A few words on Albert Camus, La Chute (The Fall)

Albert Camus, La Chute: Cover, a Folio's Edition

If in Paris, a late, sultry summer evening, walking down the rive gauche, you pass by an old rickety book stand and, by accident, stumble upon Camus' "La Chute," then be sure to give the old marchande some business, old fool! That's exactly what I did too, anyways...

    You see, the lady will have been awaiting for a while, puffing out grey billows of smoke, and the tiny gem is gonna be most likely a pocket book, a "Folio" or a "Le livre de Poche" edition, possibly as old as from the '60s. Anyways, "The Fall" is mainly about Amsterdam, in a way: and it's about the horizontal life, and vertical free falling, and about laying flat. It's the confession of a lifetime, after the mask has fallen down. Probing into reminiscences of an older existence, back to a time when life had been lived fully, along with the  majestic flowing of the Seine river, it emerges from the decomposing waters of Amsterdam's canals and the death-like, stagnant, shallow depths of the Zuiderzee. A must read.

Dostoevsky's Demons and Camus' La chute, The fall, and Kirillov

Cover, a Folio's edition

Portrait of F. Dostoevsky

It is well known Dostoevsky's influence on Albert Camus literary and intellectual development and  formation, as well as the great interest of the latter for the novel "The Possessed", of which he wrote and directed an important  theater   adaptation in 1960.

In Camus' most Dostoevskian work, La Chute, the tantalizing confession of a lifetime, echoes the spiritual dilemma  and torturing distress of the Russian writer's anti-hero Kirillov,  and the many themes revolving around meaninglessness  and absurdity of  human struggle,  the interpretation of the myth of Christ,  collective judgment and self-inflicted punishment, amongst others. In Camus' work though, Dostoevsky's many voices universe  is irrevocably shattered and never to be recomposed. 

The narrative voice of la Chute, the "juge penitent", is a true advocatus diaboli, weaving a spider web that slowly suffocates the reader's esprit and offers no alternative to despair and helplessness. The psychological probe of our individual fragility and the relentless criticism of a morally corrupted society leaves no hope for redemption, nor salvation.  In Camus' thoroughly pessimistic words, a second opportunity is not possible, let alone desirable: "Il est trop tard, maintenant, il sera toujours trop tard. Heureusement!"