A Happy Death (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Mutlu ölüm, Yabancı’da olduğu gibi yine varoluşçuluk üzerine dayalı ve bu düşünceleri karakterin ağzından aktaran, sürükleyici ve etkileyici bir roman. Camus’s story about Absurdism only begins with a suicide. The person who plans his suicide has a gun to end his life but by someone he chooses. The choice is made by Camus's main character, a person wandering through life with no purpose. Camus's main character explains he lived a life that earned him two million dollars. It was earned with purpose, by any means necessary. His purpose in life is to become wealthy. He achieves that purpose, but now as an amputee, he feels he can no longer pursue that purpose. The main character of the story is given two million dollars to shoot the amputee and make it look like a suicide with a note written by the amputee. 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.

Ramis Dara çevirisiyle dilimize kazandırılan Mutlu Ölüm, Can Yayınları tarafından satışa sunulmuş ve 149 sayfa uzunluğunda.vi] Camus responds in the imperative, echoing Marcus Aurelius’s many injunctions to himself in his Meditations to “remember!”: “Cultivate one’s memory, immediately.” The first novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author lays the foundation for The Stranger, telling the story ofan Algerian clerk who kills a man in cold blood. There is little question that The Stranger is a better written novel. Camus' organizational structure, singular tone and compelling unity of the whole creates a powerful case for meaninglessness. A Happy Death on the other hand, while dealing provocatively with a fascinating theme -- money as necessary condition of happiness -- is not as flowing and unified as The Stranger. Mersault reveals to Zagreus his existential anxieties “I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or else subscribing to L’Illustration. Something desperate, you know.” Zagreus tells Mersault that “with a body like yours, your one duty is to live and be happy.” Mersault suggests that would be nice but his life is already chalked out by a series of commitments, to which Zagreus replys “Happiness too, is a long patience. And in almost every case, we use up our lives making money, when we should be using money to gain time.”

Secondly, there is a sense of life as a gift, one meriting that gratitude writ so large in book I of Marcus’s Meditations, wherein the philosopher-emperor patiently recalls and thanks each person who benefited him in his formative years. So too, Camus will come to value above all a simple solidarity with others as amongst life’s greatest goods, given the realities of suffering, death, political polarisation and hatred: “now I have learned to expect less of [people] than they can give—a silent companionship. And their emotions, their friendship and noble gestures keep their full miraculous value in my eyes: wholly the fruit of grace.” The Plague is the longest, the most realistic, and artistically the most impressive of Camus’s novels, offering a richly varied cast of characters and a coherent and riveting plot, bringing an integrated world memorably to life while stimulating the reader’s capacity for moral reflection. In spite of its vivid realism, The Plague is no less mythical and allegorical in its impact than is The Stranger. When first published, The Plague was widely interpreted as a novel about the German Occupation and the French Resistance, with the plague symbolizing the evil presence of the Nazis. Since the 1940’s, however, more universal themes and symbols have been discovered in the book, including the frighteningly random nature of evil and the perception that humankind’s conquest of evil is never more than provisional, that the struggle will always have to be renewed. It has also been widely recognized that The Plague is, in significant degree, a profound meditation on the frustrating limits of human language both as a means of communication and as a means of representing the truth about human existence. The discovery of that theme has made The Plague the most modern of Camus’s novels, the one with the most to say to future generations of Camus’s readers. Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. His childhood was poor, although not unhappy. He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers, and became a journalist as well as organizing the Théâtre de l'équipe, a young avant-garde dramatic group.But that night, as they left the cinema, she realized that something could hurt Mersault. She said nothing about it the rest of the evening, and slept in Mersault’s bed. He did not touch her during the night. But from now on she used her advantage. She had already told him she had had other lovers; now she managed to find the necessary proofs.

The hint of optimism in this paradoxical theme— happiness is, after all, possible for some if the circumstances are dire enough—is, however, insufficient to offset the fundamental pessimism of The Plague. Aglance at the fates of the main characters will make the basic bleakness of this work manifest. At the center of the action is Bernard Rieux, a doctor who risks his life every day to lead the fight against the plague and who, more than anyone else in the novel, experiences the satisfaction and the joy of finding himself equal to a heroic task and feeling with others a fraternal bond engendered by their common struggle. His satisfaction is brief and his joys few, however. He knows that he cannot cure victims of the plague and must suppress his sympathy for them if he is to be effective in palliating their suffering and in keeping them from infecting others. The result of this bind is that Rieux strikes his patients and their families as cold and indifferent; he ends up being hated by those he is trying to help. The fraternal bond with others who are trying to help develops in only a few instances, since most of his fellow citizens are too frightened or egocentric to join him in the effort. Moreover, where the bond does develop, it proves too tenuous to penetrate his natural isolation. In awe, my fingers hesitate, for i write what i thought impossible: a new Camus favorite has been found! Born in Algeria in 1913, Albert Camus published The Stranger-- now one of the most widely read novels of this century-- in 1942. Celebrated in intellectual circles, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car accident. As the novel follows the protagonist, Patrice Mersault, to his victim's house -- and then, fleeing, in a journey that takes him through stages of exile, hedonism, privation, and death -it gives us a glimpse into the imagination of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. For here is the young Camus himself, in love with the sea and sun, enraptured by women yet disdainful of romantic love, and already formulating the philosophy of action and moral responsibility that would make him central to the thought of our time. Like in other works by Albert Camus, in A Happy Death, there is a fine line between life and death and between truly living and living in a way that might as well be a slow death. This explains why the narratives in Camus' works often revolve around a violent and deadly act. Such is the case in A Happy Death. It is one step on his hero's goal to live happily, if only briefly. In fact, recognizing that happiness is transitory is absolutely necessary. Only then can one embrace a happy death. Last time I read A Happy Death, the book grabbed me. Reading it this time, I can still see why I enjoyed it, but much of what I really responded to was in the final sections of the book. Changing my rating from 5 to 4 stars.On the contrary, Camus sees our sense of natural beauty as one of the ways in which people experience the absurd. Faced with a breathtaking landscape, Camus argues, the “inhuman” dimension of nature reveals itself to our contemplative regard. It is a matter of what his character Meursault calls nature’s “benign indifference,” facing imminent execution in The Outsider and gazing up at the stars. When we are moved by natural beauty, Camus writes, “the world evades us because it becomes itself again.” We now see it shorn of the “illusory meanings” with which our all-too-human preoccupations have clothed it; not as meaningless, but as operating according to its own logics (or Logos), greater and other than our petty concerns. [iii]