Word: beauvoire
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...MANDARINS (610 pp.)-Simone de Beauvoir-World Publishing...
Like many of her sisters in what she bitterly refers to as the Second Sex, France's Simone de Beauvoir would rather talk than eat. Since she is the grande dame of French existentialism and all-round good friend of Jean-Paul Sartre who founded it, it goes without saying that there is a minimum of natter in her chatter. She can be wrongheaded, she can make ridiculous statements (America Day by Day; TIME, Dec. 14, 1953), but even her nonsense is the product of one of the sharpest and best-stocked minds in letters...
When Simone de Beauvoir is not talking, she is writing. Her novels, like her talk, run the gamut from just silly (All Men Are Mortal; TIME, Feb. 7, 1955) to brilliant (She Came to Stay; TIME, March 15, 1954). Her latest novel, The Mandarins (roughly, The Intellectuals), is not her best, but it is her most successful. It brought her close to a seat in the Goncourt Academy, fetched her the Goncourt Prize instead, and brought her a sale in France of 250,000 copies. Now that it is published in the U.S., it is not too hard...
...they often command more attention than politicians or priest Roman Catholic Novelist François Mauriac, in Le Figaro, urges French youth to a more dynamic Christian socialism. Existentialist Merleau-Ponty attacks Sartre for his latter-day allegiance to Stalinism in L'Express, is answered by Simone de Beauvoir in Les Temps Modernes...
French intellectuals are appalled at the "bourgeois barbarism" that relegates U.S. intellectuals to the status of "eggheads." After a shuddering visit to the U.S., Simone (The Second Sex) de Beauvoir, complained: "The U.S. is hard on intellectuals. Publishers, managers evaluate your brains with a critical and disgusted air, like an impresario asking a dancer to show her legs...