A review by batbones
The Fall by Albert Camus

4.0

Starts off slow but builds into a potent, unflinching picture of the worst of human nature. Strip away the layers of performance and civility and one (like Camus' character) arrives at the heart of darkness. Reading The Fall is having a mirror held so closely up to one's face that one may squirm at the oft-buried, forgotten things about the self that cannot withstand the glare of scrutiny and admission. The reader sometimes flinches in disgust, sometimes can only nod mutely. It is like having one's self explained to by someone, an ambiguous and uncomfortable position of baring one's shortcomings and yet, by virtue of being shared, rendered palatable - although this irony is also pre-empted and exposed. Camus' world is bleakly pessimistic - where human virtue is unattainable, a sham, a promise that is eventually broken - and unafraid of laughing almost helplessly at itself. Where there is neither god nor the devil, humans have only to contend with themselves, but their depths are more than enough.