
Sartre called this Camus' most eloquent novel. It throws you off from the very beginning, it's written in the second person all the way through, you feel kind of dazed. Until you realise that it's a layered trick, the central character, a "judge-penitent", is constructing the listener as the novel goes along. For a man with a burdened conscience, the other exists only as a threat of judgement, or as a possibility for confession. He is trying to confess to you something in a roundabout way, you're only as real as his confession, the camaraderie he invokes is only as substantial as his guilt. His burden is his own mind, his acute intelligence and awareness bother him with the memory of each of his flaws and all his humiliations. A man with an inflated pride cannot go on living when that pride is punctured. He goes about the bars in Amsterdam, befriending tourists and unburdening himself of the weight he has on his conscience. 'You' of the novel is one of these tourists, it's you and me, it's a shadow on the wall. He has been doing this a while. 'The Fall' as a title has multiple connotations, there is a specific physical fall in the novel, then there is the metaphorical fall of this admired and respected socialite, then the fall of all mankind into sin, the helplessness and incongruity of the human condition and its perpetual friction against its own vanity. In breathless passages of poetic aphorisms and circular insults to all of humanity, he goes on philosophising about God, Law and Order, Good and Evil, slowly circling in to the thing that has got him all bothered anyway. He wants by the end of his confession, to convince you, and the rest of humanity of its own guilt. It's a brilliant novel, it's surprisingly short but dense. And it's beautiful. I love everything by Camus.

It is a kind of anomaly in his overall oeuvre. He strays away in this from what he thought was going to be the trajectory of his work. In the documentary on Camus, it is pointed out that during the writing of this novel, his wife told him that she liked this novel, because he is accusing himself in this. He had a famous affair around the time his wife was pregnant with his child, it eventually drove her to attempt suicide. It's said that the title 'The Fall' also refers to her attempt by falling out of the hospital window. Their marriage was open, so Camus couldn't forsee an objection on her behalf, but it's still a volatile terrain to be on, when your wife is literally about to be the mother of your child. The novel itself tries to navigate this terrain, what is the scope moral responsibility? To what extent are we responsible for the wounds we inflict? To what extent can we be forgiven? What kind of compromise is possible between freedom and necessity? The breathlessness of the novel is the breathlessness of its author. It is a kind of rejoinder, that even when Sisyphus has settled the question of eternal meaninglessness, he still has a life to live and questions to confront. He has deeds to answer for, in the living community that he is a part of.
