The Age of Reason (Penguin Modern Classics)

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In a long sequence towards the end of the book Mathieu drops in on a nightclub to meet Boris and Ivich and watch Lola sing. The Age of Reason is the first volume in a trilogy, and that work should presumably be judged as a whole; nevertheless, it's not a great start.

If you hate summer, loathe being touched, are so morbidly self-conscious that other people looking at you hurts you, if you are revolted by your bodily functions and oppressed by a feeling of futility and pointlessness, ‘burdened by events to come’ and prey to ‘an intolerable anguish’ (p.The war in Spain tempts him -- but only in the most abstract way: he doesn't have anywhere near the conviction to really have a go at something like that. But this gives an inaccurately optimistic sense of the novel; in reality it is Mathieu’s gloomy meditations on his directionless life which have the most power. In this chapter, he’s introduced as the good looking student who’s dating the much older Lola—a singer in Parisian clubs. Daniel had flung himself backwards, and was looking at him with amazement, his eyes sparkingly with anger. It wasn’t a novel, it was a thin book about existentialism and it took me about a half year to read it.

Here he acts as a sort of mediator—an adult the young ones turn to for help as he’s mature, intelligent, and reliable. Those uninitiated with Sartre might just get too engrossed with the plot, when the very essence of this work lies beneath all the love affairs, affairs without love, suicides or attempts, abortions and pregnancies, communism and Zionism, politics and philosophy and the like.

The pair discusses their situation, with Lola fussing over him and expressing many of the glaring foibles in their relationship. He had seen enough of such people at the Sorbonne, pretentious young wiseacres, bleak, bespectacled products of the Ecole Normale, who always had a personal theory in reserve, and invariably ended by making fools of themselves somehow. The thought of manipulating his ‘friend’ amuses the cynical Daniel (‘When Mathieu adopted a Quakerish attitude, Daniel hated him’, p. Thanks for this interesting review and discussion of the text, it’s interesting to see how Satre’s philosophical ideas and themes are incorporated into a novel.

You despise the bourgeois class, and yet you are bourgeois, son and brother of a bourgeois, and you live like a bourgeois. It was amusing enough a hundred years ago, but today it is simply a name for a handful of eccentrics who are no danger to anybody, and have missed the train. Such impending disaster makes many innocuous day-to-day endeavours trivial, of course, but at this stage his creations are busying themselves worrying about ageing, money, and relationships. He meets Ivich to take her to a museum and show her the works of Gaugin (a French post-impressionist artist).The Age of Reason is set in 1938 and tells of Mathieu, a French professor of philosophy who is obsessed with the idea of freedom. Exasperated by his brother’s assessment, Mathieu heads off out into the streets of Paris once again. Despite the peculiar relationship they share, she still seems fond of the man (in a weird, unpleasantly fueled way) and invites Mathieu to the Sumatra club for the evening with Boris and Lola.

You can’t help but believe Sartre developed the likes of Daniel, Boris, and Ivich from people he knew, and they’re so magnificently observed as individuals it’s as if they really were living and breathing in the 1930s. He leaned towards her : and to punish her, he laid his lips lightly against a cold, closed mouth : he was feeling defiant: Ivich was silent. Upon becoming pregnant, she’s clearly in two minds to keep the baby and comes to despise Delarue for wanting to rid it from her life. While there are restrictions on what we can do (such as killing somebody) in many cases we will restrain ourselves for fear of bringing the wrath of the state upon us.The story is about Mathieu and his mistress Marcelle whom he had been seeing for seven years with a mutual agreement against marriage and child. As one of these is pitched battle, the unpleasant emotional breakdowns with friends and lovers he suffers here stand him in good stead for warfare. All he need do is take 4,000 and he will have the fee for the high class abortion and ensure Marcelle’s well-being. Daniel, after having sex with a rent boy, is so disgusted he contemplates suicide and, holding the razor in his hand, becomes almost completely empty of thought and feeling, just a pinprick of consciousness, an arm, a slice of sharpened metal.