The Fall by Camus

[ThatIndividual]

Question: 'What do you consider the turning point in the life of our friend, Jean-Baptiste Clamence? Is there a definite turning point? What happened to him?'

I am currently about two thirds of the way through, having read it before over a year and a half ago. I'm eager to discuss and soak up your input.

[ThatIndividual]

Ok, friends... Here's your homework assignment. Read The Fall by Albert Camus. It's quite short, you can read it in a couple of hours without a problem.
Ready, set, go! :D

[starrwriter]

Question: 'What do you consider the turning point in the life of our friend, Jean-Baptiste Clamence? Is there a definite turning point? What happened to him?' I am currently about two thirds of the way through, having read it before over a year and a half ago. I'm eager to discuss and soak up your input.
I think "The Fall" may be Camus' most interesting book and a close second to the writing quality he showed in "The Stranger."

If Clemence is the narrator (I can't remember his name), the turning point in his life was obvious to me and it was made clear in the last sentence of the book. I'd rather not reveal specific plot details for those who haven't read it yet.

The book title seems like a reference to Biblical fall of man, but the story is about one man's failure to redeem himself when given the chance. He has his own rationalizations, but he acknowledges that he failed. It reminds me of a quote from Thoreau: "Men lie on their backs lamenting the fall of man, but they make no effort to get up."

[ThatIndividual]

Interesting. Yeah, I see that the turning point, if there must be one, is that same instance that you mention. However, I wonder about the significance of the scene in which he is in traffic and gets out of his car to force the man on the motorbike to get out of the way... If my memory serves me, that happened first, and made quite an impact on him. (I am quite sure that it comes first in the text, however, because of the way that he tells his story it's entirely possible that it came after the bridge event in his life.)

So you are even more fond of The Stranger? Have you yet read The Plague?

[starrwriter]

So you are even more fond of The Stranger? Have you yet read The Plague?
The Stranger has a penetrating clarity of style that amazed me and the impact of the story left me feeling giddy. I'll never forget Mersault abandoning his sexy girlfriend to boil some potatoes at his apartment. The book is a sublime mixture of existential angst and absurdity and definitely Camus' best work.

The Plague is the only fiction by Camus that disappointed me. It struck me as a fairly realistic portrayal without the subtle undertones of his other work. I enjoyed his short story collection Exile and the Kingdom.

[MiSaNtHrOpE]

I took The Plague as an examination of human behavior at times of mass crisis, especially appropriate with the threat of Avian Flu.

[Union Jack]

I know this is an old topic, I aplogise.

The turning point of The Fall, is the bridge scene. When Clamence fails to define his existance by acting to save the drowning woman, he dooms himself to his hellish life afterwords.

[kjt1981]

ive just finished reading the Fall and to me its definitely the episode on he bridge.. It seems that the bridge scene and his guilt for not saving the drowning woman unlocks the rest of his faults and turns him a little introspective, to say the least!

I walked past a kid with a very badly cut arm once.... just walked past him without offering to help, felt awful for a good week after that.

I LOVED The Outsider, which had a profound effect on me. I found The Fall enjoyable but a little more difficult to follow, particularly the last 10 or so pages which i found a struggle to get through for some reason. Maybe i tried to finish it too quickly. Onto The Myth Of Sysiphus next.

[Scheherazade]

Mean, moody and alone. What is the appeal of the outsider? The laureate of the cool teenager, Albert Camus, is having all his novels republished this week.

It's the perfect checklist for an artist to appeal to a brooding young man. Died young, looked good in moody, atmospheric photographs, wrote about serious stuff in a way that was seriously cool.

And most of all, he was an outsider, a rebel with his collars turned up, not part of the crowd.

Albert Camus, French writer and one of the youngest people to have won a Nobel prize for literature, is making a comeback.

Penguin are releasing all his novels again this week - and his most-famous work, The Outsider, was recently voted as the most significant "watershed" book for men.

Rebel, rebel

It's the book, preferably in dog-eared paperback, that generations of soulful young men have tucked inside their coat pocket, where it can be seen, even if never read.

It's the original rebel novel about the confusion and alienation of a young man in a dishonest and random world. Written in the 1940s, it was the predecessor of a whole line-up of rebels and outsiders.

Even though Camus was a left-bank existentialist, living in circles which survived entirely on cigarettes and black and white photography, by the time the cult of the outsider reached Hollywood it was big box office.

Movie stars such as James Dean and Marlon Brando portrayed loners at the edge of society, not even sure what they were protesting about.

"What are you rebelling against?" Brando's character gets asked in the Wild One. "What'd ya got?" he retorts. It was alienation, but with fashion and chiselled profiles.

And you can trace the lineage through pop music, with the self-absorbed boys' music of the likes of Morrissey, Joy Division and Kurt Cobain. Or in sport, it's the difference between being Eric Cantona or Bryan Robson.

Fatal attraction

Social psychologist Arthur Cassidy says it is part of the process of adolescence to want to play with identity - to try out how someone else might feel.

The outsider, someone with an unusual or unfamiliar attitude, can be particularly attractive. It's why middle-class kids in leafy suburbs want to buy rap music about living in gun-toting ghettoes in the United States.

"Young people become bored with their own culture, it loses meaning for them - and they learn that it's not a bad thing to be an outsider, opposites can attract", says Dr Cassidy. Through images of rebels and outsiders they can have their own experimental identities, he says.

In literary terms, Camus's posthumous success reflects his ability to still feel modern, says Robin Buss, who has translated the new versions appearing this week.

First lonely teen

A book such as The Outsider "struck an entirely new note, it was something very original, it was the first real model for the lonely teenager," he says. And it has managed to retain its sense of immediacy.

And there is something resolutely cool about the storytelling - dispassionate and to the point - which appeals to a male sense of style.

This sense of style extended beyond books. Camus was also a goalkeeper, playing in Algeria, where he had been born.

And, as part of the fashion for replica football strips, there is a range of Football Philosophy shirts - with Camus the number one.

Mark Perryman, who runs the firm, says they have sold about 5,000 Camus football shirts, carrying the quote: "All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football."

Moody and murderous

There's no escaping that Camus has a particular appeal for male readers. And a survey of most significant books, produced by academic and cultural commentator Lisa Jardine, found that The Outsider was the runaway winner for men.

ALBERT CAMUS

Born 1913 in Algeria, his father died in World War 1
Edited underground French Resistance newspaper
Major works: The Outsider, The Plague, The Fall, The Rebel
1957 awarded Nobel Prize for Literature
1960 died in a car crash near Sens, north-eastern France
"What Camus stands for is unsentimental outsiderness - that's what Morrissey was and probably what gets people going about Pete Doherty," she says.

And its account of a "moody, slouchy, isolated, slightly murderously-inclined bloke" taps into something in the male world-view, she says, and into the "moody, alienated young men" in each generation.

Also, and very importantly, it's incredibly short at little more than 100 pages. While women opt for lengthy Victorian novels as their "watershed" novels, men want books that are sharp and to the point.

And just the thing to leave out if you want to impress someone.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/5153834.stm