Enjoy fast, FREE delivery, exclusive deals and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery

List Price: $16.00 Details

Save: $2.50 (16%)

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

FREE delivery Saturday, September 9 on orders shipped by Amazon over $25. Order within 12 hrs 45 mins

Select delivery location

In Stock

$$13.50 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Payment

Secure transaction

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Returns

Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

Details

Payment

Secure transaction

We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Returns

Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.

Read full return policy

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime

FREE delivery Wednesday, September 13 on orders shipped by Amazon over $25

Select delivery location

Used: Good | Details

Sold by ZBK Wholesale

Fulfilled by Amazon

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Other Sellers on Amazon

Added

Not added

$10.00
+ $3.99 shipping

Sold by: reboundbookstore

Added

Not added

$10.35
+ $4.14 shipping

Sold by: Rustbelt Books

Added

Not added

$18.93
& FREE Shipping

Sold by: GrandEagleRetail

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See this image

Follow the Author

Albert Camus

The Fall Paperback – May 7, 1991

by Albert Camus (Author), Justin O'Brien (Translator)

4.5 2,010 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$3.99

—

Audible Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$0.00

Free with your Audible trial

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$20.89

$9.95

$7.16

Paperback

"Please retry"

$13.50

$10.00

$3.69

Audio CD

"Please retry"

$29.99

—

Kindle
$3.99 Read with Our Free App
Audiobook
$0.00 Free with your Audible trial
Hardcover
$20.89

5 Used from $7.16 13 New from $9.95 2 Collectible from $29.99
Paperback
$13.50

45 Used from $3.69 22 New from $10.00
Audio CD
$29.99

1 New from $29.99

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$13.50","priceAmount":13.50,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"13","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"50","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"TAkf1TQqZ1ZAgP8mA19XIJZRa%2FSs%2FW%2Fju1moKTA1JSZtsqsuyLVf5tKlnqUm9JCvAbIIgsii%2F57qMCKeuCknmWgV4CEpvjWAe4UjFGVzNQNKgO5Tg6adwU%2FreouMPjGCwrun0vPBX6Y%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$12.82","priceAmount":12.82,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"12","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"82","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"TAkf1TQqZ1ZAgP8mA19XIJZRa%2FSs%2FW%2FjojRhffV%2Fm5x56jLgaQogCwxSEH%2FcdDMkjLNXfPx796pOSqjaV34%2BiDZElyyKdm8%2BayDosDenje5QPf3I2gp66PTGLHlhb0PUKyQRW8rWBZ%2FjEShmxGGQJheWcjq67EkRcyDaxMeKmGYJRvlu3th4%2BeX2nN680oEV","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR • One of the most widely read novels of all time—from one of the best-known writers of all time—about a lawyer from Paris who brilliantly illuminates the human condition.

Elegantly styled, Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study of modern amorality.

Print length

147 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage Books
Publication date

May 7, 1991
Reading age

14 - 18 years
Dimensions

5.16 x 0.44 x 7.98 inches
ISBN-10

0679720227
ISBN-13

978-0679720225
See all details

Frequently bought together

$13.50

Get it as soon as Saturday, Sep 9

In Stock

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

+

The Myth of Sisyphus (Vintage International)

$9.49

Get it as soon as Saturday, Sep 9

In Stock

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

+

$11.59

Get it as soon as Saturday, Sep 9

In Stock

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

Total price:

To see our price, add these items to your cart.

Try again!

Details

Added to Cart

Choose items to buy together.

Albert Camus
2,440
Paperback
in Existentialist Philosophy
56 offers from $7.98
Albert Camus
436
Paperback
74 offers from $3.01
Albert Camus
10,341
Paperback
293 offers from $1.98
Albert Camus
737
Paperback
76 offers from $5.33
Albert Camus
6,367
Paperback
40 offers from $6.74
Jean-Paul Sartre
2,370
Paperback
38 offers from $7.49

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Elegantly styled, Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study of modern amorality.

From the Back Cover

Elegantly styled, Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study of modern amorality.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage Books (May 7, 1991)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 147 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0679720227
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679720225
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 14 - 18 years
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.16 x 0.44 x 7.98 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #17,329 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #512 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
- #734 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #1,884 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.5 2,010 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

Important information

To report an issue with this product, click here.

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Albert Camus

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Albert Camus (French: [albɛʁ kamy]; 7 November 1913 - 4 January 1960) was a French philosopher, author, and journalist. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. He wrote in his essay The Rebel that his whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual freedom. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.

Camus did not consider himself to be an existentialist despite usually being classified as one, even in his lifetime. In a 1945 interview, Camus rejected any ideological associations: ""No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked..."".

Camus was born in Algeria to a Pied-Noir family, and studied at the University of Algiers from which he graduated in 1936. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons to ""denounce two ideologies found in both the USSR and the USA"".

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Photograph by United Press International [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5

2,010 global ratings

5 star
4 star
3 star
2 star
1 star

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Jeff

A very interesting read…

Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2023

Verified Purchase

This book is a very interesting read. It’s short, but filled with lots of intriguing narratives, making it seem like a much longer book.

Helpful

steve wood

A Wake-Up Call to Those Who Refuse to Witness Terrible Events

Reviewed in the United States on May 24, 2023

Verified Purchase

This is a companion book to Camus' "The Plague." It is a commentary on the failure of the Allies after World War II to criticize the Russions for their death camps that were equal in scale to the death camps run by the Nazis. ("The Plague" was an allegory for the terrors inflicted by the Nazis during the war.)

Helpful

fra7299

Not a big fan of the style here

Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2021

Verified Purchase

“I know what you’re thinking; it’s very hard to disentangle the true from the false in what I am saying. I admit you are right.”

In Albert Camus’ The Fall, an expatriate Frenchman indulges us through a narration that gives us glimpses of his past, a journey that includes his experiences of being a lawyer as well as philosophical points about his life experiences. There is a sense that he omits quite a bit from his narration, and Camus’ style creates this.

While I realize that this book is highly regarded in literary circles, I felt like this reading experience was only so-so.

I know mostly it was the author’s intentions, but the rambling, stream of consciousness quality to the story left me feeling rather detached from the narrator’s tale, and thus uninterested. There is a scatterbrained sort of effect where he begins, stalls, starts a subject, diverts, leaves the subject, and then goes onto something else. It is very jarring and difficult to latch onto what he is reporting to us. I have read novels where stream of consciousness is handled in a more capable way by the author; this is not the case here at all. Everything sort of falls flat because there is too much of a separation and disconnect between the reader and his story, resulting in his audience being indifferent to what he is saying.

And this brings me to the next point: the rather unremarkable narrator, who is speaking to us for the entirety. He reveals bits and fragments of his life experiences in a part boast, part confessional, duplicitous, self-indulgent, sort of way, but the fact that he is not putting all his cards on the table makes it difficult to care one way or another.

Admittedly, this is my first read of Camus, so I am not familiar with his style. I bought The Stranger a few years ago and have it on my to read pile, but I might put it on hold for a bit.

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Lucas W. Humble

Insightful but ultimately indicative of an empty philosophy

Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2012

Verified Purchase

It is hard to classify this book -- it is referred to as a novel (or even a novella), but in many ways, it better serves as a philosophical discourse.

The book starts in a seedy bar, where a former lawyer is speaking with a visitor to the bar (the visitor is referred to as "you," as if the reader is in fact the visitor). The narrator explains, over the course of a few days, how his perspective on life fundamentally shifted. While the narrator once was eager to give to charities and help others, he has since chosen to cease this lifestyle in favor of debauchery and self-fulfillment. He explains that the only real reason that he was doing noble things such as helping others was the attention and praise that he received from it.

Camus is a very good writer, and the book moves at a quick, readable pace. Stylistically, it is very reminiscent of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. This was perhaps intentional -- Camus was a noted admirer of Dostoevsky, and Notes from Underground is often attributed as the start of the Existentialism movement of which Camus was a key part.

Camus also makes some very apt criticisms of human tendencies. Of particular note is the narrator's discussion of the change in attitudes and treatment of the recent dead. The observation that the dead are placed on a pedestal is perhaps not entirely unique, but Camus's discussion of why they are placed on a pedestal is reticent.

Ultimately, however, Camus's philosophy (or at least the philosophy of the narrator) is empty. The narrator's shift from doing good to doing nothing is never expressly critiqued, and indeed seems supported by the Existentialist approach of self-satisfaction. From a philosophical perspective (or even from a mere human perspective), this seems hollow and unsatisfying. After all, while the narrator was acting to help others (even for his own selfish tendencies), at least some ascertainable good was created.

So, while The Fall acts as a gateway to discussion and intellectual inquiry, it also provides a discouraging non-answer to the questions it raises regarding the worth of humanity.

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

MR M H NUTT

Camus' writing - however bleak and pessimistic - is often poignant and beautiful, full of aphorisms and immensely quotable.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 25, 2014

Verified Purchase

Camus was one of a number of post-war French writers who used the novel as a vehicle for their philosophy, using fiction to explore our place in the modern world. The story of 'The Fall', such as there is, unfolds not in actions or plot but in speech and the articulation of thoughts and ideas.

It consists of a monologue, spread across five days in Amsterdam and its environs, as the garrulous narrator Jean-Baptiste Clamance tells his story ("as soon as I open my mouth, the words pour out"). Clamance is a French exile who describes himself rather oddly as a "judge-penitent". Quite what he means by this will have to wait. He begins his monologue to an unnamed listener (the reader?) whom he meets in a sailor's bar he calls 'Mexico City' in the red-light district of Amsterdam and accompanies through the rain-soaked streets of the city at night. All the while he expounds his views on humanity, offering a jaded opinion of human freedom and liberty drawn from bitter experience. The monologue becomes a confessional, as though the narrator is overcome by a compulsion to speak, driven by a determination as dogged as that of the Ancient Mariner to tell his tale .

Camus wrote 'The Fall' in the mid-1950s and his setting is a Europe still recovering from the trauma of World War and preferring to forget the shocking events of that conflict. The world and mankind has descended into a Hell of its own making. The novel considers the question of how an intelligent person might formulate an intellectual response to such horrors, how to take any ethical stance in the face of absolute amorality.

'The Fall' is a short book, almost a novella, and just about sustains the narrative structure of a single character's monologue, which after a while can get somewhat wearing to read at length. In this edition, translator Robin Buss has captured the elegance of the author's pen, and Camus' writing - however bleak and pessimistic - is often poignant and beautiful, full of aphorisms and immensely quotable. The book was Camus' last finished work of fiction, published just four years before his death in a car accident in Villeblevin, northern France, on 4 January 1960.

12 people found this helpful

Karol Wild

One of the best philosophy Books read in 2023

Reviewed in Germany on May 9, 2023

Verified Purchase

It is a great book if you want to rethink or change your perspective on your social reality and life. For me it is in the same realm as Kafka and Nitzsche. Inspiring and optimistic view on nihilism. great read.

Rick Mackey

A foreigner's view of a great novel about a very interesting city.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 22, 2015

Verified Purchase

Camus uses self-pity to try to expunge his devils, his past, his self-pity, by finding a vehicle in Clemence to allow him the space, to disperse them, and a location in Amsterdam. He finds in Amsterdam the concentric streets, which, like rings from a stone dropped in water, near the side of a pond, he can be submerged into his Mexico City, the lewd bar near the Jewish Quarter, and where he mulls on the history of the disappearance of the vast majority of the city’s Jewish population, almost as if he was grieving for them, as if he knew them. In Mexico City he has elevation to comfort him, so that he looks at his audience from above, admonishes them, confesses to them and draws them into his world. He captures the dampness, greyness and smell of the city in Winter realistically. He prefers the smells of Paris and the seine to the dead smell of canals. He is unsure about his feelings for the ladies in the Red Light district, and blames Dutch genever and their guiles for affording him him the means to imagine voluptuous romps, which he admits to not being very good at, unless a baser purpose, other than sex itself, makes his performance a virtuoso one. This very virtuosity itself is questionable and his dominance of a lady, admitting to a streak of near sadism, is really his way of retreating from the ultimate victory, which he does not wish to achieve, in the first place. Like a good actor, using himself as a willing audience, he praises his talent, for charitable acts and make sure that these little acts are performed, where they will be noticed. He admits to having a temper, in the incident with the motorbike and suffers a little because of his weaknesses at losing it, and the chiding from the onlooker. He also saves his life by not rescuing a woman in the Seine, which makes him feel superior, in that he has risen above a mere mortal, just as he wishes to be raised in the bed, to be on a higher plane. He is able to describe his heaven in Amsterdam, by a mere light snowfall, comparing the snow to feathers, borne by doves, which bring peace and forgiveness. His position of a Judge Penitent allows him the perfect theatre to perform his plays being, at the same time, a foil between the client and the judge, neither of whom he has respect fpr, in the greater order of things and, on the other hand, in a position to sympathise with his client, but promise nothing. He knows the tariffs for the crimes and does not hesitate, when he has to inform his client. When he has an audience in Mexico City, it leaves him somewhat drained, in case he has said too much. Somehow, he seems to have written, in much the same way, as those who look at it from the outside, such as Dylan and Cohen, in his opinions on Christianity and its importance, amongst the faithful. He seems slightly puzzled, yet not dismissing the actual ethos. His illness, at the end, is merely the curtain closing on a one-man play, highly melodramatic, befitting an itinerant Judge Penitent.

One person found this helpful

femshop

I Enjoyed

Reviewed in Canada on January 9, 2023

Verified Purchase

The book came in good condition and good delivery. I knew the synopsis of the story already so finally decided to read. It is an interesting story the way he writes. I've been told this is somewhat autobiographical in terms of Camus' guilt over his wife. I guess that is why I am now reading a biography on Camus.

Dorian Gray

Fall from Grace

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 6, 2020

Verified Purchase

A boring drunk in a bar is how The Fall seems to start . But soon the reader feels like the Wedding Guest enthralled with the Tale being told by The Ancient Mariner .

Lover of Women + Justice . A successful Lawyer , defender of widows + orphans + the downtrodden . Willing to offer a helping hand to just about anyone . This great generosity of spirit . Then this Fall from Grace . How + Why ??

This great generosity of spirit ? Might it be self-serving ?

This Love for Women ? Maybe that's a way of saying : I never Loved any of them .

A brilliant portrayal of a man who has lost his innocence and comes to understand himself better .

Camus at his best .

7 people found this helpful

See more reviews

Other Sellers on Amazon

Follow the Author

The Fall Paperback – May 7, 1991

Purchase options and add-ons

Frequently bought together

More items to explore

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

From the Back Cover

About the Author

Product details

Videos

Important information

About the author

Albert Camus

Customer reviews

Read reviews that mention

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries

Amazon Prime includes:

Buy new: $13.50$13.50 FREE delivery: Saturday, Sep 9 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon. Payment Secure transaction Ships from Amazon.com Sold by Amazon.com Returns Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

Buy used: $12.82

Other Sellers on Amazon

Follow the Author

The Fall Paperback – May 7, 1991

Purchase options and add-ons

Frequently bought together

More items to explore

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

From the Back Cover

About the Author

Product details

Videos

Important information

About the author

Albert Camus

Customer reviews

Read reviews that mention

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries

Buy new:

$13.50

FREE delivery: Saturday, Sep 9 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon.

Payment

Secure transaction

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Returns

Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

Buy used:

$12.82