'the Fall'

After re-reading Camus' 'the Outsider', which I often refer to as one of my favourite novels, I decided to read a few more of his books. I bought 'the Fall' and 'the First Man' (his unfinished last novel), but I'm still kind of hesitant to tackle any more of his essays after the density of 'the Myth of Sisyphus' - no matter how interesting it was.

I started reading 'the Fall' and, even though the language isn't as easily accessible as 'the Outsider', it's still pretty good. There's more on the surface of this story and just as much underneath. Essentially it's a 100 page monologue about guilt, hypocrisy and the loss of innocence - a series of one-way conversations between two strangers in an Amsterdam bar.

This passage stood out from the early pages:

"There was one man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatter-brained woman, sacrificing everything in his life for her - friends, work, even respectability - only to acknowledge one evening that he had never loved her. He was bored, that was all, bored, like most people; so he created from scratch a life of complications and drama for himself. Something's got to happen - that's the explanation for most human undertakings. Something's got to happen, even if it's slavery without love, or war, or death."