Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #928642 in Books
• Published on: 1997-09-16
• Original language: French
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 187 pages

Customer Reviews

Ooooh, pithy, very pithy
I found this book by a widescreen television in a common area of a rented apartment in El Salvador. The heat of the afternoons was tempered by an unseasonal wind across the lake. Mostly I read lying in a hammock. My reading was interrupted by a day out riding with an ex-guerilla to an old FMLN camp complete with trenches, look-out and hide-out for the wounded dug into the side of a hill. Despite this I still found 'Le Chute' interesting and strangely moving, I would like to have had a drink both with Camus and Jean-Baptiste

A jumble of unconnected thoughts makes this hard to follow
I'm just about finishing reading this novel and I'm getting a nagging sense of unfulfilment. Despite being written in a monologue and being full of fantastic insights about human nature, these thoughts are so unconnected and come at such a furious pace that after a while it is almost impossible to read this without wincing at the many twists and turns of the text. This despite the fact that the book is only about 150 pages long, which by any standard should be read and understood in a breeze.

The story itself is rather interesting and almost archetypal: it's about a man who was a lawyer and, through his own sense (complex) of superiority towards his always guilty clients, judges and his many lovers, and his notorious success, starts being the target of envy of half the world and the receiver of less than favourable comments from the other half. He then goes into a progressive spiral of self-destruction, with many examples of misogyny, ending, in fact starting the story, with him helping sailors and paupers alike in Amsterdam, very far from the heights of his previous professional life in Paris.

The fact that he's drunk throughout part of the books isn't explicitly apparent but will make it easier to understand why his speech is incoherent and even illogical at times, without a clear line of thought. However, it doesn't seem possible that he's drunk all of the time and in so many different circumstances or that even the person he's talking to would be willing to listen to him for so long and so often, so that is a very bad excuse for his terrible speech.

To me, this is an exemplary tale about despair, about the fear of lacking the respect of society, of lack of friendship, of lack of connectedness to the outside world, about the lack of a sense of 'spirituality' that so seemed to characterise life after WWII. Many other books go at the same subject through an entirely different way but no other offers so many interesting insights about human existence and condition. That means that this book isn't meant to be read in a sitting: give it enough time to ponder over each sentence.

Were it not for these insights and this book would receive a single star from me and still be overrated.

lovely little book
deserves 5 stars; since i havent read all his book i am hesistant to give 5 stars so just 4 stars for now. this is a monologue and shows the hollowness of ones existence. Solution--NO!!