The Fall     by Albert Camus, Translated by Justin O’Brien Original title: LA CHUTE Original language: French Published by Vintage Books Pub. Date: 1991 Format: Paperback, 160 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.47 x 8.00 x 5.20 ISBN: 0679720227 Edition: 1st Edition List Price: $10.00, £11.00 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £11.00 Buy online from Amazon.com for $8.00 Published by HAMILTON Pub. Date: 1957 Pub. Place: UK Format: 109 pages Not available for ordering Published by Penguin Pub. Date: 1990 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 109 pages List Price: £4.99 Not available for ordering

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The Fall isn’t the subtlest of Camus’ books, but it’s perhaps all the more powerful for that. Delivered as a monologue addressed by a former top-notch Parisian lawyer to a stranger in an Amsterdam bar, it mounts a full-scale assault on upright humanitarians, fashionable free-thinkers and modern man in general, whose epitaph, its protagonist tells us, should read: ‘he fornicated and read the papers.’


Widely acclaimed as a charitable, virtuous and irreproachable man, Jean-Baptiste Clamence slowly comes to realise that all his generous acts are motivated solely by the need for power. His sense of his own basic phoniness is confirmed to him when, alone on a bridge one night, he ignores a drowning woman’s cries for help. After this he decides to reveal his hollowness to all his admirers, ‘hurl my duplicity in the face of all those imbeciles, even before they discovered it.’ Through ‘pleasant indiscretions’ and scandalous debauchery, he ruins his reputation and his health and takes his place among ‘the lowest of the low.’


As its title suggests, The Fall is heavily allegorical. At the height of his career Clamence is ‘bathed in a light as of Eden’; Amsterdam’s concentric canals, he muses, ‘resemble the circles of hell.’ The metaphysical framework provided by the Bible and Dante’s Inferno helps set up Clamence’s eventual perverse but persuasive argument: ‘The more I accuse myself,’ he says, ‘the more I have a right to judge you’ (his room, in fact, contains a stolen Van Eyck panel depicting several judges). Because he’s guilty and knows it, he assumes the role of father-confessor — and his monologue makes it clear that the listener becomes increasingly addicted to his company. Like Clamence, the listener is a lawyer, but it’s also, as Baudelaire says, you — ‘hypocrite reader, my double, my brother’.

‘Have you noticed that death alone awakens our feelings? How we love the friends who have just left us? How we admire those of our teachers who have ceased to speak, their mouths filled with earth? Then the expression of admiration springs forth naturally, that admiration they were perhaps expecting from us all life long. But do you know why we are always more and more generous toward the dead? The reason is simple. With them there is no obligation.’ p30