Fionnuala's Reviews > La chute

Sound is a key element in this book, for the narrator—but especially for the reader.

This short novel is a long monologue on the part of the narrator to an anonymous person he meets in a bar one winter's night in Amsterdam, and with whom he walks the circle of canals close to the docks on succeeding nights, continuing his monologue almost without interruption. We never hear the other person's voice but sometimes we intimate that he might have raised an eyebrow as he listened, or asked a question, because the narrator sometimes responds as if that had been the case. But every time the narrator responded like that, it had happened that I had raised my eyebrows or exclaimed in disbelief at something the narrator had said, so it's clear that the anonymous listener is the reader, enthralled but a little suspicious of the smooth and hypnotic tones of the very loquacious narrator as he walks the ring of canals, and circles the hell of his own existence.

I mentioned sound at the beginning because one of the most hellish aspects of the narrator's existence is the memory of the sound of a body hitting the water on another dark winter's night years before. This 'sound' memory has haunted him since.
The other reason I mentioned 'sound' is because I experienced this book as if it were an audio book. I was reading the words on the page but I was hearing the narrator's voice clearly in my ear. I've never had quite so definite an impression of being a 'listener' as I had while reading the printed words in this book.
And in case I've given the impression that all this might have been a hellish experience, it wasn't. I smiled just as often as I raised my eyebrows because the narrator is a very fine performer—he is a lawyer by trade. A lot of his lines are outright funny but every one of them is entertaining.

And here's another entertaining thing: the title of this book, 'La chute', is translated as 'The Fall' in English, and after I'd added it to my goodreads shelves, I got a notification saying that because I'd read 'La chute', I might also be interested in reading Autumn Nights or Autumn in Paris and several more titles with the word Autumn in them. The narrator would have laughed because his narrative takes him back to a time when he wandered over the bridges of Paris at night—though he never says if it was in the fall...

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A painting by Jan Van Eyck has a role in the text. It is a panel called 'Les Juges intègres' part of a larger work called 'L'agneau mystique'.


The main figures on horseback are looking at something important in the central panel of the famous polyptique in the cathedral at Gand, but they also seem to be listening very carefully, it seems to me...

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The book I picked up after this one was also about walking along canals and crossing their many bridges, but it was set not in Amsterdam nor in Paris but in Venice, the city so strongly associated in literature with death. However, you'll be relieved to know that it was also quite funny.

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