His love for her having faded, he essentially acknowledges it’s time to end the seven-year relationship. Whereas Delarue offers Ivich’s brother Boris fatherly advice and encouragement, Ivich and Mathieu are something of a misfit. The vivacity and vividness with which Sartre paints each one of his characters amidst their existential exigencies leaves behind their ever-lasting impressions on the fertile mental space. This constant battle between how things are and how we want them to be causes us to lead a life of limbo, always in between things but never picking a side, until we find ourselves at the “age of reason” – that pivotal moment where making a radical decision could alter our lives forever. For nothing: this life had been given him for nothing, he was nothing and yet he would not change: he was as he was made.

The absolute determination of all the characters to be as miserable as possible eventually becomes quite funny. Each name springs up in mind in a color and the association with that color is complete, character and the color inextricable from each other. Meanwhile, left at the table together, Ivich and Mathieu spend some time loathing each other – why on earth did he kiss such a plain pasty prickly young woman, thinks Mathieu. Despite “tumult” and “public opinion” arriving due to the gruesome situation, the pair is led off by a kindly cloakroom lady who disinfects their wounds and applies bandages. Rest assured, Delarue’s personal freedom faces greater challenges as World War II commences, essentially making his problems in his first outing inconsequential.I admit, it is good way to show how people around Europe felt at that time, but even if I forget the plot, even ideas are very difficult to follow in this style. Regretting her scream, and feeling somewhat world-weary, the duo part ways as Ivich continues to wallow in depression about her impending exam results. Economic slavery is a term that probably does not relate to this, but it is defining our freedom based upon the amount of money that we have.

She felt sick…then a sense of uttermost disgust gathered upon her tongue… She disliked her body… the sight of women suckling their babies in the Luxemberg: a feeling beyond fear and disgust…she dreaded having to despise him… (p. And yet he would not have liked to be good-looking – she was never more alone than when confronted with something to admire.You despise the bourgeois class, and yet you are bourgeois, son and brother of a bourgeois, and you live like a bourgeois. Realising the game is up, he finally levels with her (although, frankly, surely Ivich should have figured this out by now, which kind of indicates the self-indulgent frame of mind she’s often in). He reveals his inability to secure funds for the abortion and, crushingly for Marcelle, drops an emotional bomb on her which leads her to near hysterics. The half-drunk man suggests they head off to wax lyrical in a Parisian café over drinks, but Delarue turns him down (to his immediate regret). A philosophical, meandering novel, it includes some inspired ideas and episodes, but is rather middling fiction.

Put like that, maybe Sartre and his philosophy have disappeared because they have been so thoroughly subsumed into our modern attitude. I read this book on a lovely sunny day and couldn’t help thinking that all the characters in it needed to get out more, to get a hobby, get some exercise, and generally get a life.

Boris believes it to be a cocaine overdose having found her apparently cold and lifeless on his bed in the morning. The Age of Reason only concerns a handful of days, I should point out, during which time personal freedom is the main theme established.