La chute
1917
- conscience
- continental european fiction (fictional works by one author)
- existentialism
- fiction
- psychological
- french fiction
- french language
- french literature
- legal stories
- literary fiction
The story
Num bar de marinheiros em Amesterdão, um homem que se apresenta como juiz-penitente enceta conversa com um desconhecido. Entre copos de Genebra e deambulações pelas ruas daquela cidade de canais concêntricos, a fazer lembrar os círculos do inferno, recorda a sua vida passada como respeitável advogado parisiense, insuperável na defesa de causas nobres e nas conquistas amorosas. Mas à medida que a confissão se desenrola as ambiguidades acumulam-se, os motivos ocultos revelam-se, os triunfos desabam. Narrativa mordaz, de uma ironia brilhante, A Queda descreve uma viagem de decadência até às mais obscuras infâmias do homem moderno. Publicado pela primeira vez em 1956, foi o último livro de ficção lançado em vida por Albert Camus.
What it’s like
Rain-dulled Amsterdam at night, told as one long, unhurried monologue in a smoky harbour bar, with the clink of gin glasses and the drift of footsteps along concentric canals that feel like the rings of a hell. The prose is cool, precise and mordantly witty, a voice that flatters, confides and then turns on its listener, so the reading develops the sting of a slow argument. The mood is sour and self-aware, somewhere between a wry night-owl's dark comedy and a late-autumn confessional, best taken in one or two sittings on a grey evening, or on a long train journey where the rhythm of the talk can carry you. It has no action and no gore; the violence is moral and psychological, with a death in the river and a suicide raised only at a remove, so the dread lands as unease rather than shock. Nothing here is gentle, but the intensity is intellectual and quiet. It suits readers who enjoy existential philosophy, unreliable narrators and the pleasure of a sentence doing double work, especially those who like Dostoevsky's underground men or a conversation that gradually reveals its own rot.
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