Re-Read It: A Happy Death

The cover to the edition read in Spring 1988 (left)
and the edition just recently completed. 

"To think the way you do, you have to be a man who lives either on a tremendous despair or a tremendous hope. On both perhaps." 

Other than the enjoyment that comes from any of his numerous quotations popping up on my Twitter feed, it has been a long time since I have read an entire Albert Camus work cover-to-cover. While I have read The Stranger most recently (still a few years ago), it is his posthumously published first novel, A Happy Death, which I most sought to re-read. Somehow, I have a lingering positive(!) association with it from when I first read it in college. Recently, my non-school reading journey has taken me back around to novels I remember enjoying in my youth, and A Happy Death was first read during spring of my freshman year of college (cliche, right?).

The lads and I unironically
reading A Happy Death.

It is difficult not to think of The Stranger when reading A Happy Death as it clearly lays the groundwork for the more famous novel. The protagonists' characterization (and name) is similar, the initiating action (murder!) remains the same, though the point of view (third rather than first) is very different. Beyond these factors, however, chapters of A Happy Death strike me as tonally different than my recollection of Camus' other work. (It occurs to me though, that a closer read of The Stranger may suggest differently.)

The story of Patrice Mersault is divided into two parts, "Natural Death" and "Conscious Death", and it is a few chapters of the second section that I remembered most from college, especially the time Patrice spends with his "children" at the House Above the World in Algiers. What surprised me most this time through (and what likely appealed to younger me) was the overtly romantic language and sun-shiny disposition expressed, two ideas I don't commonly associate with the author. Like most readers, the black-and-white images of Camus (overcast, overcoat, cigarette dangling from his lips) is how I visualize Camus. Ultimately, the story of A Happy Death is about how one chooses to live and die. Lines like "He had to create his happiness and justification. ... At the strange peace that filled him as he watched the evening suddenly freshening upon the sea."(81) shed a favorable imagistic light on an existentialist philosophy that is often depicted as dark, a good reminder of the positive attribute of free-will and self-determination.

The inherent danger in re-visiting previously cherished things is that one's nostalgia will look different through the present-day lens. (For example, one of my favorite childhood movies, The Beatsmaster (1982), does not hold up so well in recent viewings.) In this case, however, my circumstances and place in life are so different than when I originally read it 30(!) years ago, that in many ways the themes resonate more. The take-way is that both read-throughs of A Happy Death, over a three decade long break, offer food-for-thought, which is all can ask for with literature.