The Fall (Penguin Modern Classics)

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I was always bursting with vanity. I, I, I is the refrain of my whole life, which could be heard in everything I said.’’ The book begins with the protagonist having a chance encounter with a fellow stranger at a bar in Rotterdam, where Clamence, known as a respected lawyer in his past, decides to share his story, confessing his sins and failures. As the narrative develops, Camus delves into the themes of guilt, responsibility, and judgement. By the time Camus got to Paris, World War II had officially begun in France. He wanted to join the army but was unable to because he contracted tuberculosis when he was 17 years old. This didn’t stop Camus from serving his country: he became involved with the French Resistance movement as an underground journalist for the Resistance newspaper Combat. Camus, Albert. (2004). The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays. Trans. Justin O'Brien. New York: Everyman's Library. ISBN 1-4000-4255-0 Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria, on November 7 1913. He grew up impoverished in an already poor country. Despite these circumstances, Camus still made school his priority. He worked odd jobs to pay for his education and attended the University of Algiers.

Bronner, Stephen Eric. Camus: Portrait of a Moralist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

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The time demanded his response, chiefly in his activities, but in 1947, Camus retired from political journalism. I completed my reading of the novel, a slow, careful reading as is deserving of Camus. The Fall is indeed a masterpiece of concision and insight into the plight of modern human experience. Albert Camus (1913-60) is the author of a number of best-selling and highly influential works, all of which are published by Penguin. They include The Fall, The Outsider and The First Man. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, Camus is remembered as one of the few writers to have shaped the intellectual climate of post-war France, but beyond that, his fame has been international. I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.’

The first level of religious allusion is to the Christian history of New England, a region settled by the Pilgrims fleeing religious persecution, followed by various ethnic and religious groups over the succeeding centuries. “The Fall” is set in New England towns with biblical and Christian names—Canaan, Salem, Bethel, Concord, Fairhaven, and Christmas Cove. Images of the religious heritage of New England are sprinkled throughout the poem: cities such as Boston and Plymouth that were founded by Pilgrims and Puritans, sermons preached by stern eighteenth century Anglican ministers, and the Irish chambermaids of nineteenth century Massachusetts and their devotion to weekly Mass. A philosophical novel described by fellow existentialist Sartre as 'perhaps the most beautiful and the least understood' of his novels, Albert Camus' The Fall is translated by Robin Buss in Penguin Modern Classics. This sentence reveals Clamence’s sadness that despite his love for himself and even being judged by others, he knows that he will never stop judging himself. That is one of the true ‘falls’ of the novel, in which you come to a point in your life where you have a realisation that you are a person with flaws, faced with your own guilt from your actions and importantly too, your inactions. In the essay, Camus argues that humans act the way that we do because we are constantly searching for the meaning of life, even though there isn’t one. According to Camus, we rebel because of this ultimate frustration. The Fall was the last novel Camus published before he died. The novel follows Jean-Baptiste Clemence as he retells his life story to strangers over five days. Camus' previous ideas of the Absurd inspired The Fall. Camus wrote the book after the atrocities of the Second World War. There was a distance from theorizing academics and the people who experienced the real horrors of the war. This alienation of the world in the aftermath of World War 2 is a prevalent theme throughout the book. Writer Over Philosopher Plaque on the sidewalk of an Albert Camus quote.Camus' idea of the Absurd was apparent in several of his works, such as The Stranger and The Plague. The philosophical views expressed in Camus' work made him well-known in philosophy. Sartre read his work and considered him less of a novelist and more of a writer of philosophical tales. At the end of every freedom, there is a sentence, which is why freedom is too heavy to bear, especially when you have a temperature, or you are grieving, or you love nobody.” Central to the idea of The Plague, certainly, is the theme of man’s encounter with death rather than the theme of man’s interpretation of life, which dominates The Stranger. Indeed, with The Plague, Camus was returning to the preoccupation of his earliest work of fiction, A Happy Death, but with a major new emphasis. The Plague concerns not an individual’s quest in relation to death but a collectivity’s involuntary confrontation with it. In The Plague, death is depicted as a chance outgrowth of an indifferent nature that suddenly, and for no apparent reason, becomes an evil threat to humankind. Death in the form of a plague is unexpected, irrational— a manifestation of that absurdity, that radical absence of meaning in life that is a major underlying theme of The Stranger. In The Plague, however, Camus proposes the paradox that when death is a manifestation of the absurd, it galvanizes something in a person’s spirit that enables the individual to join with others to fight against death and thus give meaning and purpose to life. From evil may come happiness, this novel seems to suggest: It is a painful irony of the human condition that individuals often discover their own capacities for courage and for fraternal affection—that is, for happiness— only if they are forced by the threat of evil to make the discovery.

Camus is known first and foremost for his writings, but he was also a French Resistance fighter and a philosopher. He was born and grew up in Algeria, a French colony at the time. Camus’ early life greatly influenced his writings, and he was famously anti-colonialist. He worked for a leftist newspaper in Algiers until it was eventually shut down, and then decided to move to Paris in 1940. The Fall is the fictional, first person confession of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a Parisian expatriate. Jean-Baptiste used to be a hotshot defense lawyer, but suddenly realized his life was hypocritical and now lives out his days in a seedy bar in Amsterdam. The novel puts you in the center of the action (not unlike those " Choose Your Own Adventure " books) because Jean-Baptiste talks to you while you’re sitting by him in said seedy bar.Now some critics have derived this to be, in part, a criticism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the Paris leftists. Oliver Gloag writes in his Albert Camus: A Short Introduction—an excellent and succinct work of criticism I shall lend you if you like after our drinks—that Camus saw that they ‘ spoke of helping others but did not concretely help them.’ Many others have seen this book on the whole as Camus’ own self-criticism as well. Have you seen a photo of Camus, mon cher? Surely Clamence’s athletic description of himself could produce a striking portrait of the author in the mind's eye. Rumor has it the bridge scene mimics the suicide of his own wife, Francine, which he alluded to in a letter to his lover, the actress María Casares. Yes, my friend, Camus had many lovers under Francine’s nose, in fact the car accident that took his life was on a trip to where his three mistresses had all received letters from him announcing three different dates of arrival to ensure he had time with them all. Camus’s less than flattering thoughts on women as expressed in his diaries, Gloag tells us, are shared by Clamence himself who finds women a bore aside from intercourse and admits he lies to them to get them into bed. Here you are made to continuously disagree with a person who goes more and more towards that abyss. You are made to define yourself in your disagreement, to define yourself as a negation. And by doing that you are the one who discovers the nausea of such an existence, even as the narrator finds ingenious and pathetic ways to avoid it. And you are the one who moves away from the abyss. Jean-Baptiste Clamence - refined, handsome, forty, a former successful lawyer - is in turmoil. Over several drunken nights he regales a chance acquaintance with his story. He talks of parties and his debauchery, of Parisian nights and the Aegean sea, and, ultimately, of his self-loathing. One of Albert Camus' most famous works, The Fall is a brilliant, complex portrayal of lost innocence and the true face of man. Read more Details As the story goes, Meursault commits a crime and is then treated as an outcast. Its almost as if Camus wants the reader to dislike the main character, as he is depicted as being emotionless and detached. Camus writes in a very simple and easy to understand way, which is a trademark of his writing style. From his dooming realisation, he exiled himself to, as referred before, the ‘bourgeois hell’ of Amsterdam. A personal punishment, due to his obsession with being superior to others (‘I have never felt comfortable except in lofty places. […] I preferred the bus to the subway, open carriages to taxis, terraces to closed-in places.’) He sent himself to a place that is below sea level reflecting his attitude of being a fallen man, he ran away to hide in the fallen depths of Amsterdam – describing each concentric circle in the design of the city resembling the hell of Dante’s Inferno. Thus, we have his cycle of duplicity as he found solace in Mexico City (the bar), as the real Mexico City is 8,000 ft above sea level, a place where he could play God by passing judgment on others whilst giving his ‘confession’ amidst the hell of Amsterdam.