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The Fall (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Bottum’s images of fall raise the central questions of human and Christian life. The title evokes both a New England autumn and humankind’s first descent into sin. Evocations of violence, judgment, forgiveness, and mercy are sprinkled through each section. The dominant metaphor of fire in September describes the blaze of colors of a New England autumn but also makes explicit violent references to the “welcome slaughter,” “blood and spew and mongerings of war,” and “flames like the blood of martyrs.” Biblical hints resonate in the allusions of “children pass[ing] through fire” (Isaiah 43:1-2; Daniel 3:26) and to “fire falls” and “the world [a]s kindling for the Lord.” (Luke 12:49: “I came to bring fire to the earth and how I wish it were already kindled!”)

I completed my reading of the novel, a slow, careful reading as is deserving of Camus. The Fall is indeed a masterpiece of concision and insight into the plight of modern human experience. You may be tempted to assume, due to everything else about me and what I do and who I am as a person, that this is sheer laziness on my part. That because I do not enjoy "putting" "effort" "into" "things," I appreciate when a book takes me an hour or two to read. Bronner, Stephen Eric. Camus: Portrait of a Moralist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Here is a quote from the Wikipedia review: “Clamence, through his confession, sits in permanent judgment of himself and others, spending his time persuading those around him of their own unconditional guilt.”An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale. That is the true role of the modern Christ. To take The Fall for you, so that he becomes the mirror in which you see the horror of your life. you know this person, we all know this person, this particular kind of person. a real do-gooder, a person of the people, doling out the goodwill and the spare change and the spare arm to help that blind person across the street. you know the satisfaction they get from looking humble, acting humble, being anything but humble at the heart of them. reveling in their goodness; reveling in their superiority. selflessness disguising selfishness. this person loves 'em and leaves 'em too, except "love" is too strong, too emotional a word to describe the shallow physical connection that leaves out any potential for a genuine connection. this person looks at other people like they would look at a collection of amusing bugs. this person sees a person needing help but if it costs them something, anything, even just a bit of delay on their way to something super important, then they are going to pass that person by. this person doesn't actually like people all that much; this person despises them, more than a little.

The product of a troubled time in Camus’s life, The Fall is a troubling work, full of brilliant invention, dazzling wordplay, and devastating satire, but so profoundly ironic and marked by so many abrupt shifts in tone as to leave the reader constantly off balance and uncertain of the author’s viewpoint or purpose. This difficulty in discerning the book’s meaning is inherent in its basic premise, for the work records a stream of talk— actually one side of a dialogue—by a Frenchman who haunts a sleazy bar in the harbor district of Amsterdam and who does not trouble to hide the fact that most of what he says, including his name, is invented. Because he is worldly and cultivated, his talk is fascinating and seizes the attention of his implied interlocutor (who is also, of course, the reader) with riveting force. The name he gives himself is Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a name that evokes the biblical figure of the prophet John the Baptist as the voice crying in the wilderness (vox clamantis in deserto) and that coincides neatly with the occupation he claims to follow, also of his own invention: judgepenitent. Plays: Révolte dans les Asturies, pb. 1936 (with others); Caligula, pb. 1944 (wr. 1938-1939; English translation, 1948); Le Malentendu, pr., pb. 1944 (The Misunderstanding, 1948); L’État de siège, pr., pb. 1948 (State of Siege, 1958); Les Justes, pr. 1949 (The Just Assassins, 1958); Caligula, and Three Other Plays, 1958; Les Possédés, pr., pb. 1959 (adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevski’s novel Besy; The Possessed, 1960). Charney, Noah (2010). Stealing the Mystic Lamb: the True Story of the World's Most Coveted Masterpiece. PublicAffairs, 2010. By the time Camus got to Paris, World War II had officially begun in France. He wanted to join the army but was unable to because he contracted tuberculosis when he was 17 years old. This didn’t stop Camus from serving his country: he became involved with the French Resistance movement as an underground journalist for the Resistance newspaper Combat. A philosophical novel described by fellow existentialist Sartre as 'perhaps the most beautiful and the least understood' of his novels, Albert Camus' The Fall is translated by Robin Buss in Penguin Modern Classics.The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year. Central to the idea of The Plague, certainly, is the theme of man’s encounter with death rather than the theme of man’s interpretation of life, which dominates The Stranger. Indeed, with The Plague, Camus was returning to the preoccupation of his earliest work of fiction, A Happy Death, but with a major new emphasis. The Plague concerns not an individual’s quest in relation to death but a collectivity’s involuntary confrontation with it. In The Plague, death is depicted as a chance outgrowth of an indifferent nature that suddenly, and for no apparent reason, becomes an evil threat to humankind. Death in the form of a plague is unexpected, irrational— a manifestation of that absurdity, that radical absence of meaning in life that is a major underlying theme of The Stranger. In The Plague, however, Camus proposes the paradox that when death is a manifestation of the absurd, it galvanizes something in a person’s spirit that enables the individual to join with others to fight against death and thus give meaning and purpose to life. From evil may come happiness, this novel seems to suggest: It is a painful irony of the human condition that individuals often discover their own capacities for courage and for fraternal affection—that is, for happiness— only if they are forced by the threat of evil to make the discovery. The Fall explores themes of innocence, imprisonment, non-existence, and truth. In a eulogy to Albert Camus, existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described the novel as "perhaps the most beautiful and the least understood" of Camus' books. Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria, on November 7 1913. He grew up impoverished in an already poor country. Despite these circumstances, Camus still made school his priority. He worked odd jobs to pay for his education and attended the University of Algiers.

In the essay, Camus argues that humans act the way that we do because we are constantly searching for the meaning of life, even though there isn’t one. According to Camus, we rebel because of this ultimate frustration. Of course you might let someone else take The Fall for you, but from then on you would have to worship him. You would have to worship the guilty. You would have to worship the Judge-Penitent. But in this modern religion, to worship is to laugh at The Fallen. I loved the line where he said we should forgive the pope. It was a refreshing take on a topic that is usually too feel good for literary circles and that we expect to be broadcast on the “O” network, which kind of blunts it’s existential value, because it makes a market for it and blunts it’s truly existential scope. In a world where we’re always judging, being judged, the one solid defense is for one to humbly, awkwardly, soberly, forgive oneself, the more private and quiet, the better. It’s interesting to think about. This book was such a rewarding read.One of the central ideas explored in The Fall is the concept of moral responsibility. Clamence confesses to posing as a "judge-penitent," an imaginary role in which he presumes to pass judgment on others while simultaneously confessing his own faults. This moral duality reflects Camus' belief in the ambiguous nature of human actions and the potential for each individual to face moral and ethical dilemmas. The Fall was the last novel Camus published before he died. The novel follows Jean-Baptiste Clemence as he retells his life story to strangers over five days. Camus' previous ideas of the Absurd inspired The Fall. Camus wrote the book after the atrocities of the Second World War. There was a distance from theorizing academics and the people who experienced the real horrors of the war. This alienation of the world in the aftermath of World War 2 is a prevalent theme throughout the book. Writer Over Philosopher Plaque on the sidewalk of an Albert Camus quote. Camus employs symbolism and allegory throughout the novel to enhance its philosophical depth. The city of Amsterdam, with its network of canals and labyrinthine streets, mirrors Clamence's psychological journey into the depths of guilt and self-deception. The bell tower in the center of the city serves as a constant reminder of judgment and the consequences of one's choices. Two persistent themes animate all of Albert Camus’s writing and underlie his artistic vision: One is the enigma of the universe, which is breathtakingly beautiful yet indifferent to life; the other is the enigma of man, whose craving for happiness and meaning in life remains unextinguished by his full awareness of his own mortality and of the sovereign indifference of his environment. At the root of every novel, every play, every essay, even every entry in his notebooks can be found Camus’s incessant need to probe and puzzle over the ironic double bind that he perceived to be the essence of the human condition: Man is endowed with the imagination to conceive an ideal existence, but neither his circumstances nor his own powers permit its attainment. The perception of this hopeless double bind made inescapable for Camus the obligation to face up to an overriding moral issue for man: Given man’s circumscribed condition, are there honorable terms on which his life can be lived? A Happy Death

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