The Fall by Albert Camus – Review

13-book-cover-the-fall-camus-50watts1

“A single sentence will suffice for modern man. He fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.”

Albert Camus, the French-Algerian novelist and Absurdist, lived what many would describe as an eventful life. He fought in the French resistance during World War 2, won a Nobel prize before he was fifty, and essentially founded a philosophical movement which still holds sway today. As his legions of fans over the last century would tell you, although probably not with this phrase, he was an unquestionable badass who lived by his convictions.

It’s therefore striking how often his work focuses on the unexceptional. His characters are not naturally brave and strong; they are ordinary men put in difficult circumstances which are nonetheless everyday: disease, melancholy, death.

The subject matter of The Fall, as with much of Camus’ work, could be fairly called depressing. On the surface, it’s the tale of a fallen socialite with a lot to say about the nature of truth and self-deception. You’re at a bar one night (the novel is a second-person narrative) and a stranger wants to tell you about his life as a judge-penitent. You don’t know him, or have any way of verifying if he’s speaking the truth. He seems arrogant, but intriguing. Do you listen?

After watching a woman commit suicide one day, this man found his mind slowly unravelling. He didn’t try to stop her. He didn’t even move. The world has shown him that he is ordinary and selfish. He’s come to some radical conclusions about the universe in the last few years, so listen up.

Camus’ tone is as witty and dry as ever, and due to the abundant grin-worthy aphorisms this novel almost works as a black comedy. The narrator is so melodramatic and slimy that it’s extremely entertaining if seemingly bleak. Deception is a running theme in his tale, and you question just what you’re being told is true and if that even really matters.

This is the kind of book that doesn’t read well if the reader isn’t willing to grit their teeth and wonder just what the hell the author is trying to get across. Passive readers, much like passive people, don’t have much luck in Camus’ universe. With the short page length, though, it’s worth your time.

The Plague by Albert Camus

“All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.”

Oran is a dreary port city where boredom disguises itself as contentment. Inhabitants go about their lives as though in a daze; not uncomfortable, not joyous. This is a place of greys.

And then the plague comes. All gates are shut, and the town is sealed. No one will be leaving for a very long time. Uncountable rat corpses are coverings streets and doorsteps, men and women are coughing up blood, and thousands are dying. We follow Rieux, a doctor trying to do what he can to help, as lives are changed and the question of whether or not you have lived well becomes a much more immediate concern.As you can, this isn’t an always a cheerful read. It is engaging, though, despite being almost a polemic (or, to be more blunt, preachy), but as this is Camus that’s rather like complaining water is wet. The dialogue felt stilted and forced at times, though, but how much of that can be blamed on the translation from French I couldn’t say. The characters are well-drawn, with some fascinating motivations and painful backgrounds. I was actually surprised at how personal this often feels considering the heady subject matter, as individual worries are again and again at the centre of concern rather than society wide sweeping change.

All stories come together to give readers a message that sounds extremely trite summarised. Big truths often do, though. Camus makes us understand that only individual sacrifice can stop the plague (which, as might be obvious, is very much a metaphor), to stop pain from spreading if you possibly can. Heroism isn’t something that should be glorified to Camus, it’s merely what must be done. Ordinary people have no choice but to become exceptional, or their friends and family will go through gruesome ends. In fact, friends and family might die either way. But, even if defeat’s inevitable, we should still try to be good.

This isn’t what I could exactly call an exciting read in the way The Stranger was, something which I raced through and made me question the way I looked at the world. It’s less direct than that, and as such maybe less impactful. All I can say is that three-hundred pages of misery somehow made me feel uplifted, and that’s an accomplishment.

Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel Dennett

“Darwinian thinking does live up to its billing as universal acid: it turns the whole traditional world upside down, challenging the top-down image of designs flowing from that genius of geniuses, the Intelligent Designer, and replacing it with the bubble-up image of mindless, motiveless cyclical processes churning out ever-more robust combinations until they start replicating on their own, speeding up the design process by reusing all the best bits over and over.”

An attempt to teach readers how to “think reliably and even gracefully about really hard questions,” Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking goes over rough intellectual terrain — consciousness, determinism, artificial intelligence, evolution, all decidedly daunting hills and valleys — with assurance and wit. If you have some patience, you’ll finish with clearer ways to examine and express your own thoughts — or, at least, that’s how I felt.

There are some admittedly shocking jumps in difficulty. More than once I found myself, after twenty pages of lucid explanations, coming across a paragraph I had to read five times just to make certain I had understood it… and even then I wouldn’t have bet money on it. This is the kind of book that will make you feel confident one moment and absurdly out of your depth the next. When you’re jumping from physics, biology, computer science and cognitive psychology, that may just be the nature of the beast, but it fortunately never feels as though Dennett is being an obscurantist. He values lucidity, and by the end of this thing I was grateful.

Dennett manages to glide from one mind-bending mystery to another and address each with wit, clarity, and frightening intelligence. It’s impressive that a man so fiercely bright can keep his work from being too intimidating: his tone is that of a kindly uncle, guiding you with patience through some of the most difficult conundrums your brain can handle.

While this was sometimes dense to the point that it hurt my head, if you find any of the topics interesting you’ll be missing out on a feast for your brain if you don’t give Intuition Pumps a shot.

Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

I have discovered where the stereotype of the depressed, smoking Frenchman, who stares into his tea in cafés and despairs about the pointless of the universe, comes from. I have found navel gazing in its purest form, and I have stared into its whiney, shrivelled heart. This novel had some fantastic ideas and concepts behind it, but blimey did it test my patience at times.

Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre is short, it’s weird, and it’s depressing. None of these things are necessarily negatives in a book – there are a lot of similarities here to Notes from Underground and The Stranger, both which I really enjoyed. In Nausea, though, I never found myself convinced by the protagonist’s struggles. He felt more like an abstraction than a person.

While the Underground Man was clearly isolated and confused and the story around him a bit polemic, his problems were human and relatable, if extreme. Antoine Roquentin, however, felt as though he had been created with the sole purpose of exploring existentialism, which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, but every problem he faces is metaphysical and absurdly theoretical. This means the human drama which is also explored comes across as hollow because we just don’t know him or anyone else in this novel as a person, only as walking ideologies.

There were some interesting observations about the way we should appreciate existence on a moment to moment basis, but it all felt more like a message with a story than a story with a message. I’ll be reading Sartre’s non-fiction if I pick up his writing again, as at least that way I’ll know exactly what I’m in for.