The Fall

"I’m going to be a bit of a rebel here. My first pick is The Fall . This is my absolute favourite novel by Camus. It’s very short. In fact, the first time I read it was on a plane flying from New York to Amsterdam and I finished it with time to spare. It is. It’s told from the first-person perspective of an unreliable narrator, telling the tale of how he came to find himself in this bar in Amsterdam, having left Paris. It’s a really fascinating book. Yes. One of the things that makes this one so interesting, particularly once you get a sense of who Camus was as a person, is how autobiographical it is and how much of this is him putting himself in the seat of judgment, trying to make sense of his own place in the world, his own decisions, and the impact that he’s had on other people. The novel itself is fascinating but then, put in the context of Camus’ life and his relationships with other people who influenced it, it really becomes a very powerful work, I think. That’s right. The narrator is telling the story of how, as he’s on the way home from work one night, a woman jumps from the bridge into the river and there’s this moment where he’s able to make a decision. He can turn back and save the woman, or he can continue on his path. He turns away, he goes on, and we’re left to believe that the woman has drowned in the river—though the narrator himself never looks back or checks to see the consequences of his inaction. This episode consumes the novel and it’s about him making sense of who he is and how his actions reveal his real place in the world. It’s about how our place in the world may be at odds with the titles we take for ourselves, or the way people refer to us because of the stories that we’ve told them. Somewhere in between there’s the truth and somehow that matters still. That’s correct. Camus’ wife had quite a bit of difficulty with the way that Camus lived his life. The extent to which Camus’ treatment of her contributed to her mental health issues or vice versa is unclear, but she suffered acutely from mental health issues and had attempted suicide. Camus felt very much burdened by this and felt very responsible for this. His journals during the time reveal that he felt acutely aware of his personal responsibility for contributing to such an acute state of misery. Interestingly, Camus was far from the only one to judge himself at fault. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins also includes a fictionalized rendering of the toll his behaviour took on his wife. I just think it gets at something really important about how our relationships to one another and the stories we tell about our relationships to each other impact our understanding of who we are, and where that enables us to locate ourselves in the world. The narrator in The Fall works as a judge, and it’s his job to mete out judgment, to decide whether people are good or bad, whether they get a reprieve, or they go to prison. And this instance with the woman on the bridge fundamentally upends his sense of who he is and he’s unable to return to where he had belonged in the world. And I think that really speaks to the power of narrative and the way our understanding of our interpersonal conflicts helps to mediate our relationships, for better or worse. That’s central to so much of Camus’ project, because he’s really focused on the importance of ‘the other’ and the way that that prevents us from avoiding the exile that we would otherwise find ourselves in. For him, the absurd was a starting point. He says in The Myth of Sisyphus , which is perhaps his most famous work, that it’s a point of departure. The absurd itself doesn’t tell us anything about the world or what we should do with it. It’s just a way of experiencing reality. In The Fall there’s an element of absurdity to be walking home from work one day, as you regularly do, and then to be confronted with this life-altering, almost cataclysmic event where this woman throws herself to her death right in front of you. It illustrates the unreliability and the inherent chaos in the world. In fact, there’s a line in one of his journals where he says, “The absurdity of the catastrophe does not alter the fact that it exists.” And I think he was really struck by the unreasonableness of human suffering and how that permeated every aspect of human existence. But ultimately, no matter how absurd, unfair, or unjust the world, there is freedom in our choices and our actions. I think that’s totally consistent with what Camus is writing about. How these different things go on to shape us is, itself, absurd because, as Nagel would say, this is holding someone accountable for the chance happenings of fate and that doesn’t really make a lot of sense once you think it all the way through."

"Or, sticking with my French theme, you might think about tackling one of Albert Camus’s existentialist novels. I can recommend The Stranger (sometimes The Outsider), although our expert interviewee Jamie Lombardi’s declared her particular favourite to be The Fall , in which the narrator witnesses a woman jumping to her death from a bridge and decides to keep walking. It’s believed to be inspired by his relationship with his wife. “I read it on a plane from New York to Amsterdam and I finished it with time to spare,” Lombardi told us in a discussion of the best Camus books . “It really speaks to the power of narrative and the way our understanding of our interpersonal conflicts helps to mediate our relationships, for better or worse.” Another favourite of my own is Muriel Spark’s iconic story of a dazzlingly charismatic schoolteacher The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie . Set in a 1930s Edinburgh girls’ school and based on Spark’s own experiences, it was adapted into a 1969 film starring Maggie Smith in the titular role – for which she won an Oscar – but the original text is well worth reading. Very concise, it was initially published in the New Yorker and later repackaged as a novel. Indeed, most of Spark’s works are short, snappy, and very entertaining. I spoke to the Scottish intellectual Alan Taylor about the best books by Muriel Spark to mark her centenary in 2018, so you can find some further reading recommendations in that interview."