A Happy Death
A
Happy Death (original title La mort
heureuse) is a novel by Absurdist French writer-philosopher Albert
Camus. The existentialist topic of the book is the "will to happiness," the
conscious creation of one's happiness, and the need of time (and money) to do
so. It draws on memories of the author including his job at the maritime
commission in Algiers,
his suffering from tuberculosis,
and his travels in Europe.
Camus
composed and reworked the novel between 1936 and 1938 but then decided not to
publish it. It was eventually published in 1971, over 10 years after the
author's death. The English translation by Richard
Howard appeared in 1972.
A
Happy Death was Camus' first novel and was
clearly the precursor to his most famous work, The Stranger, published in 1942. The main character in A Happy Death
is named "Patrice Mersault", similar to The Stranger's
"Meursault"; both are French
Algerian clerks who kill another man. A
Happy Death is written in the third person, whereas The Stranger is
written in the first person. The novel has just over 100 pages and consists of
two parts.
Summary
Part
1, titled "Natural death", describes the monotone and empty life of
Patrice Mersault with his boring office job and a meaningless relationship with
his girlfriend Marthe. Mersault gets to know the rich invalid Roland Zagreus (Zagreus
is a character of Greek mythology) who shows Mersault a way out: "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." Zagreus implies that his life is a meaningless
waste, and so Meursault decides to kill him in order to create his own
happiness with the rich man's money.
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." Severely ill, he dies a happy death: "And stone among
the stones, he returned in the joy of his heart to the truth of the motionless
worlds."
External links
- Review by Anatole Broyard, The New York Times, 13 June 1972
- Notes on A Happy Death by Bob Corbett
- A Happy Death, translated by Richard Howard
- From In Review by David Latham
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