Book-The Fall

I have been reading some of the existentialist writers lately...reading Sartre's trilogy and now The Fall by Albert Camus, and I am still trying to figure out this "philosophy."

I remember once hearing in a lit class that it means that the only reality is the one that you perceive...if you perceive it is real, nothing else is. People can tell you that it is different, but your perceptions are the only things that count and so there are as many realities as there are people perceiving them, and further, that no two people have the same reality. Sounds a lot like mental illness too, but I won't get into that.

Camus seems to be saying in The Fall, that everything is a bunch of BS. Everything we do is an affectation. If we are nice, we do it to prove to ourselves that we are good people. If we are mean, we are doing to get attention of others or out of desperation. But nothing is real, except...nothing.

Now The Fall is not a bad book...a small novel that is a long monologue from a French man living in Amsterdam and hanging out at a dive bar called Mexico City. He meets another man at the bar and engages him in conversation, to illustrate why everything is ultimately BS. It is somewhat interesting at first, but I also found he was hitting us over the head with it too much...really, 145 pages to get to that point? It was pedantic and after a bit, boring.

I'm glad I read this to be sure that I will give up on this philosophy. It seems pointless and lazy to me. I mean, if everything is BS, why bother to write about it? Hmmm?