A review by stephen_coulon
A Happy Death by Albert Camus

challenging reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

It's Albert Camus’s first novel, unpublished in his lifetime, translated from French by Richard Howard. It apparently features the same Mersault from his first published work The Stranger. This and some other parallels between the two works, especially the thematics, make it apparent that Camus used A Happy Death as a sort of first draft for his more famous debut. Camus does his thing here too. The prose is beautiful and romantic, with stark and starry scenic descriptions and a steady poetic flow. His characters are also just as bizarre here as in his published stuff. No one behaves in ways resembling real people in any given situation. He awkwardly and very explicitly states the philosophical purpose of the novel several times: to exemplify his version of existentialism which he names “the will to happiness”. That’s his message here, that the purpose of life is for the individual to discover what lifestyle makes them happy and to live it by any means necessary. He always wrote about this, sometimes convincingly. What doesn’t really work in this novel is that he made it too personal. Here, Marsault (always a clear stand-in for Camus himself), reveals the lifestyle Camus really hoped to live, which is basically stealing money and acting like a pretentious douchebag. Camus really gets in his own way here as his perpetual teenage attitude toward life demeans any of his more profound philosophical insights. To give him credit he likely realized this and that’s why he chose not to publish it.