The Age of Reason (1945)

There's a bit where Sartre describes Mathieu's sister-in-law: she's pretty, but "Mathieu had on countless occasions tried to unify these fluid features, but they escaped him; as a face, Odette's always seemed to be dissolving, and thus retained its elusive bourgeois mystery." (p. 127) And that's a little how I feel about this book, halfway through; it's certainly very good, and pretty to look at, but it's weirdly slippery. I can't quite get a handle on it.

That may be my fault. Tough to say what you bring to a book, and what the book brings to you.

And there's a sense of foreboding hanging over the thing that makes me feel like this won't always be the story; like something might happen soon to throw everyone into sharper relief. Maybe the whole thing is like the Gauguin self-portrait that Mathieu takes Ivich to see: so far we're just drawing the shadowy figures behind him, and soon enough we'll show the figure in front.

Sorry, I got a little flowery there.

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And it ended like and unlike how I expected. I don't want to say too much, 'cause, y'know, spoilers and all that. It was beautiful, and I feel like getting screamingly plastered now. ( )

Soap opera with brains. Yes, I can agree with this. Caring about other people while watching their little lives and dramas is so much more fulfilling when they prove themselves to have complex despair behind their everyday actions. It never ends, really. The constant proving to oneself that this life is worthwhile, that the hopes of the past and the dreams of the future won't go to waste. Mathieu keeps to his belief of freedom, to be capable of anything, no matter what constraints have been laid across his living by emotional bonds and societal dictations and past history. In the end he achieves this freedom, and finds that he no longer believes in it. He has reached the age of reason, when he sees that the ideas that once characterized him can no longer be applied to him, unless he wishes to be a hypocrite. In achieving his freedom, he sacrificed for nothing, a nothing that provides a clean a break from everything that had been forcing him into a situation that was no longer; and for what? He may have found a small satisfaction in not being free, now that he had realized that he was waiting for a moment of a lifetime that would never come. Everyone around him either spins out delusions of the future or chases desires that had died long ago, joining him in his everlasting goal of not sinking into regret and despair. A satisfyingly realistic portrayal of the tightrope walk that daily life really is. ( )

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. ( )

Too literal translation, often ( )

An achingly analysed view of human's potential to be "free", whatever that means, Sartre shows the way in which morality is important in his view due to the complex web of human relations. Whatever choice a person makes, they are accountable to whoever those choices affect. A person's freedom, according to Sartre, is dependent on their agency in deciding between the myriad paths in life.

I have to say I tend to lean more towards a Foucauldian view than those held by Sartre, it was an interesting read though, and I found it an easy introduction to his work. ( )