Word: beauvoirs
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...Second Sex Revisited LES BELLES IMAGES by Simone de Beauvoir. 224 pages. Putnam...
When Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex) casts her cold, existentialist eye on the predicament of modern woman, the author emerges like a tough-minded, hardhearted Fransoise Sagan. Les Belles Images has sold over 100,000 copies in France for reasons that have nothing to do with the art of fiction. In its brief compass (long enough to irritate, short enough to finish between lunch and cocktails), the novel lambastes modern life, love, marriage and values with thoroughgoing cynicism. It is bound to have an insidious appeal: it can make a woman wallow in self-pity. The scene...
...outward affluence and fake wellbeing, says Author de Beauvoir, are the worst kind of illusion; reality is bile. Yet on the very last page, there seems to be a smidgen of vague hope, at least for the children-maybe. That is small compensation for a novel that is distinguished otherwise only for its predictable course and Gallic ennui...
...number of women are publishing too: Edna O'Brien (The Lonely Girl) will crank out yet another book about Kate and Baba-now married, unhappily of course. Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images is about a lady executive who of course becomes disenchanted with comfort, possessions and conventional life. Brigid Brophy and Pamela Hansford Johnson are both writing about modern London; Brigid's is comic, Pamela's serious...
...plot - just a splattering stream of Freudian chaos, a surrealistic carnival revue dwelling on food, money and sex. Le Desir was per formed twice, by experimental theaters in Manhattan and Vienna; shortly after the play was written, a cast headed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir gave it a formal reading in Paris under Albert Camus' direction. Nobody else had tried it since; the show is more of a happening than a play...