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Julia_98

Julia_98@bookwyrm.world

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reviewed A Happy Death by Albert Camus (Penguin classics)

Albert Camus: A Happy Death (Paperback, 2002, Penguin)

A young man searches throughout life for the key to confronting death without fear.

The Price of Happiness – My Reflection on Albert Camus’s A Happy Death

Reading A Happy Death felt like stepping into the intimate laboratory of Camus’s thought — raw, searching, and strangely serene. Written before The Stranger but published posthumously, it carries the early pulse of his philosophy: the tension between the body’s hunger for life and the mind’s craving for meaning. From the first pages, I sensed a quiet intensity, as if Camus were dissecting existence itself through the slow awakening of his protagonist, Patrice Mersault.

What fascinated me most was Mersault’s journey from restlessness to solitude. He begins amid the ordinary emptiness of work and routine, longing for escape. When he commits a murder — an act both shocking and curiously detached — it becomes less a crime than a pivot toward liberation. I found myself disturbed by how calmly Camus presents it, yet I understood: for Mersault, happiness must be wrestled from life, not granted by it.

The later chapters, …

The Rules of Attraction is a satirical black comedy novel by Bret Easton Ellis published …

Disconnection and Desire – My Encounter with Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction

Reading The Rules of Attraction felt like being dropped into a party that never ends—one where the music is loud, the alcohol endless, and everyone is both searching and utterly lost. Ellis constructs his novel through shifting voices, fragmented perspectives, and overlapping narratives. At first, the style unsettled me, but soon I realized it mirrored the confusion and alienation of his characters.

The story unfolds at a liberal arts college in the 1980s, where students drift through affairs, drugs, and half-hearted philosophies. What struck me most was how every character speaks, yet almost no one truly listens. Sean, Paul, Lauren—they circle one another in a haze of desire and misunderstanding. I felt a strange tension reading their confessions: on the surface, they seemed confident, rebellious, even careless, but underneath, I sensed a profound emptiness.

Ellis’s prose is sharp, ironic, and relentless. As I turned the pages, I often felt complicit, …

Jean-Paul Sartre: Huis Clos, suivi de Les Mouches (French language, 2000)

The Flies (French: Les Mouches) is a play by Jean-Paul Sartre, produced in 1943. It …

Freedom in the Shadow of Guilt – My Reading of Sartre’s The Flies

Reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Flies was for me like standing in a dark square, listening to voices that echoed both fear and defiance. The play, Sartre’s reimagining of the myth of Orestes and Electra, struck me not only as a retelling of a Greek tragedy, but as a profound meditation on freedom and responsibility in a world paralyzed by guilt.

From the moment Orestes returns to Argos, I felt the oppressive weight of the city, haunted by the flies that symbolize decay and remorse. The people live crushed under the authority of King Aegisthus and the manipulations of Jupiter, convinced that their sins demand eternal punishment. I was deeply moved by how Sartre captured this suffocating atmosphere—it reminded me of how fear can keep entire societies silent and submissive.

What stirred me most was Orestes’s awakening. His decision to kill Aegisthus and Clytemnestra is not just an act of vengeance, …

Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis (2006)

Behind the Locked Door – My Uneasy Reading of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

Reading Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis was for me an unsettling journey into alienation and the fragility of human bonds. The story begins abruptly: Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. What struck me most was not the transformation itself, but how quickly the narrative shifts to the reactions of those around him—his family’s fear, shame, and eventual rejection.

As I followed Gregor’s slow decline, I felt both compassion and horror. His initial concern for work deadlines, even in his grotesque state, revealed the crushing grip of duty and habit. Yet, as the days passed, his world shrank to the walls of his room, and I could almost feel the suffocating isolation closing in on me as well.

The family’s responses unsettled me deeply. Their shift from pity to burden, and finally to cold detachment, felt like a cruel mirror of how …

T. S. Eliot: The Hollow Men (1925)

"The Hollow Men" (1925) is a poem by the modernist writer T. S. Eliot. Like …

Whispers of Emptiness – My Encounter with Eliot’s The Hollow Men

Reading T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men felt like walking through a wasteland of whispers, where every word was a fragment of despair. The poem struck me immediately with its stark portrayal of spiritual emptiness, a vision of humanity drained of conviction, drifting in a liminal space between life and death.

What moved me most was the repetition of voices that seem almost prayer-like, but hollow, stripped of faith. I felt as though I were listening to a chorus of lost souls, murmuring without hope of redemption. Eliot’s images—the dry land, the fading stars, the scarecrow figures—gave me a physical sense of desolation. Each line carried the weight of an exhausted century, scarred by war and spiritual collapse.

The ending, with its famous “not with a bang but a whimper,” left me stunned. I had expected perhaps a burst of resolution, but instead Eliot offered silence, anticlimax, a whimper that …

Bret Easton Ellis: Lunar Park (French language, 2005)

Lunar Park is a metafictional novel by American writer Bret Easton Ellis, presented as a …

Haunted by Myself – My Uneasy Journey through Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park

Reading Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis felt like stepping into a hall of mirrors where the reflections kept changing, sometimes grotesque, sometimes heartbreakingly intimate. At first, I thought I was reading a parody of the author’s own life: the narrator is named Bret Easton Ellis, a writer infamous for his excesses, his celebrity, and his brutal novels. There was an almost comic sharpness to the way he exposed his own vanity, drug use, and fractured relationships. But as I turned the pages, the tone shifted, and I found myself caught in something far darker.

The book becomes a hybrid: part memoir, part horror story, part satire. Ellis describes settling into suburban family life with his wife and son, only to find the past clawing its way back. Strange, supernatural events unfold: a possessed house, unexplained deaths, ghostly presences. I could never tell if these hauntings were real or simply …

For more than two years, one book has taken over Germany's hardcover and paperback bestseller …

When the Ocean Strikes Back – My Unsettling Journey through Frank Schätzing’s The Swarm

Reading Frank Schätzing’s The Swarm was for me an experience both thrilling and deeply unsettling. At first, I thought I was entering a typical science-fiction thriller, but very quickly I realized the novel was much more: a confrontation with the fragility of human dominance over nature.

The story begins with mysterious and seemingly unrelated incidents: whales attacking boats, deep-sea crabs crawling onto coasts in destructive masses, unexplained collapses in the ocean floor. As I turned the pages, I felt the unease building—what if these were not random events, but signs of an intelligence rising from the depths? Schätzing gradually reveals the existence of a collective oceanic entity, an intelligence that sees humanity as a destructive intruder and responds with calculated vengeance.

What struck me most was not only the suspense but the sheer plausibility of it all. Schätzing grounds his narrative in marine biology, geology, and environmental science, so much …

Bertolt Brecht: Baal (German language, 1994)

Baal was the first full-length play written by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. It …

Drowning in Excess – My Encounter with Brecht’s Baal

Reading Bertolt Brecht’s Baal felt like standing too close to a fire—at once hypnotic and destructive. The play follows Baal, a poet and musician whose raw talent is matched only by his self-indulgence and cruelty. Instead of being celebrated as a misunderstood genius, he comes across as someone who consumes everything around him: friends, lovers, even himself.

What struck me most was the way Brecht refuses to romanticize the artist. Baal is charismatic, yes, but also repellent—driven by desire, incapable of restraint, leaving ruin wherever he goes. I found myself both fascinated and unsettled, unable to look away from his downward spiral.

The imagery is stark and often brutal: drinking, wandering through taverns, seductions that quickly turn sour, and the slow erosion of his vitality. By the end, Baal is not a tragic hero but a man hollowed out by his own appetites.

For me, the play was less about …