Word: camus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...FALL (147 pp.)-Albert Camus-Knopf...
...Jean-Baptiste is damned. What is so wrong with him, anyway? Readers may have to brace themselves for the answer given by French Novelist Albert Camus (The Plague). It is not fashionable, like the Oedipus complex or alcoholism or a nagging mistress. Jean-Baptiste is under Adam's curse, original sin. Such a theme would be no novelty from François Mauriac or Graham Greene, but it is surprising when it comes from an existentially-minded French intellectual. As a novelist, Camus dissipates his shock effect by telling his story in a long-winded flashback. As a thinker...
...suicide the answer? People "will take advantage of it to attribute idiotic or vulgar motives to your action." Is God the answer? He is "out of style." Is there a second chance? No, Adam used up man's only chance. In Camus' existentially-locked universe of absurdity and guilt without divine grace, no one ever releases the sinner from his cell. As The Fall ends, Jean-Baptiste apostrophizes the girl he allowed to drown: " 'O young woman, throw yourself into the water again so that I may a second time have the chance of saving both...
Tending Towards God. Author Camus is a fascinating case study of a modern thinker caught in a dilemma that is not confined to France or to French intellectuals. He stubbornly clings to the conviction that man is the measure of all things-the sentimental tradition of the Enlightenment. But he is far too intelligent and sensitive to accept the Enlightenment's shallow optimism and Utopian illusions about the human condition. On the other hand, he cannot move in the opposite direction towards religion. He is frozen midway. He accepts the Christian insight into the nature of evil, but rejects...
That is the harrowing dilemma that Camus sketched in essay form in The Myth of Sisyphus (TIME, Oct. 3, 1955) -the vision of a man in despair who can believe in damnation but not salvation. Yet in this novel there are clues of something else to come. The hero's name, Jean-Baptiste, is intriguing as a wordplay on John the Baptist, the herald of Christ's coming. The Fall is too obviously the novel of a man in mid-quest to be Camus' last word. Perhaps both book and author are best described by the late...