THE FALL, Albert Camus

I sometimes try to imagine what future historians will say about us. They’ll be able to sum up modern man in a single sentence: he fornicated and read the papers.

As noted previously, I use the winter to fill in the gaps in my reading, of which there are many because I am an uneducated oik. And so, THE FALL by Albert Camus, which was more entertaining than I expected.

In the internal monologue, ‘please accept my sympathy’ comes right before ‘now let’s get on with something else’. It’s the emotion felt by a prime minister or company chairman: you get it cheap after some disaster.

A tourist in Amsterdam makes the acquaintance of Clemence, once a Parisian lawyer, now in the self-selected job of “judge-penitent” in the seedy bars. Over several days, Clemence tells the tourist his life story, in order to reveal what “judge-penitent” really means. Over the course of these monologues, Clemence gleefully shows himself as an emotional monster, a serial killer of hope and joy, a cheerfully sociopathic mindfucker. One might imagine Bret Easton Ellis read it in the years before he conceived AMERICAN PSYCHO.

It’s rather brilliant and a fun, chilling read, if somewhat quaint and mannered. I wonder if even at the time it must have seemed somewhat genteel next to, say, Simenon’s romans durs.

(though it also occurs to me that it can also be read as a final middle finger to Sartre)

At least, you must have heard of the spitting cell that one nation thought up recently to prove that it was the greatest on earth? A brick box in which the prisoner is standing upright, but cannot move. The solid door that seals him into his cement shell stops at the level of his chin, so all that can be seen is his face, on which each warder spits copiously. The prisoner, cramped in his cell, cannot wipe himself, even though he is allowed to shut his eyes. Well, that, my good fellow, is an invention of man. They did not need God to dream up that little masterpiece.

THE FALL, Albert Camus (UK) (US+)