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"May I, monsieur, offer my services without running the risk of intruding?" Thus begins The Fall (La Chute), the last novel of the Algerian-born French writer Albert Camus (1913-60). The two-character work - which has perplexed and disturbed readers since its publication in 1956 - is in essence a dramatic monologue, the confession of a former Parisian attorney, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, to a stranger in an Amsterdam bar. As the narrative unfolds, the reader is increasingly drawn into the role of the listener and ultimately comes to feel personally threatened by Clamence's revelations For its originality, its intricacy, and its ingenious construction, The Fall represents the culminating masterpiece in a career that earned its writer the Nobel Prize in literature in 1957. Yet The Fall is also less widely known to readers than other works by Camus, such as the novels The Stranger and The Plague, the essay The Myth of Sisyphus, and the play Caligula Arguing that The Fall is Camus's "most complex and enigmatic literary creation . . . and his most successful creation," Brian T. Fitch, a leading Camusian scholar, here offers readers a peerless guide to the novel, the first full-length study to explore the work progressively from the standpoint of the reader's interaction with it. After detailing the biographical and historical events shaping the writing of The Fall, assessing the novel's literary importance, and surveying critics' and scholars' reception to it, Fitch delivers a penetrating reading of the work, drawing on reception theory to demonstrate how Camus crafted his novel to affect readers so subtly yet so profoundly. Readers new to the novel, as well as longtime Camus devotees, will appreciate this soundly presented, forthright analysis of what in Fitch's estimation is Camus's most difficult yet most significant achievement
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