A Happy Death (and a rabbit hole)

I’m re-reading a book that I read in translation when I was sixteen or so: Albert Camus’ A Happy Death. Now I’m “reading” it as an audio book in French, La Mort Heureuse. It impressed me very much at the time and probably (now that I’m reading it again), pushed me in ways that I may never understand. My mother had a copy of The Stranger in translation, and I read that even younger, maybe twelve or so.

I think books like those might need a warning on the cover, “This book may make you question your existence and follow strange paths in life.” Both books have almost the same character, a Patrice Mersault in La Mort Heureuse, and Patrice Meursault in L’Etranger. I don’t have any desire to re-read L’Etranger, but I remembered La Mort Heureuse was rather hopeful. I live most of my life in French now, and it’s not a difficult read. (I don’t have a good relationship with reading French literature on the page, however. The passé simple, which is almost uniquely used in French novels and rarely orally, just seems pretentious. Listening to it doesn’t pose any problems, though.)

I wanted to look some things up, because sometimes with an audio book, I miss something and it’s hard to find the place to go back.

So there’s two things I wanted to write about here. The first is just the odd things I found when trying to search for the city where Mersault lived at the beginning of the story (I wasn’t sure if it was Algiers, but it seems so). I started to look a bit on the internet. I found….really odd things. One has him as a painter, and I mean, he paints his house but he’s not creating works of art.

This site was more or less what I was looking for:

http://www.comptoirlitteraire.com/docs/995-camus-la-mort-heureuse-.pdf

This one was entirely wrong:

https://www.bacfrancais.com/resume/resume-camus-mort-heureuse

It concludes that Mersault was furious with jealousy, and that is partly why he kills Zagreus, but there’s no indication of that. He’s curious, maybe a little jealous at first of Marthe’s previous lovers, then seems fascinated. There’s no indication in the text that he might have killed Zagreus out of jealousy, but more because Zagreus wants to die, and doesn’t have the courage to do it himself. That’s just one item, but most of the interpretations are just wrong.

Another I found, https://literopedia.com/a-happy-death-novel-summary-by-albert-camus is almost entirely off. Was this written by an AI? There’s no Gloria, not Monsieur Jourdain. I found it really disturbing that in looking for something completely banal, like the summary of a story, that some of the information could be so very erroneous. So I looked at what “literopedia” was and found this lovely, unintelligible text under the “Contact Us” section:

Far far away, behind the word mountains, far from the countries Vokalia and Consonantia, there live the blind texts. Separated they live in Bookmarksgrove right at the coast of the Semantics, a large language ocean. A small river named Duden flows by their place and supplies it with the necessary regelialia.

It is a paradisematic country, in which roasted parts of sentences fly into your mouth. Even the all-powerful Pointing has no control about the blind texts it is an almost unorthographic life One day however a small line of blind text by the name of Lorem Ipsum decided to leave for the far World of Grammar.

I think I want that on a t-shirt.

The second thing I wanted to write about was the story itself. Now that I’ve read a bit more widely, it’s interesting that Camus was trying to find an entirely occidental path to happiness, without passing through Eastern philosophy and religion. It’s as if he was left in a void and found his way all on his own to the same conclusions; human relationships and being present in the moment are important. These concepts are the basis for some forms of Buddhism, but there’s no indication that Camus might have been influenced by them.

I just looked, Siddhartha was written in 1922, and Hesse was popular and read widely. There’s a chance that Camus ran across Hesse’s texts, but it’s not certain. That could be a source, or he just figured it out for himself.

The thing I remember the most about the book was the anger Mersault had for spending his life working in an office. More than anything else, I think I was pushed by this to want to spend my life working differently. He found his way out by killing Zagreus and taking his money. I’ve found my way by (in the end) managing to work less, and also by working with kids. My job feels meaningful in itself, and by keeping my living expenses to a minimum I can have a pretty good work-life balance. I like working. During my sabbatical year, which ended a year ago, I realized that I wasn’t ready to stop yet.

Foro is buried in my bag so I don’t have a cute cow photo to accompany this post. I’ll just add a pretty one of the sky this morning.