Parts of the book are hard-hitting and profound, but some bits (especially towards the end) become quite verbose and difficult to follow. It's easy to get the gist of what the narrator is trying to convey, but the repetitive nature of his argument does not redeem itself at the end, unlike Camus' other notable work, The Stranger. ( )

A fabtastic book by Camus, that brings you into a world in which you feel you are the protagonist. ( )

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 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. ( )

By far my favorite book of his that I've read. I specially love the format: a conservation that we can only read one part of, though the narration tells you enough that you can fill in the answers of the other side by mere context cues.
Really recommend it. ( )

A promising work. The first half is camus at his strongest. His description of the "upstanding avocat" is reminiscent of the "Lovers" prefaces in The Peste (the strongest sections in that work), and contains the promise of subtle insight to follow. Unfortunately camus doesn't make good on this.

The self-description of the soi-disant "virtuous person" already contains some not-so-subtle hints of its collapse (most prominent in association with the narrators adoration for Height: being at the top, looking down, etc. - such imagery isn't difficult to parse) and this is fine. From there it would be sufficient to develop these flaws and thereby follow to the end the trajectory of such an above-average person - an idea for a passable work. Had he more courage, camus would have instead given him an "abnormal psychology" which, perfect in its virtue, anticipates its own demise and rejects it, finally succumbing to a clever dialectical turn in which the virtuous narrator approximates himself to a higher categorial virtue and annihilates himself (a kind of "Johannes de Silentio" figure - though dealing with "Judge William"-type questions). Camus has patience for neither of these approaches.

Quite simply, he has the narrator enter "existential" proximity with "the truth", after which he immediately becomes the insecure, idealistic, strangely young character who is the precise self-image of the "disillusioned" (and almost invariably male) lycée readers who have come to admire this author so very much. From there we get a few tiresome ideas such as:

"I learned what life is really like and realized I was a hypocrite to be held in such high esteem, and so I began acting out precisely to fall in these graces and become who I really am." (this is what teens like to imagine they are doing when they act out)

"Once I realized other people could judge me I lost the assurance of my character and became insecure" (coincidentally the teenager is also just discovering that other people have thoughts too)

"As a 'judge-penitant' I am actually the most clever person in the room because, with my dialectical approach, I am able to convince my interlocutor to divulge their deepest inadequacies while, really, I risk nothing. They are affected, but I am right and shall never change." (this one speaks for itself)

That said, the prose, even in translation, is not bad, and the work also has the virtue of brevity - take note. ( )