A very decent novel about the period just before WW2, when war is looming on the horizon. There are quite a few characters and we are able to explore many positions of class, propriety, and social influences that are pushing the characters towards their eventual destinations and we are able to understand the motivations that guide them to a higher degree. The novel is very dramatic and Sartre approaches it carefully and successfully to show what he is trying to both explain and denote in his fiction.

3.5 stars. ( )

Fiction describing the despair and confusion surrounding the events of the Treaty of Munich. Sartre, I admit, is not one of my favorite authors. But both the stream-of-consciousness style and the historical context gave me a better footing for appreciating the sulkiness that pervades his books. ( )

It has been a number of years since I read this series, so i will have to be rather general about it even though it has stuck with me all these years. I am a fan of Sartre's and his existentialist contemporaries, but this series was an amazing display of Sartre's skill as a fiction writer. While I am generally more fond of Camus' fiction, every book in the "The Roads to Freedom" trilogy stands out as my favorite fictional work by that group. Make no mistake, this trilogy is a masterpiece of existentialist fiction."The Roads to Freedom" series (originally meant to be a tetralogy) was a fictional representation of new direction in Sartre's vision of existentialism which was far more participatory. Using the back-drop of the Nazi occupation, Sartre's characters move from a prewar existence of complete apathy toward their life and others into individuals who are empowered by the will to resist any impediments to their freedom. ( )

This strangely written novel, authored by the leading existentialist philosopher, examines the international events leading up to the Second World War through the thematic lens of personal responsibility. The stylistic techniques of darting from one location to another without warning and drifting seamlessly between first- and third-person perspectives give a frantic quality to the writing that intensifies the story’s climactic moments. Not exactly a beach read, but the book’s last sentence and the events leading up to it will never be forgotten. ( )

This is book two of Sartre's trilogy of novels Les Chemins de la Liberte (The Roads to Freedom), set in Paris at the outbreak of the Second World War.