Sartre is both a philosopher and an author and his work must be treated as a whole, which means that his interpreters must combine the functions of the logician and the literary critic. Iris Murdoch accomplishes this with her study. It is a small masterpiece of compression and lucidity, but above all it is proof that philosophical argument can be technical without being lifeless. As an interpreter of German philosophical and psychological thinking to his own countrymen Sartre has played a part insufficiently recognized by critics who overrate his originality while underestimating his considerable significance as a representative of modern post-nationalist European culture. Murdoch points out that he is a thinker who stands in the wake of three post-Hegelian movements of thought: the Marxist, the existentialist, and the phenomenological. Murdoch admirably illuminates this complex background. She has made a little too much of Sartre as a thinker in his own right, and not enough of his admirable talent for translating German metaphysics into French.[1954]

In what was her first published work, Iris Murdoch here interprets, clarifies, and criticises Sartre's existentialist novels and philosophy, as well as some of his writing on literature. At only 120 pages, split into 10 chapters, this work covers a lot of different areas concisely and with insight.
Sartre is unusual for a well known philosopher in that his novels and plays have much more finesse than his somewhat disjointed and jargon-loaded academic philosophical work. Having recently read Sartre's novel Nausea, as well as his major philosophical work Being and Nothingness, I learned a lot from this short work that illuminates and ties their main concepts together. Therefore his novel becomes deeper, and his philosophy gains illustration.
Sartre's philosophy in Being and Nothingness, while falling short of being the coherent and complete philosophical system he intended, is nevertheless psychologically insightful on various matters. However, it is a laborious work to read, unlike his novels which do a much better job of highlighting these existential concepts, albeit in a very different manner. While I have not read Sartre's trilogy of novels too, these are also dealt with here and discussed, although to a lesser degree than his novel Nausea.
This is one of those books that mainly benefit the reader who is familiar with the works discussed, so I would not recommend reading this unless you have read Sartre's Nausea, or unless you are going to. However for those who have an existing interest in Sartre or Existentialism, I would recommend this highly because it concisely and accurately explains a lot of the existential themes and concepts that run through his novels and philosophy, which could otherwise remain obscure. ( )

Murdoch's short, insightful book offers a view not just of Satre's philosophy or his writing, but of these taken together to the point where the subject of the book is something more like Sartre's "outlook," where the man and his work sometimes even function as a stand-in for existentialism and a style of response to the modern world.

Murdoch focuses primarily on Satre's novels, using them as a way to grasp Sartre's positive vision for how we are to live in the world as envisaged by the existentialist, where man [sic] is an absolute value, positing value and seeking an impossible ("man is a useless passion") condition of wholeness in an inhospitable world.

The argument occasionally veers in the polemical, but only barely, and this was fine with me since she articulates well the shortcomings of Sartrean existentialism. The only time I disagreed with her was when she claimed his plays fell less victime to the "thesis first, then the art" problem that plagues his novels. ( )