There follows a fitful few pages where Delarue reaches the apartment block and makes his way to Lola’s room, finding her naked and seemingly stone dead in bed. Not that the subsequent books lack this, but the Reprieve’s focus on simultaneity and Iron in the Soul’s immersion into total war ensure the Age of Reason maintains a humane and innocent edge as it is set prior to the world’s descent into madness.

It has two effects in that in one case existentialism is us making a concerted effort to define ourselves (such as me being the straight guy that pretends he knows nothing about brothels and sits in the Crown Casino reading a book) and the outward effects of that definition, in that people see who you are and respond to this. I daresay she has [been studying hard], in her own way—that is, she no doubt sits for hours over a book. If the book does not rise to the stature of a great, or even a very good, novel, it at least does not try to show a great panorama of society, and fail. He had seen enough of such people at the Sorbonne, pretentious young wiseacres, bleak, bespectacled products of the Ecole Normale, who always had a personal theory in reserve, and invariably ended by making fools of themselves somehow.Boris tries to touch Lola for the money he knows Mathieu needs but makes up a clumsy cover story and causes a big argument with the singer.

This is something most of us realize, at least on some level, but I don't think I've ever seen it rendered so well in fiction. Daniel Sereno is the extremely good looking gay friend of Mathieu, although they don’t appear to get on particularly well. Yesterday morning… when you had the impertinence to touch me… I said to myself—that’s the way a married man behaves. She agrees, but the situation becomes worse as, back home, Delarue finally admits his feelings for her. 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.This does have a potential to backfire though because the idea of defining oneself can apply only to that which can be perceived, and there are times when we try to create a perception that does not work. Sometimes it felt like ‘Monty Python and the French Philosopher’, with John Cleese saying in a heavy French accent, ‘Oh no, I feeel ze anguish of freedom oppressing my consciousness and feeelling me with despair at ze ‘uman condeetion’.