The Fall

by Albert Camus · 1956

In an Amsterdam sailors' bar, the self-declared "judge-penitent" Jean-Baptiste Clamence delivers a rambling confession to a stranger, recounting his fall from a celebrated, self-satisfied Parisian lawyer into guilt after he failed to help a young woman who jumped into the Seine, and the corrosive philosophy of universal judgment he built from that failure.

Books mentioned in The Fall (1)

• A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov: epigraph: "Some were dreadfully insulted...to have held up as a model such an immoral character as A Hero of Our Time"

Books that mention The Fall (1)

• Coventry by Rachel Cusk: “Albert Camus, more eerily, foretold precisely the manner of his death in La Chute”