The Last Chance: Roads of Freedom IV

Description

The first English translation of Sartre's unfinished fourth volume of Roads of Freedom, exploring themes central to Sartrean existentialism. Based on the French Pleiade edition, published by Gallimard in 1981, the book also includes an interview with Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir's account of his plans for the unfinished work, and introductory material by the editor of the French edition.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) French existentialist philosopher, novelist, and playwright who, with Jean Anouilh, dominated the postwar French theatre. In 1964 he refused the Nobel Prize for literature. In 1929 Sartre graduated from the Ecole Normale Superieure, where he formed a lifelong partnership with his fellow student Simone de Beauvoir, the writer and feminist. His melodramatic plays explore moral conflicts with a deep Gallic pessimism, while also expounding the philosophical existentialism he popularized in the 1940s. The first, Les Mouches, an interpretation of the Orestes story, opened in 1943 in Paris. As The Flies it was produced in New York in 1947 and in London in 1951. The one-act Huis-Clos opened in Paris in 1944 and was subsequently produced in London as Vicious Circle and in New York as No Exit. Morts sans sepultures (1946), about a group of captured Resistance fighters, was seen in London as Men Without Shadows (1947) and in New York as The Victors (1948). Le Diable et le bon dieu (1951), based on the Faust of Goethe, is often regarded as Sartre's best dramatic work. His other plays include Nekrassov (1955), about a confidence trickster who assumes the identity of the Soviet ambassador, and the wartime drama Les Sequestres d'Altona (1959), produced in 1961 in London as Loser Wins and in 1965 in New York as The Condemned of Altona. Sartre's adaptation of the elder Dumas's Kean was seen in 1953 in Paris, reworked as a US musical in 1961, and produced at the Oxford Playhouse in 1970 (later transferring to London). Jean-Paul Sartre (1904-1980) was a French existentialist philosopher, dramatist, novelist and critic. He is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential European thinkers of the twentieth century. Craig Vasey is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Mary Washington, USA.

Recommended by New Statesman. 'With explanatory notes and generous critical padding ... As a continuation of Roads of Freedom, Craig Vasey's gritty translation will be of most interest to students of Sartre; it offers only hints at the directions a fourth volume may have taken in story and style, but those familiar with the earlier instalments will find a few surprises among its reassembled shards.' - James Purdon, The Observer 'The quality of Sartre's writing, accomanied here by engaging essays and interviews, has never been more evident than in this excellent translation ... fresh, organic, and decidedly human.' - The Guardian 'The Last Chance is of huge importance to Sartre scholars for the moral, political and philosophical ideas it contains and for what it reveals about Sartre's post-war intellectual dilemmas ... Readers of the first three volumes will be thoroughly entertained by this incomplete but nonetheless revealing and powerful fourth installment.' - The Philosophers' Magazine "Vasey presents the first English translation of the two parts of volume four of French philosopher Sartre's (1905-80) trilogy Roads of Freedom, and that is only the beginning of the confusion. The title Les Chemins de la liberte applies to the series of novels as a whole, he explains, but each of the five novels has its own title. These two final ones, Strange Friendship and The Last Chance, were published in 1981 by Editions Gallimard, Paris. Introductory material includes a 1945 interview, and comments Sartre made on the novels. The text is followed by critical essays on the two novels and the series." -Eithne O'Leyne, BOOK NEWS, Inc. [Vasey's] reading is a bold one, one that asks questions and stirs debate. In this respect, be they roads to or of freedom, this volume allows contemporary Anglophone readers to continue to engage with Sartre's writing critically and, as far as possible, freely. -- The European Legacy, Volume 16, Number 5 "The publication of the fourth volume of Sartre's Roads of Freedom is a key contribution to the field of Sartre studies. English-speaking readers will here have access for the first time to the sequel to what they thought was a trilogy. It is an important sequel, as translator Craig Vasey so aptly shows. In these pages, the roads of freedom take an interesting turn, unveiling Sartre's own trajectory with regards to the concepts of freedom and commitment. Vasey's translation makes these texts available with a concern for accuracy and respect for Sartre's words. Further, this book complements Sartre's manuscripts with a scholarly apparatus that makes it more than a mere translation. This is a scholarly edition of the fourth volume that will shed a new light on Sartre's notion of freedom and how it ought to be pursued. A key reading for anyone interested in Sartre as a writer and/or philosopher." - Professor Christine Daigle, Brock University, Canada "The English speaking world has had to wait nearly thirty years before obtaining access to Jean-Paul Sartre's The Last Chance: Roads of Freedom IV. Therefore, Craig Vasey's faithful translation represents an important contribution to a better and more complete understanding of Sartre's fictional world. It will also help English speakers to situate more clearly his literary production in the context of his complete writings and illuminate the directions in which Sartre attempted to find solutions for his tortured protagonists to the vexing problems of freedom, friendship and fate in a bewildering universe dominated by vicious and hostile ideologies." - Adrian van den Hoven, University of Windsor, Canada