The Age of Reason (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Each of us has our own perception of ourselves, and everybody around us has their own perception of who we are.

The Age of Reason is concerned with Sartre's conception of freedom as the ultimate aim of human existence. She sometimes had the feeling that her life had come to a stop one day at noon, and she herself was an embodied, eternal noontide brooding upon her little world, a dank and rainy world, without hope or purpose….Reader's noteBrighten your bookshelf with a spot of orange with this this 1964 edition of Jean-Paul Sartre's The Age of Reason.

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. Once Sarah leaves, the two argue, with the young student finally breaching the kiss Delarue had forced upon her. Individual tragedies and happiness are etched against the Paris summer of 1938, with its nightclubs, galleries, students, and cafe society. Misanthropic, narcissistic, and aloof, his actions are seemingly based on a desire to disrupt peoples’ lives. All is going well until it becomes apparent he can’t receive the loan immediately, which leads him to try and chase down Sarah again.I’ll be taking a detailed look at this trilogy over the coming months and, of course, be warned ahead are numerous spoilers. With a trick up his sleeve to get one over on Mathieu, he heads off to see Marcelle in an attempt to manipulate her thoughts surrounding Delarue, although he now considers having to deal with him: “another plunge into the clinging slime of pity”. Well that got old so one day when I was poking around the props (you know - how they set up the entire fancy-pants mock bedrooms? One of the people Mathieu hits up for money is his older brother, Jacques, who went through his own dissolute stage ("he had dallied with surrealism", among other things) but now is entirely prim and proper.