EPISODE · Oct 13, 2025 · 15 MIN
Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Fall' by Albert Camus
from Close Readings · host London Review of Books
Never trust anyone who tries to be ethically pure. This is the message of Albert Camus’s short novel La Chute (The Fall), in which a retired French lawyer tells a stranger in a bar in Amsterdam about a series of incidents that led to a profound personal crisis. The self-described ‘judge-penitent’ had once thought himself to be morally irreproachable, but an encounter with a woman on a bridge and a mysterious laugh left him tormented by a sense of hypocrisy. In this episode, Jonathan and James follow Camus’s slippery hero as he tries and fails to undergo a moral revolution, and look at the ways in which the novel’s lightness of style allows for twisted inversions of conventional morality. They also consider the similarities between Camus’s novels and those of Simone de Beauvoir, and his fractious relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip Further reading in the LRB: Jeremy Harding: Algeria's Camus: https://lrb.me/cip11camus1 Jacqueline Rose: 'The Plague': https://lrb.me/cip11camus3 Adam Shatz: Camus in the New World: https://lrb.me/cip11camus2 Audiobooks from the LRB Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre': https://lrb.me/audiobookscip Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What this episode covers
Never trust anyone who tries to be ethically pure. This is the message of Albert Camus’s short novel La Chute (The Fall), in which a retired French lawyer tells a stranger in a bar in Amsterdam about a series of incidents that led to a profound personal crisis. The self-described ‘judge-penitent’ had once thought himself to be morally irreproachable, but an encounter with a woman on a bridge and a mysterious laugh left him tormented by a sense of hypocrisy. In this episode, Jonathan and James follow Camus’s slippery hero as he tries and fails to undergo a moral revolution, and look at the ways in which the novel’s lightness of style allows for twisted inversions of conventional morality. They also consider the similarities between Camus’s novels and those of Simone de Beauvoir, and his fractious relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip Further reading in the LRB: Jeremy Harding: Algeria's Camus: https://lrb.me/cip11camus1 Jacqueline Rose: 'The Plague': https://lrb.me/cip11camus3 Adam Shatz: Camus in the New World: https://lrb.me/cip11camus2 Audiobooks from the LRB Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre': https://lrb.me/audiobookscip Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Fall' by Albert Camus
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