The Fall

The Fall is delivered as a series of soliloquies confessing more and more of the nature of our unreliable narrator, filled with eloquence of language professed as his weakness and pleasure, serving to take us forth on a journey of character devolving under the realization of his own ethical failings. The city serves as a colorful backdrop and supporting symbolism for this fall from the great heights so beloved of the narrator--and mirrored in his professional and personal life--to its position below sea level and at the center of the concentric canals which he equates to Dante's tiers of hell.

It's a wonderful little novela.

The Book Report: Told as a long monologue stretched over several days, Jean-Baptiste Clamence reviews the very great highs of his life as a respected criminal attorney, and the very great lows of his life as a libertine without a discernible conscience or moral compass. He narrates his life to an unseen and unheard Other, a tourist from France in Clamence's adopted home of Amsterdam who runs into Clamence at a seedy bar. At each major turning point in Clamence's life, the narrative adds another level of self-serving horribleness, and the reader recognizes the commonality of all people with each other in Clamence's descent...fall...from the peaks of public acclaim and well-wishing into the pits of a personal hell, made up of the deeds show more done and undone that bend us into new internal shapes with our regrets.

My Review: I read La Peste when I was seventeen, and I ***HATED*** it. I was angry at the waste of so much as a single tree to print it, in any and all languages and countries around the world. I despised each and every syllable. I vowed never, ever, ever to read another word by Camus. From that cold winter's night in 1976 to the point I was forced by the Book Circle to pick this book up, I kept to that promise.

Well. I sit corrected. La Chute is a fascinating moral tale told by a story-teller of great power and flawless control of his material and his language. (I am reliably informed that the original French is superb; this translation is sterling.) I am so glad that I didn't make the mistake of letting my teenaged judgment stand unchallenged. I would have missed out on a life high point in reading. I am accused, with Clamence, of leading a life grounded in the illusions of one's own superiority, one's own infallible rightness. HA! Wisdom comes, when it does, at a high price...the life of an innocent, the decision to be silent, the power of life and death over a virtual stranger are all things that happen to many, even most, of us; they're not always instantly obvious, of course, so we let them slide away unmarked. But how do *you* know that your call to complain about the service you received didn't result in someone losing a last-chance job, spiraling into depression, and ending her life? You don't. Clamence does. (That didn't happen in the book, by the bye.)

This book did what only the very best books written by the very best writers can do: It reoriented my internal compass. Permanently. Read it! Soon! show less

I mean, it's Camus, so of course it's exceptional. But this might even be a cut above. The narrative style is perhaps a little odd - talking to a largely silent companion in the second person. But that adds to the very ominous air that the conclusion takes, it gives a tense build (towards something actually quite trivial, but none-the-less something that takes the feeling of a profound reveal).

But of course it's never really Camus' narrative that you come for. His insight into the human condition is both horrifically compelling and repellant all at once. The protagonist didn't quite describe me - or at least, he did in terms of underlying existential feeling, but not ways of dealing with that in the day-to-day, but it none-the-less show more resonated deeply. I sense perhaps that there is a certain degree to which particular elements of the person he describes are bound up in 'maleness', because he described a few men I know with pinpoint accuracy. That's always the thing with Camus, he articulates what we only have a murky, nebulous sense of with such off-hand clarity that it almost makes you gasp.

There was much merry highlighting of sentiments so cutting and 'true' that you want to remember them forever when reading this book. Alas, I won't, but I guess that just justifies a re-read some years down the line. show less

Each of the fundamental pieces of this novel could, on their own, function as separate individual works of towering brilliance, individual light houses casting their luminescence into dark skies. And each of these possible works could easily be stretched into tome sized volumes.

But Camus consolidates all of the pieces into a sum far greater than its parts, at a page count barely over a hundred pages. This is to me, an accomplishment so rarely even approached that it's borderline inconceivable.

Jean Bapiste-Clamence is a self described 'judge-penitent' who after his own fall from grace, resides in an amerstdam bar called 'mexico city' lecturing, preaching, philosophizing, and even just basically conversing with each and every strata of show more society that comes to him drunk or otherwise.

Told in first person present tense, Clamence speaks to the readers directly along with the nameless and mostly silent secondary character. another successful parisian like clamence who starts off amused and curious towards clamence's ideas, then, along with the readers, is quickly absorbed into the war of ideas that clamence is forming, and advancing, until, finally, he is the witness to this remarkable character's (now one of my favorites of all the literature I've read up until this point) final lamentation as to simultaneously the inherent limits of his own espoused philosophy coupled with its actual potential for bringing about a deep and true, profound and nearly totally curative redemption for human kind.

Camus is to me one of the truest and purest writers who has ever put pen to paper. The individual visions of each of his works all function separately and together, as heartbreaking and breathtakingly living and breathing portraits of the dire rot of mankind's depravity and suffering which, of course, is mostly if not completely self-inflicted. The works are also somehow (beyond paradoxical) able to run a thin string through the muck of humanity's collectively shattered hearts and minds, psyche's and silences to connect us all from the message of the lone artistic genius (Camus, truly apart from not only his own time and people but even from mostly all others everywhere). This string is delicate as gossamer but tough as titanium cord.

It's not hope or the promise of salvation, I'm not sure I can adequately describe it (actually I know I can't) but if pressed I guess I'd wager a weak idea and label this string 'potential'. But the potential given us by Camus, and in The Fall it is no different, is something to be earned and suffered for and towards, but given the repetition of paradoxical equals (faith and non belief, high and low class and what that entails, intellect and base bestial behavior, etc) presented in the text, this necessary suffering is equal in weight and importance to all of humanity's suffering that has come before it, no more or less.

It's a suffering that we as a species need, deserve, and create for ourselves. It is at once what damns us and what can save us. Our faith and our intellect, the rise and the fall of what could be great versus what we kill in each other every moment with every breath in all our waking days.

Necessary literature for everyone, please read. show less

You are in a crowded subterranean bar in Amsterdam, trying unsuccessfully to attract the attention of the barman, when a stranger comes to your assistance. Confident and friendly, he introduces himself as Jean-Baptiste Clamence, and proceeds to tell you his life story. Because you are the ‘you’ who is addressed throughout The Fall, a silent witness to Clamence’s confession. He explains how he used to be a successful Parisian defence lawyer, a champion of the poor and oppressed, a good liberal and a happy man with many friends and admirers. But that was before the fall. Now he lives amongst criminals, in self-exile in Amsterdam with its concentric canals ‘like the circles of hell’. A self-styled ‘judge-penitent’ he spends show more his time confessing his sins to the strangers he meets in the seedy bars he frequents.

Philosophical meditation, dramatic monologue and authorial confession disguised as a novel; The Fall is all of these. It’s certainly a technical tour de force and Clamence’s monologue is sustained with great skill. Camus’ collapsing of the fourth wall produces an effect at first intimate and eventually uncomfortably claustrophobic. ‘You’ are dragged involuntarily into the novel and left hopelessly implicated in its narrator’s testimony. Clamence is the most seductive stranger ‘you’ ever encountered in a sleazy bar: elegantly epigrammatic, sardonically witty and beguilingly lyrical. He is also not so much a man who has lost his innocence as one who has made the shattering discovery that he was guilty all along. He is at once confessor of his own sins and accuser of all humanity. Is he unusually candid or unutterably manipulative? Truth-teller or sophist? ‘You’ be the judge.

Clamence ‘is the talking voice that runs on’ (as Stevie Smith said of her alter-ego Pompey Casmilus in Novel on Yellow Paper). He rattles around your brain for ninety-odd pages raising endless questions about our old friend the human condition. Are altruism and egotism the same thing? Do we like to judge others to avoid being judged ourselves? Are we all guilty? Camus leaves any possible answers to ‘you’, the reader. show less

It is humbling to read anything by Camus. In this novella, set up as a monologue by the narrator with an audience of a man he met in a bar, Camus, as usual, evokes self-examination. The narrator has set himself up as a "judge-penitent" whose mission is to teach the truth that all people are responsible....guilty...and can only be set free by acknowledging this. If you choose to read the novella, you will learn how the narrator "fell" from his prior life into his current one, and how civilization also "fell". A powerful treatise of judgement, truth, and just being human.

A self-titled “Judge Penitent” living in Amsterdam tells his life story, over several days, to a man he meets in a bar, bizarrely called Mexico City. It is written as a first person monologue, with occasional asides and replies to the other man, which gives the narrative a very distinctive voice.

Although a very short book, it is not one to rush as so much philosophy, law and theology is explored. (It is certainly much heavier than The Outsider or The Plague.)

You discover how an apparently altruistic and upstanding citizen comes to live a very different sort of life, with no single turning point – which perhaps makes his subsequent depravity and duplicity more alarming.

The conclusion (for me) was that only fallen people can judge show more others – but that we are all fallen. Pretty pessimistic, really. show less