Les Mots

This autobiographical narrative, ostensibly recounting the career of a man of letters, dismantles literature itself, exposing every dreamer’s error: mistaking their disenchantment for truth. For Sartre, writing had long meant giving meaning, “wresting my life,” as he put it, “from chance.” Having renounced this wager, the fifty-year-old author of Les Mots draws a final reckoning of his past illusions: “for about ten years now I have been a man waking up, cured of a long, bitter and sweet madness, who cannot get over it and who cannot recall his former wanderings without laughing, and who no longer knows what to do with his life.”

A very fine copy.