Books on Guilt

One is a series of "Five Best" columns that appear at the weenekd in the WSJ. In this one Pascal Bruckner confesses his admiration of these books about guilt.

1. The Trial. Franz Kafka.  Knopf, 1937.

One morning Joseph K. is arrested for no reason at all, brought before a court and, eventually, executed in a quarry: His ordeal has become a poignant metaphor for the experience of citizens in totalitarian regimes. In the eyes of the ruthless judicial system in Franz Kafka's "The Trial," Joseph K. is guilty of existing, no more than that; his crime is the very fact that he is alive. Nothing he can do can save him once he has fallen into the hands of the judges. The more he protests his innocence, the more he arouses suspicion. "Innocent of what?" one judge asks. "The Trial" (first published in German in 1925) is terrifying because the hero, without understanding why, begins collaborating with the machine that crushes him. One is reminded of the people convicted during the Moscow purge trials of the 1930s when they shouted, as they were about to be executed: "Long live Stalin! Long live the proletarian revolution!"

2. And Then There Were None. Agatha Christie. Dodd, Mead. 1940.

Ten people who have nothing in common find themselves on Indian Island. They have been invited there by a mysterious Mr. Owen, who has, unfortunately, not shown up. A couple of servants see to their comfort. On the living-room table the guests find 10 Indian statuettes, and in the bedrooms hangs a nursery rhyme announcing how each guest is to be murdered. The deaths follow one another implacably, hewing to the poem's predictions as though the characters' fates were foreordained. Everyone has sinned enough to deserve death; everyone bears the mark of Cain. Within this Puritan framework Agatha Christie displays her passion for playing with crime. As it turns out, one of the 10 guests is the murderer—and he knocks himself off as well, using a sophisticated technique to make it seem as if he has been killed by someone else. Christie's taste for trickery is stronger than her taste for punishment. Thus there is no tragedy in her work: Evil can always be overcome by a shrewd detective.

3. Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad. 1902.

In Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," an officer in the British merchant marine named Marlow sails up a serpentine African river to look for Kurtz, an ivory-trader from whom no word has been had for months. As Marlow ventures into the interior, oppressed by the dense jungle, he hears a strange report: In a mad quest for ivory, Kurtz has begun slaughtering the natives. Conrad took his inspiration from the atrocities committed by the Belgian King Leopold II, who was then master of the Congo and who tortured and massacred his recalcitrant subjects. Kurtz, of whom we get only glimpses, is fascinating because he speaks the language of the tormentor, not that of civilization: He feels no remorse; he is a man who never feels guilty. A pamphlet he has written on civilizing the natives ends with the terrible words: "Exterminate all the brutes!" He weaves a bond between the logic of profit and the logic of annihilation. Conrad's genius consists not solely in denouncing colonialism but also in anticipating the disasters that followed decolonization. We can read this short novel as a still-relevant depiction of the abominations that have stained the recent history of Africa.

4. The Fall. Albert Camus. Vintage. 1956.

At the height of the Cold War and communist domination over the French intelligentsia, Albert Camus published "The Fall," the brief confession of a "judge-penitent" named Clamens, who let a young woman commit suicide before his eyes by throwing herself into the Seine and did nothing to help her. Clamens has taken refuge in Amsterdam, preferring the canals' still water to the Seine's impetuous flow, and he likes to confide in strangers. He tells them that he does not regret what he has done—and then forces the strangers to confess, in turn, a crime of their own. I am a bastard, he seems to say, but so are you. Clamens practices public confession as kind of contamination, a way of implicating all humanity in his crime. The novel was an indirect attack on Jean-Paul Sartre, who was always ready to flagellate himself for being a bourgeois and to accuse France and Europe of causing all the world's ills. In the tradition of the 17th-century French moralists, Camus, concealed under this penitent's habit, denounces the moral hypocrisy of a certain kind of leftist.

5. The Human Stain. Philip Roth. Houghton Mifflin. 2000.

Coleman Silk has been forced to retire from his professorship amid murky accusations of racism, an episode in which he lost everything—his job, his family, his reputation. Embittered, he visits his new neighbor, the writer Nathan Zuckerman, to suggest that Zuckerman avenge him by writing his story. We discover that Silk's main crime is having tried to escape the racial prison in which America incarcerates its citizens: Born black, Silk has passed himself off as a Jew to escape the stereotypes he might have had to endure. Refusing to accept being identified by the color of his skin is, of course, an offense that Silk's "tolerant" colleagues find intolerable.

—Mr. Bruckner is the author of "The Tears of the White Man" (1986) and "The Tyranny of Guilt," recently published by Princeton University Press. Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W8