies society's rules by committing a murder and escaping punishment, then experimenting with different ways of life and finally dying a happy man. In many ways A Happy Death is a fascinating first sketch for The Outsider, but it can also be seen as a candid self-portrait, drawing on Camus's memories of his youth, travels, and early relationships. It is infused with lyrical descriptions of the sun-drenched Algiers of his childhood - the place where, eventually, Mersault is able to find peace and die 'without anger, without hatred, without regret'
Thoughts on it
Very difficult to decide.
In part, the way it describes a life searching for a way to live happily, the travels, the way it touches topics of death and not caring for others is both unappealing and refreshing at the same time.
The story begins with a murder, and since that instant, you are caught, you need to know what happened in order to lead to such event taking place.
The focus is on Mersalt and his lifestyle, first, he is unhappy in his life, his job, and his lover. He is a very superficial man. Only cares about Matha based on the way other men envy him as she parades around with him. Afterwards, he becomes very possessive and jealous of Martha's past lovers and behaves arrogantly and stupid, demanding to know about them, wanting to know how many there were, who they were, what kind of reactions and actions they had as lovers with her. He even goes as far to go meet one of her exes, she introduces them. He is such an asshole that he feels contempt because the man has both legs amputated, later he becomes friends with the man.
They share thoughts and opinions about life and death, that part was fantastic, he begins to wonder and then the desire to be happy makes him change his life forever.
As the topic of live, death and such are done, the story is very good, pleasant eve but as soon as he takes on the subject of lovers, it becomes so cringy. It takes all the pleasure from the reading for me.
The way he took to idleness in the last part of his journey dedicating his time to just seeing the seconds and minutes tick by, it is very well expressed but the personality of the man was the huge disappointment.
Mersault is a very unlikable person in my opinion, as very vain and inconsiderate of the feelings of those around himself. He saw women as nothing more than convenient for him, yet he was honest with most of them about his lack of feelings towards them so I guess that a point in his favor. As a person he was flawed but the way he was going through his life after deciding to pursue happiness was interesting.
It was not as awesome as people had made it out to be, might be lack of understanding on my part. But I will need to read more of his work in order to see if its more of a personal thing my dislike for the book or if simply this specific story was simply not for me. I might enjoy the rest of his work.
I was debating what rating to give it. I gave it a 3, but I was considering just lowering it to 2 because of the enjoyment factor but the writing style was very good so it would be unfair to lower so.
I really can't see past the parts that extremely annoy me in order to
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