The Fall
Albert Camus(1956)
Extract
I'll tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day.
A man holds court in an Amsterdam bar, speaking to a stranger with the fluency of a confessor who has rehearsed his guilt until it gleams. He was once a Parisian lawyer, celebrated, generous, admired, until a woman's body struck the Seine one night and he did not turn back. Albert Camus published this compact, devastating novel in 1956, crafting in Jean-Baptiste Clamence a voice that implicates everyone who listens. The monologue spirals through the fog of Amsterdam's canals, through concentric circles of self-accusation that double as accusation of the reader. It is a book about the impossibility of innocence after awareness, the way judgment, once discovered, saturates everything. No one who hears Clamence's confession emerges unjudged.
If you loved this
Dostoevsky builds the same confession, but gives Raskolnikov a listener who is not also the accused.
Dostoevsky's narrator performs the same monologue of self-justification, but without Clamence's elegance or his Amsterdam bar.
Kafka puts another man on trial, but K. never manages the trick of becoming his own judge.