The Age of Reason (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Delarue clearly has a thing for her, but is caught between being the intellectual elder statesman and the lust-driven buffoon. By making himself so vulnerable, he exposes himself to his conniving or judgemental friends and acquaintances, ensuring he takes an emotional battering on his way to an unsteady future. As you can see there’s a fair bit of toing and froing among this cast of deadbeats and losers, but the ‘plot’ is mostly beside the point. If you do not want to do that because you are too ethical, you do not need to tell people that you do not want to do that, but rather let your ethical nature come out based upon your actions, and not upon the statements you make about what you do not want to do.

It was joined immediately by The Reprieve, the writing style of which uses simultaneity as events unfold at the same time, with Sartre considering numerous characters at once as they jostle for position on page. Boris then unexpectedly appears outside the cafe where they’re recuperating and, smiling crazily whilst swaying to and fro, staggers towards them and announces: “Lola is dead”.

As she’s Boris’ sister, at some point she’s been introduced to Mathieu who seems to fall for her due to her looks and youth, with the two sharing an odd relationship based on the professor teaching Ivich about high culture. Regardless, with Daniel’s departure he duly has off with a textbook without even attempting to conceal the thing. Back in the day, educated people agonised about how to find meaning in a world stripped bare of religion and the old certainties, and threatened by Nazism and totalitarianism. This seemed to her just funny, and she thought: ‘I don’t give a curse for coelenterata,’ and the chap couldn’t get another word out of her.

I had never previously come across the guile and craft of Sartre, the artist and only knew Sartre, the philosopher whose authoritative philosophical monologues were curt and declarative, sans the resplendence of an artistic canvas. Fat unhappy Marcelle – trapped by illness in her pink bedroom, stifled by the mother she shares her apartment with – is the central symbol of the squalid reality of the physical body, of nausea at its revolting fecundity, a claustrophobic image of unhappiness. 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. 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.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. 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.

The Age of Reason only concerns a handful of days, I should point out, during which time personal freedom is the main theme established.We believe, in a way, that the more money that we have (and the finance industry loves to float those ideas) the more we believe that we are able to do Regretting her scream, and feeling somewhat world-weary, the duo part ways as Ivich continues to wallow in depression about her impending exam results. With the youth gone from his life again, reality hits home on the 34 year old and his predicament becomes ever-present.