The Age of Reason (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Incidentally, as everyone is about to get pretty inebriated in this section, during this era getting drunk is referred to as being “tight”. I first read the Age of Reason in early 2005 aged 19 and it transformed my view of literature—it’s at once a gripping and brilliant story, but it also deals with Sartre’s complex philosophical concepts.

Boris scratched his head in perplexity, and wondered what was the origin of these destructive impulses which gripped him from time to time. And hence the over-arching title of the series, Roads To Freedom as it indeed dramatises different characters’ journeys towards different definitions of freedom. The novel is a fictional reprise of some of the main themes in his major philosophical study Being and Nothingness (1943). Even if he let himself be carried off, in helplessness and despair, even if he let himself be carried off like an old sack of coal, he would have chosen his own damnation: he was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate: to marry, to give up the game, to drag this dead weight around with him for years to come.On edge, the couple discusses what they’ve been up to, including Delarue spending time with young student Ivich.

A philosophical, meandering novel, it includes some inspired ideas and episodes, but is rather middling fiction. Ivich was not precisely a flirt, but from time to time she assumed an affectionate air for the pleasure of sensing the heavy, fruit-like sleekness of her face. His characters are a god-forsaken lot, condemned, abandoned and carrying on their shoulders the ‘burden’ of their freedoms. Starting to age, she’s found a picture of herself from 1928 (the timeline for Age of Reason is the summer of 1938), in the picture she’s dressed in a man’s jacket and remarks to Delarue: “I was a scream in those days. The sense of general foreboding in the tale suggests he’s likely to fail in some way—or he has to accept he’s a member of the bourgeoisie and his life has been a lie.The Spanish Civil War is still being fought, but it's an isolated conflict; the threat of war in the rest of Europe looms larger now after the Austrian Anschluß, but does not feel immediate yet.

It has two effects in that in one case existentialism is us making a concerted effort to define ourselves (such as me being the straight guy that pretends he knows nothing about brothels and sits in the Crown Casino reading a book) and the outward effects of that definition, in that people see who you are and respond to this. The relationship between these two becomes central in the whole trilogy as it plays out over a couple of years. Towards the end of the story, Mathieu sneaks back into Lola’s apartment with the key Boris gave him and this time does steal 4,000 of her Francs. As to freedom, there was no sense in speculating on its nature, because in that case one was then no longer free. In that belly a little strawberry of blood was making haste to live, with a sort of guileless urgency, a besotted little strawberry, not even yet an animal, soon to be scarped out of existence by a knife.Entering chapter 12 and the final 100 pages of the novel, a series of events force Delarue towards the culmination of his predicament.