I LOVE this book for Sartre's honestY, wit, and his willingness to share the flaws and joys of learning to write in one's own voice. ( )

I wish I could recall my first ten years like J-P could. All very cerebral, but a hundred years on, these recollections have little or no interest. Even J-P reveals he's a little bored with life and writing at the time he put this fragment of autobiography together. You are far better off reading his novels.

Las palabras es un libro autobiográfico publicado en 1964, nos cuenta la niñez de Sartre. Deja de temblar y sigue leyendo, valiente. El pensador francés desnuda sin pudor su vocación, sus inofensivas miserias infantiles, y al mismo tiempo, desviste a su familia. Es crudo y sincero. Eso sí, al principio confiesa ser un “farsante”, un fingidor… ¿qué podemos creer, entonces? Amaba la literatura. Los libros. Eran sus mejores amigos… los únicos. Una condena. Una ventana. Una puerta. Un tornado de ideas para un chavalín de seis años.

Faith, even when profound, is never entire.

There is considerable audacity in a project of this nature. The famed philosopher/playwright/novelist creates a memoir fifty plus years into the past, a poking about in a small child's mind. I hazard to say there's a some fancy in these pages. Much as Sartre notes throughout most of his childhood he was acting, I assume the great thinker feels compelled to craft something of stature to merit his adult achievement. I will be honest: I don't remember much of my early life. One or two images of leaving Michigan ages 3-4. There are a few flutters after that. My adoptive mother telling everyone I was reading at age two. Was I? I have always had books and much like Sartre I feel indebted. Also, just like the author I had flowing curly locks, a surprise I guess after being bald for 14 months. The stories bifurcate there as Sartre benefited from his grandfather's library and I read comics and books from the local public library. Both of us constructed constant narratives where we were the heroes. He was encouraged to write. I was given a typewriter and I filled notebooks in junior high when I should have been learning geometry.

The second section Writing isn't as magical as the first Reading. He broaches his burgeoning narrative structures, slowly evolving in a stumbling gait --and how everything was ultimately enriched by attending school. That period of his life so deserved a further extensive treatment, if only his adolescent friendship with Paul Nizan. Outside of his widowed mother and tacit grandmother, women do not feature large in this vision. His partial blindness, his diminutive stature, his less than ideal looks all reflect upon this but without explicit comment. ( )

The Words, Jean-Paul Sartre's famous autobiography of his first ten years, has been compared to Rousseau's Confessions. Written when he was fifty-nine years old, The Words is a masterpiece of self-analysis. Sartre the philosopher, novelist and playwright brings to his own childhood the same rigor of honesty and insight he applied so brilliantly to other authors. Born into a gentle, book-loving family and raised by a widowed mother and doting grandparents, he had a childhood which might be described as one long love affair with the printed word. Ultimately, this book explores and evaluates the whole use of books and language in human experience.

Sartre writes about his very early life. He writes about things that as an adult you aren't even conscious of anymore. How reading a book about horses and armies can bring those things to life. Sartre talks about his grandfather, his mother, his absent father. He is pretty dispassionate about them. The main thing about the book is Sartre's ability for clear observation and honesty. Sartre describes his fatherless childhood, a period during which playmates and rambles were happily exchanged for his grandfather’s library, where “I found my religion”:

I disported myself in a tiny sanctuary, surrounded by ancient, heavy-set monuments which had seen me into the world, which would see me out of it, and whose permanence guaranteed me a future as calm as the past. …I was a daily witness of ceremonies whose meaning escaped me: my grandfather—who was usually so clumsy that my grandmother buttoned his gloves for him—handled those cultural objects with the dexterity of an officiant…. At times, I would draw near to observe those boxes which slit open like oysters, and I would see the nudity of their inner organs, pale, fusty leaves, slightly bloated, covered with black veinlets, which drank ink and smelled of mushrooms.

Sartre’s reading and writing nurtured “the idealism which it took me thirty years to shake off.” Inside the sixth-floor library, “I would take real birds from their nests, would chase real butterflies that alighted on real flowers”; compared to the bookish archetypes, “the monkeys in the zoo were less monkey, the men in the Luxembourg Gardens were less man.” In the last pages of The Words, Sartre begins to describe the exchange of the idealism for the brand of Existentialism which made him famous. “I’ve given up the office but not the frock,” writes the sixty-year-old: “I still write. What else can I do?” ( )