La Chute Reading Order

La Chute (The Fall, 1956) by Albert Camus is a monologue: Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a former Parisian lawyer who was once celebrated for his elegance, generosity, and professional success, addresses an unnamed interlocutor in a seedy bar in Amsterdam called 'Mexico City,' and over the course of five evenings tells the story of his fall from self-satisfaction. The fall begins on a November night in Paris when he crosses a bridge and hears — or fails to respond to — a woman's cry from the water below, and then her body entering the river. He does nothing, walks on, and cannot forget it. The rest of the novel is the story of how this failure corrodes his self-image and eventually leads him to a position he calls 'juge-pénitent' (judge-penitent): a man who confesses his own sins in order to disarm others' judgment and then, having established his own fallibility, judges them from a position of shared guilt. La Chute is Camus's most complex and tonally unstable novel: the monologue is beautifully written, witty, and self-aware, and Clamence is simultaneously one of the most charming and most unreliable narrators in French fiction. The novel was read by Camus's contemporaries as an attack on Sartre and on left-wing intellectual complacency (Clamence lives in Amsterdam, the city of Descartes, and the novel begins with the bar where he holds court); it is now read as Camus's most precise study of guilt, self-deception, and the impossibility of innocence.