European Reading Challenge #2

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

The Fall - Albert Camus

This is a novel of confession, a monologue from a man who shouts into the abyss, not expecting any reply. Jean-Baptiste Clamence, once a respected Parisian lawyer, now wanders the bars of Amsterdam, recounting his descent with the clarity of one who has lost faith not only in others but in himself.

His crimes are mundane. A road rage incident, a woman poised to leap into the Seine - he did nothing. And in doing nothing, he became something else: not a coward, not a villain, but a watcher. A man who sees too clearly the absurd theater of daily life, the endless posing, the judgments, the masks. He is not defiant, not repentant. He is ironic. Detached. Silent. Not a monster but an imp, assenting to beliefs that don’t do him any good.

To mistake Clamence for Camus is to miss the point. The narrator is not the author’s mouthpiece but his warning. Clamence is what happens when one lives without authenticity, without responsibility. For us hardcore readers - especially those hardened by work and literature, tempted by postmodern games - Clamence is a cautionary figure. He reminds us that thoughts, words, and actions - inaction too - are not abstractions. They have weight. They leave marks.

The title The Fall is not merely personal. It is historical. It evokes the collapse of complacencies and illusions after the Great War and The Slump and the Second World War, the revelation of what humanity is capable of under pressure - internal, external, ideological, economic, social. Camus, in this slim novel, delivers philosophical ideas concisely.

Some critics call The Fall Camus’s greatest achievement. It is certainly his most intimate. In awarding him the Nobel Prize in 1957, the world recognized not just a writer, but a man who understood that the modern soul, stripped of its certainties, must still bear the challenge of freedom and the consequences of silence.