Reprieve V839

by Jean-Paul Sartre

Book Overview

An extraordinary picture of life in France during the critical eight days before the signing of the fateful Munich Pact and the subsequent takeover of Czechoslovakia in September 1938. Translated from... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394718399
• ISBN13: 9780394718392
• Release Date: December 1972
• Publisher: Vintage Books USA
• Length: 445 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A philosophical potboiler...

*The Reprieve* is the second book in Sartre's epic World War II trilogy, which starts with *The Age of Reason* and ends with *Troubled Sleep.* Because it happened to be the one I found in the library, I started in medias res, so to speak, with *The Reprieve.* Maybe the greatest compliment that I can pay this novel is that even after 450 pages I immediately ordered the other two in the trilogy and can hardly wait to start *The Age of Reason.* It's hard to believe that the same author who, in *Being and Nothingness,* gave the world what is probably the most turgid philosophical masterpiece since the works of Hegel can write a novel as quickly paced, as compulsively readable, and as utterly absorbing as *The Reprieve.* Indeed I'd been prejudiced for years against reading this trilogy because I couldn't imagine it being anything but the dullest sort of fictional clunker. I couldn't have been more wrong! The war hasn't even started in *The Reprieve* and yet the drama is perhaps all the more intense for the oppressive sense of the storm of blood and steel about to break. The novel covers about a week in France during which the major European powers attempt a last-minute negotiation with Hitler to maintain the peace. Sartre tells the story of this tense week through the viewpoints of a wide variety of characters from every strata of French society. In doing so, he dramatizes the impact the shadow even a looming war can throw over individual lives--paradoxically defining and negating the very concepts of freedom and individuality. On the verge of being swept into history, Sartre's characters are also on the verge of being annihilated...and on some level, whether it's instinctual, intellectual, or emotional, each of them know it and each experience a kind of terrified exhilaration. This is a deeply philosophical novel but not in a heavy-handed or didactic way. There are very few "philosophical digressions" in the true sense in *The Reprieve*; rather Sartre's philosophy permeates the entire novel from beginning to end in so seamless and un-intrusive a fashion that you experience an understanding of existentialism from the gut. And this is perfectly as it should be; for existentialism is a response as well as a manifestation of a felt sense of being, the nausea resulting from the absurdity of human life, not an arid and wholly theoretical intellectual exercise. What is so riveting, rare, and admirable about *The Reprieve* is that Sartre--a bona-fide major philosopher--was able to repackage his ideas with the skill of a first-rate novelist. Sorry Jean-Paul. I had you pegged wrong. You beat the pants off Camus hands-down.

the collective consciousness.

The only thing I will comment (because I do not give away the book) is the writing style. If you are expecting "Age of Reason" part II, then you will not get what you were looking for...the writing style or mode is very different. The way the book is put together is there are many characters all in different parts of French territory in different walks of life, ages, sexes, etc. Often times when you are reading you will lose sight of where one character speaks or thinks and the next one. you will have to go line by line in the same paragraph, where a sentence ina paragraph represents a though of a different character and that character will not be identified...but you will know...but it becomes irrelevant who says or feels what because it is about the collective consciousness of french people in the midst of war...and this is the biggest success of the book is that this technique so succesful and masterfully implemented. It makes the book feel like events are happening so quickly and things are moving so fast which lends to the urgency of the situation in France. I feel like its a forrest fire...that starts with a brush and picks up momentum until its raging! There are new characters in this book and he has carried the old characters over. Please do yourself a favor and do not read the series out of order.

What is war?

What is war other than as it exists in the minds of the people who experience it? Sartre explains that in order to locate it, one would have to be everywhere at once, which is precisely what this novel permits its readers. This text, which is a complex weaving of the psychological states and experiences of a diversity of people who are forced to anticipate and conceptualize war, sheds light not only on the events leading to WWII, but the events which shaped Sartre as a writer and philosopher. A novel that could be read a thousand times, it contextualizes existentialism as a philosophy and serves as a framework for understanding the evolution and existence of existentialist thought.

Incredible.. Thought provoking!

This is one of the most powerful works of literature that I've ever read. It combines a powerfully unique literary style, a philosophical dilemma threaded through lives of a set of well developed characters set against a background of one of the most important historical developments that has defined the rest of the 20th century. This is the kind of a book, where every other page "asks" to be quoted. It will wrench your heart, focus your mind and make you look inward questioning the significance of a man in the context of a historical momentum. Awe inspiring..!

Incredible, thought provoking

This is one of the most powerful works of literature that I've ever read. It combines a powerfully unique literary style, a philosophical dilemma threaded through lives of a set of well developed characters set against a background of one of the most important historical developments that has defined the rest of the 20th century. This is the kind of a book, where every other page "asks" to be quoted. It will wrench your heart, focus your mind and make you look inward questioning the significance of a man in the context of a historical momentum. Awe inspiring..!