About this title: An expatriate Frenchman on the skids in Amsterdam spills his life story in a sleazy bar, revealing that he used to be a successful Paris lawyer. His downfall parallels the plight of all humanity in Camus's allegorical novel, which is a classic of existential literature.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books
Date Published: 1956
Description: Good. Cool 1956 paperback. Cover shows some wear or creases. Pages yellowed/tanned. Remainder marks on top and bottom page edges. No highlighting or underlining. You're gonna love this book! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books
Date Published: 1956
Description: Fair. Cool 1956 paperback. Cover shows some wear or creases. Pages yellowed/tanned. No highlighting or underlining. You're gonna love this book! read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Date Published: 1991
ISBN-13:9780679720225ISBN:0679720227
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. clean text, tight binding, minor shelf wear to cover/corners, nice reading copy, help support independent booksellers! Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 160 p. Vintage International (Paperback). Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf
Date Published: 1961
Description: Used-Good. Ex-Library. Hardcover. We individually inspect and grade each book. Our books are professionally packaged and processed quickly. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Date Published: 1961
Description: Good in None jacket. Smaller hardcover, no jacket. 12th printing. Cover lightly worn, spine faded, more so on edges, crayon marks on back cover. Pages browning from age, no other markings inside. Elegantly styled, Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study of modern amorality. read more
Description: Very Good. 0679720227 Paperback, Condition: Very Good; this book is in very good condition with light curve to the spine / light reading creases to the covers. read more
Edition: Eleventh Printing
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, New York
Date Published: 1960
Description: Near Fine in Good jacket. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. Translated by Justin O'Brien, $3.00 Publishers Dust Jacket Price, 147 Pages, Chips-Nicks-Rubbings and Short Tears to the DJ. read more
Description: New. Orders placed after Dec. 7 cannot be guaranteed delivery before Christmas. GREAT BUY. Brand New From US Distributor. WE ARE A 5 STAR SELLER with OVER 3, 500, 000 BOOKS SOLD. read more
"Forget The Stranger - this is Camus' best novel. It obviously helps if you like existentialism but what really makes this book amazing is the creative monologue-as-narrative writing style, and the observations on ulterior motives and human nature.
The Fall delivers ideological wit without preachy heavy-handedness, and it will have you rereading passages and thinking about concepts days later. His ideas (and how cleverly they are presented) sneak up on you.
Of course it's a challenge but I've read it as least twice and even attempted the original French version and never once felt like I was doing homework. Even if you don't factor in Camus' contributions to philosophy, this is just an incredibly great book."
"I have been reading some of the existentialist writers lately...reading Sartre's trilogy and now The Fall by Albert Camus, and I am still trying to figure out this "philosophy."
I remember once hearing in a lit class that it means that the only reality is the one that you perceive...if you perceive it is real, nothing else is. People can tell you that it is different, but your perceptions are the only things that count and so there are as many realities as there are people perceiving them, and further, that no two people have the same reality. Sounds a lot like mental illness too, but I won't get into that.
Camus seems to be saying in The Fall, that everything is a bunch of BS. Everything we do is an affectation. If we are nice, we do it to prove to ourselves that we are good people. If we are mean, we are doing to get attention of others or out of desperation. But nothing is real, except...nothing.
Now The Fall is not a bad book...a small novel that is a long monologue from a French man living in Amsterdam and hanging out at a dive bar called Mexico City. He meets another man at the bar and engages him in conversation, to illustrate why everything is ultimately BS. It is somewhat interesting at first, but I also found he was hitting us over the head with it too much...really, 145 pages to get to that point? It was pedantic and after a bit, boring.
I'm glad I read this to be sure that I will give up on this philosophy. It seems pointless and lazy to me. I mean, if everything is BS, why bother to write about it? Hmmm?"
"Camus's thrid and shortest novel is really more an introspective, existential essay told through the memory of a former French lawyer Jean-Baptiste Clamence, who questions and regerets his own actions or, more specifically, his lack of action, during a short, fateful moment 10 years earlier on the quai of the Seine when he saw a young woman about to jump and take her life. The story is not exactly action-packed, but it is a thought-provoking and distrubing reflection about the responsibility of evey human being to look out for everyone else. It also says some sobering things about courage, cowardice, rationalization, and guilt. It makes the reader think, what is the title referring to? Has the narrator's moment of poor judgment resulting in a personal fall from which he cannot recover?"
"Sartre is supposed to have said,"perhaps the most beautiful and the least understood" of Camus' books. It's just like Sartre to claim to find something profound in what seems to me just one of those things that didn't quite come off.
For once, I can agree with Sartre, at least half way. This is certainly not the most beautiful of Camus' books --- I'd choose "L'homme revolte", but you might choose "La peste" and I wouldn't argue with you. Sartre's right about "The Fall/La chute" being the least understood, though -- at least by me. The technique of the single character's monologue is, right off the bat, not brought off here. The character's indictment of all humanity's integrity, with especially bad marks for the Dutch and the French, is just. . . peevish.
Okay, maybe it's the translation. I may revise this after I get hold of the original version and read it.
Wait a minute --- Camus wrote it, after all. Here's two good quotes I had to share: "Martyrs, cher ami, must choose between being forgotten, mocked,or made use of."
And, "But too many people now climb on to the cross merely to be seen from a greater distance, even if they have to trample somewhat on the one who has been there so long.""
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