25

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. ( )

"Para ser feliz, não devo preocupar-me demais com o outro." O protagonista Clamence , advogado, não acredita mais nos discursos que deve fazer no tribunal sobre justiça, lei, crime. Sua descida ao inferno começa, e ela é feia, embora esclarecedora. Existem verdades filosóficas que Camus aborda, mas as desilusões predominam. Contado como um longo monólogo estendido por vários dias, o romance revê os grandes pontos altos da vida de Clemence como um respeitado advogado criminalista e os baixos de sua vida como um libertino sem consciência discernível nem bússola moral. ( )