Customer Reviews:
 "The rule is that there are no good fathers..." March 1, 2007
Sartre gives us his childhood and a book filled with characters, the exception being... `that one who's lacking' till the end... Sartre himself.
The man is, of course, present throughout as narrator and master writer, comic even. With the first few pages we find fathers weighing down sons as Anchises, crushing them. Further, we find peasant grandfathers betraying the future, the `myth' of the family, social hierarchy as `ritual', and religion...I cannot describe how. The man, as narrator, looms formidably over his work like the tyrant fathers and grandfathers he sees handling between themselves the lives of their offspring and dependents.
The man, as the character Sartre of Les Mots, is however an `indelible transparency', a mere `reflection in a mirror' as against the deadweight of other people, heavy with their own inertia and `carved in stone'. It is only by a vicarious life in reading, and later, by the creative act of writing that he describes himself for the first time `carving out a glorious body in words'. We find the child Sartre locked away in the towering rooftops of Parisian houses, peering down on other children below and, (he admits) regrettably, shunning them for Platonic relations with Corneille, Hugo, and Wells. Other places of his youth, the public gardens and classrooms, are ever allusions, context only for the evolution of a primarily noetic being, already (at ten) seeing himself as a dead one.
Nonetheless, this is a glorious work of revival; a working out of existence from it's opposite, the juvenile reaction; a working out of self-belief from a void authority might otherwise have colonised as its own. Sartre's story, whilst neither too conventional nor applicable in modern terms is still valuable for illuminating our own childhood and our own absurdities therefrom.
 Faithless April 6, 2001
6 out of 16 found this review helpful
It may seem ironic that profound ideas can spring from an illusory childhood but Words indeed expresses this sentiment. I haven't read any other of Sartre's books but I sensed that this was a good introduction to existentialism; he founded it after all, and this is his pre-adolescent life. The story is hard going and his memories (surprisingly lucid so long after the event) are difficult to relate to, but there remain lessons applicable to all. He seemingly pinpoints his lack of obedience (as an adult) to having lost his father at an early age; an interesting anomaly given that he lived through the wars. But his refutation of religion and more particularly faith of any kind were for me the most startlingly illustrated of his points. Believe his views and there will be no salvation "atheism is a cruel, long term business" but if you don't there is still a message that cannot be ignored. Inadequacy both ways.
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