A friend of mine lent me a copy of "A Happy Death" about a decade ago, and today I finally made good on reading it... sorry buddy. "The Stranger" blew me away when I read it in my formative years, and for this very reason I have been reluctant to read to the novel billed as its preamble. That said, my reluctance was probably warranted.

While this has many hallmarks of a Camus narrative, it is still an underdeveloped product compared to his later works. Not just with character and plot development, what makes Camus so great is his ability to craft tone that simultaneously weighs on you and evanesces into the stratosphere of your mind.

His characters embody detachment, and tend to oscillate between manic highs (hope) and depressive lows (existential dread). This is something that is highly relatable, especially when coming to terms with trauma, even damage that a "protagonist" may have caused.

A problem with published volumes released posthumously is that they are inherently curated by someone other than the author. Intention is everything in a Camus novel, so this is a factor that definitely impacts the overall work. One might say that this whole business is... absurd? Don't worry, I'm done.