A Happy Death & The Stranger by Albert Camus

On November 7, 1913, Albert Camus was born in Algeria.  He attended at the University of Algiers, where he was goalkeeper for the university team.  He contracted tuberculosis in 1930.   He completed his Bachelor’s Degree philosophy in 1935, and in May 1936, he successfully presented his master’s thesis on Neo-Platonism and Christian Thought.  During the war Camus joined theFrench Resistance cell Combat, which published an underground newspaper of the same name.  This group worked against the Nazis, and in it Camus assumed the nom de guerre Beauchard.  Camus became the paper's editor in 1943.  He met John-Paul Sartre at the dress rehearsal of Sartre's play, The Flies, in June 1943.  When the Allies liberated Paris in August 1944, Camus witnessed and reported the last of the fighting.  Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.  In the words of the committee, he received the award for "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times."

I have long admired Camus for his thoughtful, provocative, and stimulating novels.  The Stranger and The Plague frequently appear on college reading lists in world literature and great books classes.  This review will depart somewhat from my usual reviews, because Camus is a serious writer with a decidedly philosophical bent.   While Camus is frequently associated with Existentialism, he rejected this label.  He broke with his friend Sartre over several issues, but Sartre’s nihilism topped the list.  Camus believed that life itself was much too valuable to throw away.  He once wrote, “Your duty is to live and be happy.”

The posthumously published A Happy Death foreshadows the work he is most known for, The Stranger.  As notes in the book reveal, the main difference between A Happy Death and The Stranger lies in the fact that Camus the man is much more present in the former work than the latter.  

I first encountered Camus back in the 70s.  The prose mesmerized me and drove me to dig deeper into his life. 

In Happy Death he wrote: “Summer crammed the harbor with noise and sunlight.  It was eleven thirty.  The day split open down the middle, crushing the docks under the burden of its heat.  Moored at the sheds of the Algiers Municipal Depot, black-hulled, red-chimneyed freighters were loading sacks of wheat.  Their dusty fragrance mingled with the powerful smell of tar melting under a hot sun.  Men were drinking at a little stall that reeked of creosote and anisette, while some Arab acrobats in red shirts somersaulted on the scorching flagstones in front of the sea in the leaping light” (8).  This reflects Camus’ memory of the working class district he lived in and his job with the maritime commission.  

The Stranger and Happy Death deal with a murder by the main character, Patrice Merseult.  While there are similarities, substantial differences also separate the two stories.  Camus expert, Roger Quillot explicated these differences.  He wrote, “Mersault is … the younger brother of Mersault’ [in The Stranger] (165).  Another critic Jean Sarocchi asserts that Happy Death is a “prefiguration of The Stranger.”  This view is based on the comparison of the structure of the two texts.

Thought-provoking, intriguing, splendidly written, Camus’ work validates the judgment of the Nobel Literature Prize committee.  5 stars.

--Chiron, 10-13-13

The First Man by Albert Camus

When Albert Camus met his tragic end in an automobile accident in 1960, he left behind this unfinished manuscript. His wife, Francine, decided its incomplete state, with lots of marginalia, notes, and interleaved sheets, would tarnish her husband’s reputation, so she decided against publication. When Francine died, responsibility for Camus’ literary estate fell to his daughter Catherine. She struggled with the decision, and rejected the idea of destroying the manuscript of about 144 pages with little or no punctuation, and with only the barest evidence of any revision. In the 1990s, at the urging of some scholars, she agreed to publication. The English translation appeared in 1995. I, for one, offer a most hearty thanks to Catherine for her decision.

This highly autobiographic novel offers many insights into the formative years of Camus. The death of his father -- when he barely passed his first birthday -- his strict upbringing by his timid mother who deferred to his martinet of a grandmother, to his early education and rescue from a life of poverty by a beloved teacher who recommended him for a scholarship to the lycée, and ultimately to his search for information about his father, appear with a warmth and nostalgia I have not experienced in any of Camus’ other works.

In fact, so many things in his early life strike me as startlingly familiar. For example, on his vacation, young Jacques Cormery frequently visits the local library,

“Thursday was also the day Jacques and Pierre would go to the public library. Jacques had always devoured any books that came to hand, and he consumed them with the same appetite he felt for living, playing, or dreaming. But reading enabled him to escape into a world of innocence where wealth and poverty were equally interesting because both were utterly unreal...illustrated stories that he and his friends passed around until the board binding was gray and rough and the pages dog-eared and torn, was the first to transport him to a world of comedy or heroism where his two basic appetites for joy and courage were satisfied” (244).

Jacques sets off for the lycée with the encouragement of a beloved teacher, and he experiences an epiphany similar to that used by James Joyce in the last paragraph of the Dubliners story, “Araby.” Jacques and Joyce’s young boy realized they are on the edge of new experiences and are about to put their childhoods behind them.

The manuscript has numerous passages with a bit of awkwardness, and footnotes hint at Camus’ indecision about diction or deletion, inclusion, or expansion of some information for the final version of the novel. But he deals with all the major issues found in all his works – life, death, religion, punishment, colonialism, prejudice, and family relationships. Camus always makes me think about all these topics.

If you are unfamiliar with Camus, this novel is the perfect place to start – a literary and philosophical buffet of his life and beliefs. The First Man represents a most important addition to the literary canon of existentialism. 5 stars

--Chiron, 7/17/10

The Stranger by Albert Camus

I read this book years ago, when I first began to explore rationalism, and I liked most of it, except for Camus’ idea that nothing matters and nothing makes any difference. The idea of an afterlife is irrational in my view, but I believe we each create our own meaning and purpose to life. Our lives can be as rich and meaningful as we choose to make them.

For me, the crucial sentence is in the last paragraph on page 122: "For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman. I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a “fiance,” why she had played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too."

Powerful stuff. Mersault's mother lived her life. Her last years were happy and comfortable. Why should anyone regret that life with tears? As Camus wrote in his posthumously published note books, A Happy Death, “Your duty is to live and be happy.” Profound and deceptively simple.

This is a new translation by Matthew Ward. What I did not know, was that Camus intended to write this novel in “the American style” -- mostly adjective free and a simple subject-verb-object structure. I enjoyed, and had a much better understanding, this time around, and I am glad I read it again as we come to the end of 2008. Five stars

--Chiron, 12/29/08