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| View Larger Image | The Fall
by Albert Camus
| | List Price: | $11.95 | | Price: | $9.56 | | You Save: | $2.39 (20%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 23051 | | Studio: | Vintage | | | Binding: | Paperback | | Number Of Pages: | 160 | | Publication Date: | May 07, 1991 | | Publisher: | Vintage |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Elegantly styled, Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study of modern amorality. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 91 reviews)
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Bleak but Beautiful 
Bleak but beautiful, The Fall is one of those books that reveals humans for what they are. The lawyer protagonist has worked all his life for justice, but to what end? He would like to believe that he has a selfless interest in downtrodden people and lofty ideals, but as the book progresses he is forced to confront his hypocrisy. He works hard ultimately for himself, he enjoys the public image of himself as a selfless person. The realization tortures him, and to resolve the hypocrisy he stops all his charitable endeavors and hurls himself into a life of selfish pleasure. But can any of us claim true selflessness? Camus is of course a master at showing us the hypocrisy and ridiculousness lurking under our highest ideals, and this book is no exception.
June 29, 2008 | |
Best Book Ever Written. Period.......... 
I've been reading some of the reviews for this book and can't believe that there are so many people writing about this book without really understanding it. I have read this book about a dozen times, never read any other book more than once. The first time I read it I thought it was very boring and dry, just two guys talkng in a bar. The second time I thought this Jean-Baptiste guy might be the devil talking.
About the sixth time I really understood it. The narrator of the story is the Devil himself (for real). And he was talking not to somebody in the bar, but he was talkng to me personally (for real).
This book changed my outlook on life and my actions in life. Just about every word in every sentence has more than one meaning. Does anyone else get this from the book?
March 31, 2008 | |
Book is good
This is the second book I've read by this author, the first one being "The Stranger". Both books tend to examine human thoughts in the face of death. The book is more or less a collection of thoughts directed at a few abstract objects of interest like modern life, celebrity, death by suicide, and modern love. As such it's a decent book considering it's pretty readable, despite the lack of much of a story. It's kind of just a bunch of thoughts with a few events few and far between, but it manages to captivate and project a mood onto me (or maybe someone else whose reading it). He's able show the amusement and glorify this modern life in a somewhat self-effacing way, showing the advantages and the humor of this type of lifewhich includes a placid rebellion, lust and hypocrisy for a major group of its beneficiaries.
Its really not that great of a book but its hard to give three stars, because it depends what you're comparing it against. If compared to other literary masterpieces than maybe three stars, but I'll give four.
March 07, 2008 | |
Am I missing Something? 
"The Fall" was my introduction to Camus. I believed it was high time that I read the work of this Nobel Laureate and, so, in I dived.
I regret to say that I was disappointed. Camus' short work is a monologue from its principal character, Jean-Batiste Clamence, who serves as the narrator of the tale. First person grammar is used to tell what can best be described as a very meandering story. To use the term plot would be unfair. The book simply has little or no such plot.
Now, it is probably quite unfair to come to a sweeping conclusion on the basis of one short work. The work of Camus is widely praised. Many people deem him to be one of the literary giants of the twentieth century. So, it is incumbent on me to read further into the work of Camus. I trust that my efforts will be rewarded in due course. For the moment, I feel somewhat cheated.
November 22, 2007 | |
Probably Too Complicated To Fully Describe in a Brief Review Here
Albert Camus (1913 - 1960) was a French writer and philosopher. He is often associated with existentialism, but Camus rejected any ideological classification. Camus was a young recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature when he became the first African-born writer to receive the award in 1957. He died in a car crash only three years after receiving the award. He was a social activist and Communist, and fought with the French resistance in WWII. Later he rejected Communism. The present book is one of his last works.
Camus combined his philosophy with his writing skills to produce literary art. The end result is sometimes complicated. It takes a close and careful examination to see exactly what points he is trying to make. Camus descibed The Stranger as a story about someone who was telling the unvarnished truth, but it was more complicated than that.
For The Fall, the analysis needed to discuss the work is far beyond the scope of a simple one page review as we have here. I humbly suggest that those wishing to learn more about Camus and The Fall should read some of the lengthy analysis found elsewhere.
Back then to The Fall and two basic points. As most know, the present work is a monologue set in an Amsterdam bar and parts are set on a foggy winter evening. A former Paris lawyer tells his tale to a listener. This is not a novel as we think of a novel but a slightly confused story in prose. In any case, there are two major points and a few others that we do not have space to discuss.
The first is that Camus's ideas and his theory can be found in the non-fiction work The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe) (1942): it is about "the absurd sensitivity." That idea is continued here in The Fall. We cannot conclude that Camus "found religion" in the present work nor are there any changes in Camus's philosophy. Any idea that he found religion is a misunderstanding of Camus's method. To say he found religion or God would be a bit like having Dostoevsky come out as an aetheist in one of his final books, i.e.: impossible. Also, Camus remains involved in "the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart." This is a continuation of his past themes, but with a different setting and with a different plot and characters.
Secondly, a similarity exists in the existential condition of loneliness and isolation that is "man's lot" in this world without "transcendental hopes." So, the character of Jean-Baptiste Clamence brings us the monologue and he describes and he reacts to his inner discovery. He does so in an extremely ironic fashion - and that is part of the "art" part of the novel along with accepting the notion of the absurd.
Overall, this is a good book from Camus that takes only a few hours to read and probably will take much more time to understand. Some will want to read it a second time, or even three or four times. It is far more complicated than The Stranger, and it is less straighforward to read and understand.
This is one instance where you should look beyond the reviews here to get a deeper understanding of the work; and, it is probably best to read some of the detailed analysis found elswhere in critical books or on the net.
August 21, 2007 | |
SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
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