Word: beauvoirs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...CAME TO STAY (404 pp.)-Simone de Beauvoir-World...
Simone de Beauvoir's place in the French intellectual world is that of a woman who has marched into an all-male club and taken over a deep chair by the window. She cannot be thrown out because 1) she is a first-rate expounder of the teachings of one of the club's most celebrated current philosophers (and her great and good friend), Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, and 2) she can talk most of the other members under the intellectual table...
Author de Beauvoir's introduction to the club was perhaps her 1943 novel, L'Invitee, now published in the U.S. as She Came to Stay. It is the story of what happens when a devoted couple make the mistake of inviting a blonde to live with them in Paris, and Author de Beauvoir's publishers have jacketed the book with a picture of the kind of sultry number for whom strong men lose their wits. This is a mistake. She Came to Stay is an admirable novel not because there is a blonde in it, but because...
Passion for Pacifism. Author de Beauvoir begins by showing the perfect, almost mathematical harmony into which her lovers, Pierre and Franchise, have built their lives. He is an intellectual actor-producer, she an equally intellectual writer. Around this hard-working pair in 1938-39 swirls the theater life of Paris, popping with misfits, eccentrics, and tough careerists. Smug in her harmony with Pierre, Franchise finds it hard to understand why other people's lives are so full of discord...
Lessons for Children. Author de Beauvoir is at her brightest and best in describing the sort of exasperation that takes a keen-witted, methodical man when he tries to get the better of a girl who lives stubbornly by whim and base instinct. The more Pierre tries to discipline Xaviere, the more apt she is to turn up at the wrong place at the wrong time, or to keep an appointment for an intellectual talk at a sidewalk cafe loaded down with a bag of shrimp and bananas...