A review by diannastarr
The Fall, by Albert Camus

emotional reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

While Camus' other works like The Stranger are critically acclaimed, for whatever reason The Fall resonated with me in a way that the rest had not.  It chronicles a man's fall from innocence and "naivety" into a dismissal of this world and mankind as a whole; however, Camus also brings into question what is innocence, what it truly means to be "naive," and whether reckoning with the "truths" of the world is as much of a climb as we hold it up to be, or if it is a slow and steady decline into a perpetual state of untangleable nihilism.  It is a long stream of consciousness - which can be off putting to some - but I personally enjoyed this narrative choice as it gave me a true sense of walking around in his shoes, in following his train of thought.  It is a short story and one that it's frighteningly simple plot wise, but it is one of those novels that you can pick up five, ten, even fifteen years from now and get something different from it, very similar to how you as a reader follow the shift in the narrator's perspective.  It's overall simplicity doesn't reveal the Achilles Heel of the narrator, but it leaves you, the reader, raw in that you can read an entirely different story and take away very different things from the piece depending on where you are at that point in your life when you picked it off the shelf.  The Fall is one of those works that you have to read again and again, and in the next decade I cannot wait to see what I will take from it the next time.