Customer Reviews

The Age of Reason: A Novel

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4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The Age of Reason is one of those rare classics in literture that combine an interesting and readable account with a deep quest for understanding.Sartre has taken the disruptive world of Paris, on the brink of invasion by Germany in 1939, and used this backdrop to debate the meaning of freedom. Obviously the idea of freedom is subjective and Sartre certainly does not presume to have found the answer in absolute terms. He uses the protagonist, Mathieu, as well as the peripheral characters, to examine different view points; albeit, with mixed results. The Age of Reason can certainly be read as an independent novel, but if one is to truly understand Sartre's vision, it will be necessary to read the other works in the trilogy, The Reprieve and The Troubled Sleep. Both are excellent and follow up on the secondary characters that are first introduced in the Age of Reason. The three novels, known collectively as The Roads to Freedom, represent, to me, the most significant analysis of what freedom means to a given individual. It will force the reader to reexamine long cherished views and address their own concept of freedom. If you haven't been introduced to the writings of Sartre, The Age of Reason is an excellent starting point.

As a translator, I am always angry to see a good novel destroyed because a publisher refused to pay for a decent translation. This book has no flow as in the original language, and certain translations are absolutely embarrassing (he was of good humor? come on, even after a year of studying languages one should know better). It makes the narrative confusing and the reader has to translate from french english to real english. Read the original or don't bother with this one.

Can someone get Gregory Rabassa to translate this thing for the sake of humanity?!

the age of reason is the 1st book in a trilogy, roads to freedom. i have not yet read the next two books, but after this one, i plan to. this is an excellent novel.

it is a thinking man's book not an action thriller. it's concepts are existential in nature and deal specifically with the concept of freedom.

the story, which covers only a few days in the the life of character mathieu in 1938 france, deals with mathieu's obsession with his personal freedom. he has just been informed of the unwanted pregnancy of his girlfriend. i personally did not see the pending war as a significant element in the story. it is there, but does not drive the quest for freedom. this is most likely picked up in the later novels. as mathieu searches for funds to abort the child, we meet his friends. all of them have hidden personal problems of their own. the results of this quest and the resolution of his problem make up the storyline.

the interesting issue is the understanding of freedom. what does mathieu think about it in the beginning and how does that change as he reaches the age of reason.

the story is best summed up in mathieu's comment near the end:
"i don't know what i would give to do something irrevocable."

this is a book that raises amazing questions and has the potential of changing your life.

Mathieu Delarue, a 34-year old philosophy professor, has led his life so that he has maintained complete freedom, which he defines as closing off no possibilities in his future. This makes philosophical sense to Mathieu, who wants his freedom in place, if and when he is required to perform a great act of conscience or begin a mission of self-fulfillment. It's 1938 and going to Spain to fight the Fascists has been tempting but not quite right. Meanwhile, Mathieu remains interested in the life of Gauguin, who, in his forties, left a Sunday-painter's life in France to become a great painter in Tahiti.

While Mathieu has lofty philosophical ideas, the effect of his freedom, he admits, has been to "dexterously construct an undistinguished but solid happiness upon the basis of inertia and to justify himself from time to time on the highest moral grounds." He is, in the words of other characters, a small-time government official, a solid member of the bourgeoisie, and a person whose relationship with Marcelle, his long-time girlfriend, is indistinguishable from a marriage.

Then, Marcelle becomes pregnant and Mathieu, who wastes his money drinking with students in bars, has to choose. Will there be an abortion, enabling Mathieu to preserve his so-called freedom? Or, will Mathieu marry Marcelle and basically recognize the nature of the prosaic life he has made?

Then, add to this dynamic an evil and manipulative friend who resents Mathieu's bogus sense of freedom, a childish female student who has come to represent freedom in Mathieu's mind, and a lack of money to pay for a safe abortion. The effect of this literary concoction is an absolutely great and riveting tale, where Mathieu comes to terms with his illusions and responsibilities. And, it has a surprise ending!

But say you don't like novels in which a protagonist confronts the nature and limits of his or her life? Then, read THE AGE OF REASON anyway, simply to enjoy Sartre's amazing writing. In this case, read with a ready eye for his numerous descriptions of light in Paris or for his amazing facility with similes and metaphors. You're only in Chapter 1, for example, when you read:

"Her mouth snapped out the last words: a varnished mauve-tinted mouth, like a crimson insect intent upon devouring that ashen visage."

"She collapsed on to his shoulder, sobbed a little, but she did not cry. It was all the she could allow herself: a rainless storm."

A great book and highly recommended.

Jean-Paul seems like such a likeable character. Especially towards his later years, when he became quite politically active in anti-colonial issues. But a lot of his early work is inconsistent. This novel, the first of a trilogy, was written leading up to and during the second world war, and is a compelling portrait of a parisian bourgeois as the shadows of fascism grew longer. This bourgeois professor, mathieu, fancies himself a prime actor in his own life, a man free to act as he chooses because he doesn't have any illusions. But that is his worst illusion. He is 35 years old and acts like a modern spoiled american university student. He can't commit to anything, whether it be to head to spain to fight against franco, marry his pregnant mistress or demand that she have an abortion, or act decisively enough to win the heart of his OTHER girlfriend, a spoiled early 20's russian emigre.

SO the whole novel passes with us watching these spoiled bourgeois lunk-heads wander around and do nothing with all their vaunted freedom.

But That's the point. As you get into the trilogy more, you see that mathieu's problem is that his life is unbearably light, to steal from Kundera here. And it is Kundera's "unbearable lightness of being" that provides a great insight into what Sartre is getting at here. Our freedom as human beings comes into play when we make choices, not avoid them.

So, I recommend this book, but stick it out because this first volume is tough at times. The characters herein are all fools. But they are all learning to act, and as Hitler draws closer, you can see they now know that they will HAVE to make a choice in the near future.

And after you read these three volumes, read Kundera's book, which is about a lot of the same issues but is a lot more humane and sexy too. Say what you want about Sartre but he wasn't really a sexy writer. In fact he kind of reminds me of wallace shawn in "manhattan." But that's another story.

Having already read *The Reprieve,* I have now finished two-thirds of Sartre's "Roads to Freedom" trilogy--that's over 800 pages--and I cannot wait to begin the third volume...that's how compelling I find these novels. It's difficult to explain their appeal. In *The Age of Reason,* a philosophy professor discovers his lover is pregnant and spends the next two days frantically trying to raise enough money for an abortion. His life zigzags haphazardly through a rich cast of characters whose stories and intertwined fates--complex, tragic, absurd--continue in the next volume.

What Sartre does is immerse us in the struggles of these characters as they each attempt to define and make sense of their lives...this struggle informed, of course, by the existential principles of Sartre's own philosophy. What Sartre does so well in *The Age of Reason* is to portray the psychological torment of men and women under even fairly ordinary circumstances. Here is the quiet drama of consciousness, the sufferings of daily life...at least as it is experienced by those who give it any thought.

What does it mean to be free--to have a life that means something? These are the questions that obsess Mathieu as he runs into one dead-end after another in his search for the abortion fee and at the same time wallows in a hopeless erotic obsession with a self-destructive young female student. All the distinctive trappings of a French existential novel are here--the drinking, the brooding, the café's, the jazz bars, the intellectual dissection of every act and motive, the relentless self-analysis...it's a riveting read if you don't require a lot of explosions, kidnappings, and sordid murders to entertain you.

Unlike his stylistic experimentation in *The Reprieve,* Sartre narrates *The Age of Reason* in a traditional, straightforward style, but it's no less briskly-paced; if anything, there is a higher pitch of emotional intensity in this novel and less ennui than in *The Reprieve.* Its not absolutely necessary to read *The Age of Reason* first, I didn't, but I would definitely recommend doing so, as it enriches vastly your understanding of the characters in the second book.

As I mentioned in my review of *The Reprieve,* I can hardly believe that the Sartre of *Being and Nothingness* fame was capable of writing in such a lively and entertaining manner, *Nausea* aside. So this series has so far come as one of the most pleasant literary surprises I've had in years. If the French, their philosophy, or existentialism appeal to you at all--or just a good novel about interesting characters facing the void within life--then I'd unreservedly recommend you take a look at *The Age of Reason.*

I feel out of my league reading the thoughtful and well-informed reviews provided for this novel, but still desire to add my own thoughts. I read this first when I was 18, and I do not purport to have any great knowledge of the philosophy of Sartre. It is several years later and over the course of my college career I have picked it up time and again to read a chapter or two.

I am unsure of whether or not this book is a mere front for Sartre's philosophy--I do know it is a sort of fictional application of Being and Nothingness--but what continues to drive me back to this book is the sheer power of the narrative. Only in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man have I found such an encyclopedic representation of human struggle and motivation in twentieth century literature.

While I am no true student of philosophy, I have no use for a thinker who cannot provide an accurate depiction of the real world. If they are not presenting reality properly, they are not observing it properly. Sartre seems to be a man with an immense mind and a remarkable pen. Although his conclusion grates with my own feelings about life, I respect his standpoint because the journey towards the conclusion portrayed a world with such real pain and such familiar people that I cannot help but be moved.

This work discerns Sartre in his element. Reason characterizes the modern age: through reason, we abstract our realities, turn away from experience and into the "cognitive", "mental" field, and consequently loose our grounding.

This novel is a phenomenological journey into the absurdities of life; through it, we delve into the mood of the times: one in which anxiety towers over our very Being, one in which anxiety is the primordial mood in which we dwell. Anxiety, a consequence of Being turning (into) "pure abstract" Thought, reminds us that without a full acknowledgment of our "being-in-the-world", we remain homeless, uprooted, fearful of that which is. We value the "supersensuous" over the sensuous, "mind" over "body", and as such, loose sight of our concrete existence and meaning-making possibilities.

Through strikingly insightful "experiential" writing (i.e., descriptive, not explanatory), Sartre, dare we understand him, engenders in us a despair at our current state (and many who do not "like" Sartre use this as a defense of their position: he is too dreary, too "depressing"). Yet if we choose to listen carefully we observe that nothing he says is out of the ordinary, out of touch with our own experiences: rather, his descriptions sound at least vaguely familiar, attentive as they are to the nature of commonplace Being itself.

This is not only a masterful philosophical work (though certainly not by some philosophers' definitions of philosophy), but a beautifully written art work as well. The two belong together in Sartre's case; this becomes clear when one considers that to obtain a truly powerful description of that which is, language must be attended to deeply and fully.

It's always puzzled me that this book gets so little attention when Nausea is so acclaimed -- and even Nausea gets trashed by many of the more academic critics. I read a series of interviews with Sartre at one point, after all of his major books were a ways behind him, and he himself did not seem to consider the Roads to Freedom trilogy of particular significance or importance. I find this puzzling because the Age of Reason is one of the best novels I have ever read. It is more of a story than Nausea (and more of a story than its sequels, from what I've read of them), and, well -- it's just incredible. The psychological accuracy and moral neutrality with which Sartre places himself, and the reader, in each character's shoes, is remarkable; the existential "adventure" of the book is intoxicating, and there are some simply incredible moments. As with anything Sartre writes, it is a bit self-indulged, and the characters will not appeal to everyone, but personally, I found this an incredibly rewarding book; it left me feeling giddy.

When does a broke philosophy teacher with a pregnant mistress attain the age of reason ? How can "philosophy" (read higher consciousness), "freedom" (read utopia), and "a life that doesn't cause misery to oneself and others" coexist ? Is that at all possible ?
Sartre ponders upon these questions as does Mathieu, the central character of this book. Mathieu is obsessed with the idea of freedom and does not want to lose it at any cost. On one hand he refuses to marry his mistress of 7 years and on the other, he refuses to join the Communist party when asked by his best friend. Sartre examines the ambiguity of freedom and philosophical formulas at a time when the need for collective effort and active involvement was acute.
The dialogues between Mathieu and other characters - his friends,his brother, his mistress are engaging. Still, at times the book seems a drag but I guess that is because Sartre is painstakingly descriptive about some of the "vacant" characters.

Sartre does not come to any conclusion in this book (of course, its the first in the trilogy), yet does not leave the reader unsatisfied(you know what I mean). Personally I didn't find Sartre's ideas in this book to be either original or truly brilliant. What I love about the book is the writing. Miracle words, poetry in one page, brute force in the other.
Read it once.