A bleak and beautiful book, as evocative as the face of a young Auschwitz survivor. A book about that moment in a life where everything changes; a moment most of us fear and flee from, while others earnestly seek it out — in Ashrams, travels, passions, paintings, work, in submitting to fate or resisting it. Sartre ‘got his’ on a park bench circa 1935 according to this story of a man who says ‘I should like to understand myself properly before it is too late’. Rather than his indigestible philosophical ragôuts like Being and Nothingness this book constitutes the true Bible of Existentialism, along with some of Albert Camus’ work.


Calling it a Bible though misleads as to the essentially ironic tone in a book where we encounter a café proprietor who ‘when his establishment empties his head empties too’ — reminiscent of a present-day TV personality and his studio.


Here where it counts, where he speaks with the minimum of mystification, Sartre comes out from behind the mask of scholar, ironist and bloodless philosopher to espouse a warm, challenging and courageous version of life which has and will inspire many readers in every generation.

‘After all, you have to kill time. They are young and well built, they have another thirty years in front of them. So they don’t hurry, they take their time, and they are quite right. Once they have been to bed together, they will have to find something else to conceal the enormous absurdity of their existence. All the same...is it absolutely necessary to lie to each other? I look around the room. What a farce! All those people sitting there looking serious, eating. No, they aren’t eating: they are reviving their strength in order to complete their respective tasks. Each of them has his little personal obstinacy which prevents him from noticing that he exists; there isn’t one of them who doesn’t think he is indispensable to somebody or something....Nobody is better qualified than the commercial traveller over there to sell Swan toothpaste. Nobody is better qualified than that interesting young man to fumble about under his neighbour’s skirts. And I am among them and if they look at me they must think that nobody is better qualified than I to do what I do. But I know. I don’t look very important but I know that I exist and that they exist. And if I knew the art of convincing people, I should go and sit down next to that handsome white-haired gentleman and I should explain to him what existence is. The thought of the look which would come on to his face if I did makes me burst out laughing.’ p161