To The Fall δεν είναι ένα απλό μυθιστόρημα. Αλλά είναι μια φιλοσοφική εξερεύνησε προς τον δρόμο για την αλήθεια. Γραμμένο σε δεύτερο πρόσωπο, το μυθιστόρημα είναι μια σειρά από χωρισμένους μονολόγους που αφηγήται ο Jean-Baptiste Clamence σε έναν ξένο - δηλαδή εμάς. Εδώ μας διηγείται την ιστορία της πτώσης του από το «Eden» αλλιώς Παρίσι και την εξορία του στην «αστική κόλαση» του Άμστερνταμ. Ο Clamence είναι ένας πρώην δικαστής που δεν παύει να μας υπενθυμίζει πόσο αγαπάει τον εαυτό του ενώ ταυτόχρονα πάσχει να βρει το νόημα της ζωής. Ο μεγαλύτερος φόβος του είναι πως θα κριθεί για όλα όσα έχει κάνει στην ζωή του. Για να τα καταπολεμήσει αυτό χρησιμοποιεί το χιούμορ και το γέλιο. “Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.”Η ιστορία ξεκινάει σε έναν τριτοκοσμικό μπαρ στο Άμστερνταμ όπου λέγετε "Mexico CITY". Αρχικά ο Clamence είναι ο τέλειος χαρακτήρας ένας σεβαστός Παριζιάνος, με ευγενικούς τρόπους και σκοπούς. Καθώς όμως η ιστορία προχωράει διάφορα ελαττώματα του βγαίνουν στην επιφάνεια. Μέχρι το τέλος του μυθιστορήματος ο Clamence θα περάσει από πολλά στάδια και θα δούμε έναν πολύ διαφορετικό άνθρωπο, κάποιο που παραδέχεται τα λάθη και τις ατέλειες του. Ο Clamence παρότι είναι ένας άνθρωπος που αγαπάει τον εαυτό του και έχει κριθεί από τους γύρω του αυτό που τον θλίβει είναι πως ξέρει, πως ποτέ δεν θα σταματήσει να κρίνει τον ίδιο του τον εαυτό. Και αυτό ακριβώς θέλει να μας δείξει το "The Fall" ότι κάποια στιγμή ως άνθρωποι θα συνειδητοποιήσουμε πως δεν ήμαστε τέλειοι, έχουμε χιλιάδες ατέλειες και πρέπει κάποια στιγμή να παραλείψουμε τις ενοχές μας γιατί οι ενέργειες της ζωής μας δεν κατάφεραν να μας κάνουν όσο τέλειοι θα θέλαμε τελικά να ήμαστε.“Yes we’ve lost the light, the mornings, the holy innocence of the man who forgives himself.”Το "The Fall" είναι ένα άκρως φιλοσοφικό μυθιστόρημα που δεν έχει στόχο να περιγράψει μια αλληλουχία γεγονότων αλλά να διερευνήσει μια συγκεκριμένη ιδέα. Σε αυτήν την περίπτωση το μυθιστόρημα εξερευνά το θέμα της αθωότητας, της αλήθειας και του υπαρξισμού. Το μεγαλύτερο ίσως πλεονέκτημα είναι το πως έχει θέσει την γραφή του βιβλίου ο Albert Camus. Αν και το μυθιστόρημα είναι γραμμένο από την οπτική γωνία του δεύτερου ατόμου χρησιμοποιεί πρώτο πρόσωπο ενεστώτα με αποτέλεσμα ο αναγνώστης να γίνεται ένα με το μυθιστόρημα και να μιλάει άμεσα ο ίδιος με τον Jean Baptiste Clamence. Ο αναγνώστης έτσι δεν είναι αποστασιοποιημένος αλλά βρίσκει τον εαυτό του να συνομιλάει βαθιά και προσωπικά για κάθε θέμα που τον αφορά. Το "The Fall" μας διδάσκει πως σε μια εποχή που τα Social Media έχουν κατακλύσει την ζωή μας και ο καθένας ξέρει καλύτερα από το οτιδήποτε να κρίνει και να ελέγχει τους γύρο του. Τελικά πάντα εμείς θα ήμαστε αυτοί που δεν θα αφήσουμε τον εαυτό μας να προχωρήσει μπροστά, θα φτάσουμε στην πτώση και στο τέλος θα κρίνουμε τους εαυτούς μας... Best Quotes: --> "At the end of every freedom, there is a sentence, which is why freedom is too heavy to bear, especially when you have a temperature, or you are grieving, or you love nobody."--> Friendship is less simple. It is long and hard to obtain but when one has it there's no getting rid of it; one simply has to cope with it. Don't think for a minute that your friends will telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to find out if this doesn't happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit suicide, or simply whether you don't need company, whether you are not in the mood to go out. No, don't worry, they'll ring up the evening you are not alone, when LIFE is beautiful. As for suicide, they would be more likely to push you to it, by virtue of what you owe to yourself, according to them. May heaven protect us, cher Monsieur, from being set upon a pedestal by our friends!--> We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.
The Anti-ChristWhy does the Judge-penitent address you directly, as if he has found a kindred soul in you?In this world responsibility is infinite and that is why The Fall is inevitable - even for a Christ. But back then Christ made a mistake — he saw (was) the nausea of the world, he saw (was) the complete guilt of each man (and his own) and he decided to redeem man (himself) by setting a supreme example. He sacrificed himself because he found himself guilty. It was only an example, a call to action -- to make men recognize and alter their way of life. He wanted man to see the depravity of his own existence by this one magnificent act. But his sacrifice was merely self-elevating, it could not elevate man. For man cannot be elevated before being shown the depths he roils in currently. And man cannot see faults where he looks to see heroes. He cannot see himself in Christ. Man cannot see man in the Ideal.No, the faults had to be shown through an anti-hero. That is why the prophesy of an anti-christ was our true hope. That is why Christ had to return as the Anti-Christ. The Anti-Christ has to be closer to man, he has to be able to whisper to him as if he was just another man. He has to be able to make man see himself by looking at him. To make you see yourself as you really are by seeing in him yourself — yourself after The Fall. That is why the Judge-penitent addresses you directly. He has found a kindred soul in you.The Judge-PenitentYou are personally guilty for every fault that exists in the world. And The Fall is to not acknowledge your guilt — to withdraw from the world into aestheticism (recall Kierkegaard’s A in Either/Or) and make your life’s central concern one of making yourself feel good about yourself and thus about the world.By the time Jean-Baptiste’s confession is over, you should realize that in fact the Judge-penitent is you. The story was yours. It is time to begin your own confession. It is time to stop being Kierkegaard’s A, and to be the B. To polarize yourself. Time to take responsibility and stare into the abyss.Of course you might let someone else take The Fall for you, but from then on you would have to worship him. You would have to worship the guilty. You would have to worship the Judge-Penitent. But in this modern religion, to worship is to laugh at The Fallen.That is the true role of the modern Christ. To take The Fall for you, so that he becomes the mirror in which you see the horror of your life.The FallThis necessary and continuous fall is the theme of the novel. It is one unforgiving, vertiginous descent. It is not a story of gradual discovery and ascent as in Sartre’s Nausea. In Nausea you see the picture that you should be painting of yourself. In The Fall you see the anti-thesis that you should use as your anti-model, as the one point which gives meaning to your picture by not being painted.Here you are made to continuously disagree with a person who goes more and more towards that abyss. You are made to define yourself in your disagreement, to define yourself as a negation. And by doing that you are the one who discovers the nausea of such an existence, even as the narrator finds ingenious and pathetic ways to avoid it. And you are the one who moves away from the abyss.You are the hero of the story, or at least the would-be hero — the one who is going to have the transformation that will change your world. The polarization is external to the novel.Jean-Baptiste is one of the most powerful anti-heroes of literature, but you never root for his redemption. Instead you root for him to fall and fall — to Fall as horribly and as deep into the abyss as possible. Because that is the only way to root for yourself. Because the more he falls, the more you can see of what consists the abyss, and the further away you get from it. His Fall will save you. Mon cher, he is your personal Christ.
What do You think about The Fall (1991)?
اقتباسات من الكتاب تعبر عن أفكاره الرئيسية ، عذراً على عدم كتابة رأيي الشخصي بالكتاب ، النجوم كافية هذه المرة ^_^" أتحدثني عن يوم الحساب الأخير ؟ اسمح لي بأن اضحك باحترام ، و سأنتظر ذلك اليوم بصبر ، لانني عرفت ماهو أسوأ منه .. حساب البشر ، سأخبرك بسر كبير يا صديقي العزيز .. لا تنتظر يوم الحساب الأخير ، إنه يحدث في كل يوم "المرء يتخذ شكل الأماكن التي يعيش بها-البشر يحتاجون إلى المأساة .. الا تعرف ؟ انها تمثل نزوعهم الذاتي الصغير .. و مشتهاهم-الإنسان - ياصديقي العزيز - له وجهان ، فهو لا يستطيع أن يحب دون أن يحب نفسه في ذات الوقت -الضجر هو مبدأ و تفسير كل الاتزامات البشرية .. حتى الحب -كل انسان يحتاج الى العبيد كما يحتاج الى الهواء النقي و أوطأ رجل في السلم الاجتماعي يمتلك زوجه أو ولدا ، وان لم يكن متزوجا فانه يملك كلبا ، و الامر المهم بعد ذلك هو ان يكون المرء قادرا على الغضب على شخص ما لا يملك حق الرد- عندما تكون نفسك مطمئنة إلى مركزها ، تتقدم على سطح الحياة -إن جدوى الله الوحيده هي أن يمنح البراءة ، وانا اميل الى ان ارى الدين مغامره تنظيفية هائلة -أشد العذابات الانسانية ان يكون المرء محكوما بدون قانون -الحقيقة هي كالضوء .. تعمي العين ، و الكذب من الناحية الأخرى هو غسق جميل مرتفع عن قمم الأشياء كلها -
—Anoud
Oh, just to have that second chance... __________________________________________________________________________This is the first book I read every year. I read it in memory of a friend I lost going on seven years ago. January 1, 2015 I have read it again "O young girl, throw yourself again into the water so that I might have a second time the chance to save the two of us!" A second time, eh, what imprudence! Suppose, dear sir, someone actually took our word for it? It would have to be fulfilled. Brr...! the water is so cold! But let's reassure ourselves. It's too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!"To have a second chance and not be too late.
—Joseph
"Mon chéri, it seems Amsterdam has disagreed with you. You're so pale.""Ah, mon amour, oui, I never want to leave the Paris sun again. I want to hold you naked and hang my fog-drenched clothes over the terrace to dry and never look at another dismal canal or smoky bar.""But I thought my man liked those things about Amsterdam.""I did, sweet, until I had the misfortune of running into this rather shabby, verbose character...French expat, Jean-Baptiste...well, at least that's what he called himself, Jean-Baptiste. Who the hell knows? He struck me as an unreliable narrator. Called himself a "judge-penitent" a lot. Never really explained very well what he meant by it. I think he meant he was a judge who was judging himself, but then made a lot of fuss about judgment being hypocritical and whatnot. Told me all about his libertine adventures, and war stories about being named the pope in a prison camp, and bragged about how he flattered people while laughing behind their backs. A really obnoxious, stuck-up fellow. Kept letting on that he had some kind of profound wisdom but ended up talking in circles and contradicting himself a lot. And I never could get rid of him. He'd show up every day for five days wherever I was, in a bar or on a ferry, and off he'd go again, and he was absolutely impossible to shake. I mean, imagine being accosted for a week by Raskolnikov from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and being subjected to his compulsive confessions hour after hour. Needless to say, I got nothing done on my business trip in Amsterdam.""Goodness, honey, sounds awful!""It was, it really was. The guy would say things he thought were terribly profound, but when you really took apart what he said, it often was nothing more than just an obvious banality. Take this, for instance...oh yes, I took some shorthand notes when he was nursing his beer and staring off into space...usually into that empty picture frame over the bar, the frame that held a painting by Van Eyck he claimed to have stolen... Anyway, take this for example. He would say something like: 'Be it said, moreover, that as soon as I had re-won that affection I became aware of its weight. In my moments of irritation I told myself that the ideal solution would have been the death of the person I was interested in. Her death would, on the one hand, have definitively fixed our relationship and, on the other, removed its compulsion. But one cannot long for the death of everyone or, in the extreme, depopulate the planet in order to enjoy a freedom that cannot be imagined otherwise.'"So, if you pare that down and remove all the fancy language, he said little more than: 'You can't kill people just to be free of them.' Well, no duh!"But then, he would turn around and say something fairly profound and not beat around the bush about it, such as: 'No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.'"Mr. Self-important Diarrhea Mouth probably won't be able to stop himself from writing a novel about his adventures, and proceed to ruin it by spewing off a bunch of confessional thoughts that he barely takes the time to explore before throwing in 10 more tangents, then throw in a little Amsterdam atmosphere to give it some bare semblance of scene-setting. Knowing the literary critics and academics, they'll probably go apeshit with praise and fall over each other trying to come up with the usual litany of biblical allusions--which seems to be de rigueur for people seeking tenure...Ah but I digress like he did. Alas, he seems to be rubbing off...an unfortunate aftermath. Anyway, I'm well rid of him... Fortunately!"
—Evan
