Vintage International
3 total works
It is September 1938 and during a heatwave Europe tensely awaits the outcome of the Munich conference, where they will learn if there is to be a war. In Paris people are waiting too, among them Mathieu, Jacques and Philippe, each wrestling with their own love affairs, doubts and angsts – and none of them ready to fight. The second volume in Sartre’s wartime Roads to Freedom trilogy, The Reprieve cuts between locations and characters to build an impressionistic collage of the hopes, fears and self-deception of an entire continent as it blinkers itself against the imminent threat of war.
"'How are you?' said Mathieu. 'I thought you were dead.'"
Following a Parisian philosophy teacher through the cafés and bars of Montparnasse over two days in the sweltering summer of 1938, Sartre's searing novel explores what it truly means to be free.
Powerfully depicts the fall of France in 1940, and the anguished response of the French people to the German occupation. Translated from the French by Gerard Hopkins.