Word: beauvoirs
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FORCE OF CIRCUMSTANCE by Simone de Beauvoir. 658 pages. Putnam...
...Certain Pleasure. The portrait adorns the wrapper of this book, which is the third and presumably final installment in the memoirs of the most relentlessly intellectual and ungrand-motherish woman in France. Simone de Beauvoir has no husband and no children; by design, she has denied herself the rewards, or the burdens, of maternity. The smile is unreal, put on, perhaps, for the photographer; she cannot accept or endure the fact that she is now 57. Her mortality has obsessed her for a generation. "Since 1944, the most important, the most irreparable thing that has happened to me is that...
Sadly enough, not only youth has abandoned Simone de Beauvoir. So has judgment. That brilliant, recalcitrant mind, trained at the Sorbonne and annealed during the French Resistance, cannot accept the shape of the postwar world. When Dienbienphu falls, she exults, although the fallen are Frenchmen. The U.S. is decadent and bent on war. Russia is interested only in world peace, and fills the sky with Sputniks in proof of its military superiority, which will keep the peace. Pope Pius XII dies, and Mile, de Beauvoir, who renounced God at 15, accepts the news "with a certain amount of pleasure...
...Discontented Estate. In justice, this book must be measured against the life that led up to it. Born to stifling bourgeois respectability, Mile, de Beauvoir fled to the Sorbonne, where only one of her classmates stood higher in the examinations, and she determined to cast her lot with him. "It was the first time in my life," she said of Jean-Paul Sartre, "that I had felt intellectually inferior to anyone else...
...shadow of Sartre's celebrity, Mile, de Beauvoir found a derivative celebrity of her own. She was the Mother Hubbard of existentialism, a clock in a refrigerator, a cerebral loan of Arc-to cite some of the appellations, largely invidious, that were flung at her during her prime. Periodically, she issued books, all of them painstakingly analytical and exhaustingly long. The Second Sex, a dizzy blend of pedagogy, logic, emotion, prejudice and just plain talk about woman's discontented estate, became a classic. The Mandarins, her roman á clef of life with Sartre, Camus and their intellectual confraternity...