With every Camus book there are two major problems:
- The writing is purposefully contrived, possibly lost in translation from French.
- The meaning is purposefully contrived, possibly lost in translation from French.
In spite of this, I just cannot get enough of his books. He is the most enlightened person I’ve ever read.
The Fall is the story of a benevolent lawyer who is always going out of his ways to help others, a hugely successful lawyer who offers his services to the poor for free. He is the perfect partner in love and the best friend one can possibly hope for.
One unfortunate night, he hears a woman scream while jumping off a bridge into the cold Seine. Instead of stopping and doing something about it, he looks around, and seeing that there is no one nearby he continues walking pretending as if nothing has happened. This singular incident then completely unravels his life and becomes the beginning of his fall.
The upper layers of actions are gradually peeled off and the deeper layers of intention rise to the surface. Our protagonist realizes that he is in fact a deeply narcissistic guy whose only goal in life is to derive pleasure and to feel superior to everyone else. He only helps others to feel above them. The most important thing for him is that the world owes him favors but he is never in debt.
The singular incident lingers with him and haunts him for the rest of his life. It is the moment when he becomes self-aware of his shallowness and his hypocrisy.
He then quits his comfortable life in Paris and moves to Africa as a form of repentance but realizes that there is no solace there and even there he inadvertently ends up being above all of his compatriots so much so that he becomes their new pope and is forced to make decisions about who lives and who dies.
After all this, he gives up on penitence and decides to embrace his demons. He turns to Amsterdam to use his law skills in service of the criminal class. To be both physically and socially in one of the lowest places in the world. To him, the canals of the city represent the circles of hell and this final transition completes his fall from the heaven of Paris to the hell of Amsterdam.
The story is a parable whose intended meaning is something that one can only guess at. The wiki page claims that this is a story about universal guilt, the absence of innocence, and the impossibility of penitence. And I can see all of that. But to me, this story seems to be another manifestation of his philosophy of the absurd. It reflects Camus’ great insight into the human condition, about the shortfall of reason, the drives behind human actions, and the smallness and futility of human endeavour against the whims of the universe. Our hero slowly goes from action to awareness to reflection, and finally to acceptance - acceptance of his own nature and the nature of reality and his inability to run from it. Through his fall he rises out of naivety and achieves enlightenment. As he puts it at the end of his story, “It’s too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!”