Word: beauvoir
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...nobody has ever had cause to think of Simone de Beauvoir as ordinary...
...PRIME OF LIFE (479 pp.)-Simone de Beauvoir-World...
...Sartre, 24, the high-priest-to-be of existentialism, was a physically unprepossessing philosopher with an urge to write. The two plighted their troth in what was destined to become one of the strangest and most durable extracurricular alliances of modern times. The Prime of Life is Simone de Beauvoir's account of her own philosophical growth and self-inflicted torments from 1929 to 1944-the first 15 years of her life with Sartre...
...what Sartre saw in the girl. Finally, to exorcise this succubus, Simone wrote her first successful novel, L'Invitee, which told how a young woman moved in on a sympathetic couple and so demoralized them that the wife eventually murdered her. Of this denouement. Authoress de Beauvoir says: "By killing Olga on paper I purged every twinge of resentment ... I felt for her ... Above all, by releasing [ the wife], through the agency of crime, from the dependent position in which her love for Pierre [i.e., Sartre] kept her. I regained my personal autonomy." The triangle collapsed...
World War II rescued Simone de Beauvoir from the limbo of intellectual narcissism. She and Sartre (who served at the front, and spent nine months in prison camp before escaping) were for the first time engaged in action. "I no longer pretended that I could escape my own human condition," she explains. "Instead I endeavored to bear it." The liberation of Paris (where the book ends) left Sartre and Simone full of plans to help rebuild France...