So yes, the best is yet to come for Albert Camus, and this first novel is yet to be that of a great writer. But it amply deserves to be read as a call to perseverance, to go beyond the imitation that all apprentice writers begin by carrying out, and that few (he will be one of those, which is an understatement) manage to exceed. The strings are pretty large, but the novel remains pleasant and enjoys some beautiful scenes, particularly some magnificent sentences and passages that are among the best of Camus and which I particularly remember.

v] Commentators have wondered what to do with these fragmentary and aphoristic reflections, because so much of them is given over not to theoretical or literary developments, but to Camus’ own philosophical practice of trying to actualise, in life, his philosophical principles, just as Marcus Aurelius had done in his Meditations. Zagreus also gets a classic Nietzsche line: "Not the will to renounce, but the will to happiness." In both Zarathustra and Toward A Genealogy Of Morals Nietzsche is at pains to argue that the Christian ethic is one of denial of human instinct and power, not an embracing of life.

I am doing away with only half a man. In need cause no problem — there is more than enough here to pay off those who have taken care of me till now. Please use what is left over to improve conditions of the men in the condemned cell. But I know it’s asking a lot.’ Besides his fiction and essays, Camus very actively produced plays in the theater (e.g., Caligula, 1944).

The answer to life for Camus is not that humans are Superman or Superwoman because there is no God, but that any human man or woman can choose, or not choose, to have purpose in life. Camus views the world as an absurd place where anything can happen but that does not mean one cannot choose a purpose in life.

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Translated from the French, LA MORT HEUREUSE by Richard Howard. Afterword and notes by Jean Sarocchi. Mersault ate quietly until Emmanuel started to tell Celeste how he had fought the battle of the Marne. ‘See, they sent us zouaves out in front ...’ Once we understand Camus’ sense that he could quite literallydie at almost any moment, we comprehend the urgency of his repeated stress upon the importance of memento mori throughout his work, most famously in the idea of “absurd freedom” in The Myth of Sisyphus. “There is only one liberty: in coming to terms with death,” Camus reflects in his Notebooks, evoking Seneca’s famous maxim: “the person who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.” Reading this is to witness Camus’ philosophy shaping up into what it would eventually become. You get to watch Camus exposing his character, revealing the raw essence of what would ultimately emerge as Meursault from The Stranger. And to understand such cultivation of a personality, his conscious yet alienated nature, devoured by passion yet disinterested, the essence of the absurd hero, this is a must-read. The beautifully economic yet evocative writing extends beyond the physical to Mersault’s interior world. Mersault has a sexual relationship with Marthe whose “beauty she offered him day after day like some delicate intoxication” but, as in other sphere’s of his life, Mersault vacillates between fully engaging in the sensual world and trying not to be controlled by it. When a trip to the cinema reveals one of Marthe’s ex-lovers, Mersault’s mood, which had been exultant, turns to ash in his mouth and the moment makes him forget his dignity. He asks Marthe if the man they saw was once her lover.

there is a gain in impersonality in The Outsider and the reason given for the murder is the heat of the sun,the glint of the sun on the blade etc. I think Camus is consciously taking the In A Happy Death, written when Albert Camus was in his early twenties and retrieved from his private papers following his death in 1960, revealed himself to an extent that he never would in his later fiction. For if A Happy Death is the study of a rule-bound being shattering the fetters of his existence, it is also a remarkably candid portrait of its author as a young man. 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. The other experience which shaped the “royal privilege” (as Camus calls it) of this neo-Stoic disinterestedness towards external things is his lived experience of the imminence of death, because of the tuberculosis that continually dogged him throughout his short life. In a remarkable fragment from his Notebooks, Camus writes of a memento mori few of us, preferably, will have to entertain:Mutlu ölüm, Yabancı’da olduğu gibi yine varoluşçuluk üzerine dayalı ve bu düşünceleri karakterin ağzından aktaran, sürükleyici ve etkileyici bir roman.