Volume 18, Number 11 · June 15, 1972
Stranger in Paradise
By John Weightman
A Happy Death
by Albert Camus, translated by Richard Howard, Afterword and Notes by Jean Sarocchi
Knopf, 192 pp., $5.95
La mort heureuse, volume 1 in a projected series of Cahiers Albert Camus, is a first novel, written between 1936 and 1938, about a hero called Mersault, which Camus, for reasons unexplained, never attempted to have published. Instead he went on immediately to write his celebrated story, L'Etranger, reworking some of the episodes of La mort heureuse to make them fit his second hero, Meursault. If we are fond of dubious linguistic speculation, we can meditate on the possible significance of the change from the syllable mer (sea, with an implied background of mère, mother) to meur (die; Meursault = the imperative, meurs sot! die fool!). As it happens, sea, mother, death, and the sancta simplicitas of the Absurdist consciousness are four major themes in Camus and are common to both his early heroes, so that the second name would have been equally appropriate in the first book. Both novels deal roughly with the same subject matter, drawn for the most part from Camus's life as a young man in his native Algeria, but they give it sharply different emphases.
Review, 2523 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |