Simone de beauvoir biography book
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That is a feat, and maybe over time I can begin to see she had a clearer sight into realism than I--her life attests to the constant and very real balance of both existential wholeness as well as the sacrificial nature of love. I appreciated that, as some biographies I've read often resigned to bait-and-switch, and though that approach may propel you throughout fiction, in biography you lose some of the sense of growth, change and large periods of time building upon each other to create a complete portrait of the subject.
However, I interpreted Beauvoir’s firm role as reminding Sartre of the ideas of Being and Nothingness as her own philosophy--the fact that she did not constantly move with his own philosophical fluctuation shows that she has convictions of her own, and that in many ways the ideas of Being and Nothingness were created at the pinnacle of his respect for her, when they were constantly in dialogue, and therefore she exists as a thinker within that existential system to a very great extent.
Bair argues persuasively that de Beauvoir was affectionate, generous and witty, but also quirky, opinionated, witheringly honest and generally humorless.
All in all, a well documented account of her life. Based on many interviews, and discussing each of Beauvoir's works within the chronology of her life, Bair's magnum opus combines literary biography, intellectual and oral history and feminist theory, yet centers on de Beauvoir's extraordinary long relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre.
“However in reality it should be considered separately from the decade of the 1970s when it was first of all a way of evading Sartre’s drawn out process of dying, and only after that a source of personal and professional pleasure.”
However, to read about a woman of such intellectual power, self-possession, and commitment to freedom was refreshing.
To touch on the author, Bair’s, actual construction--it read in journalistic style but was sectioned into chapters that left you with whole ideas and themes within Beauvoir’s life.
Though I was surprised to see this, I feel it is in direct contrast to the author’s assumption that she never *succumbed* to womanhood, as she constantly makes it seem.
Simone adopted if not as recognizable the predictable female role. Bair adds much to our knowledge of every aspect of de Beauvoir's life--her love affairs with Nelson Algren and Claude Lanzmann, her attitudes toward Camus, Giacometti, Koestler, Merleau-Ponty and many others--but, like Bair's own description of de Beauvoir's book on Sartre, the biography is sometimes ``detailed to the point of inducing fatigue and boredom.'' (Apr.)
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Reviewed on: 03/31/1990
Genre: Nonfiction
So, unfortunately, my initial question of whether a woman can be in tune with this tendency and also create an identity for herself unafraid to be in conflict with and exist without those for which they care goes unanswered in Simone’s life.
I'll probably write an essay on in it and leave it somewhere on the dregs of the internet because there are so many interesting both political and philosophical questions raised by such a fascinating person's life.
(Also, spoiler, piles of dry journalistic pages and turning Sartre into a cold-hearted, somewhat hedonistic egoist did not prepare me for "'The real world,' he tells her in once instance, 'That was what I lived in with you," as if to say that all other people and things mattered less to him.' Wah, it still hurts)
Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography
Deirdre Bair.
As for Beauvoir herself, this book is very keen to emphasize that Beauvoir was very much philosophically dependent on Sartre for most of her life. Although never bound by the traditional constraints of marriage or family, she guarded Sartre jealously.
Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography
Eighteen and in Love with Love
A Highminded Little Bourgeois
The Young Girl Who Worked Too Much
Castor
On Her Paris Honeymoon
Learning to Be Alone Again
Rouen
Paris
What Will Happen Tomorrow?
When Life Goes Slightly Adrift
To Stay and Try to Survive
Socialism and Liberty
The Promise of the Future
How to Make a Living
Flinging Oneself on the Future
Always Something to Say
Moving in Some Sort of Blur
Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography
Little Brown and Company, $24.45 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-671-60681-7
This impressively researched biography by the author of Samuel Beckett is the most detailed account to date of the life and work of de Beauvoir (1908-1986). She continues to be a model for both women and myself personally, in that she never faltered in confidence regarding her skills and never completely let anything subsume her until there was simply no Simone de Beauvoir left.
The book, or their life together really, raises another good point for dialogue also, in that she was fine doing Sartre’s social dirty work as well as giving him all the credit for the existential basis of The Second Sex. Though the author seems convinced that Simone was a man “eluded the usual duties of her sex”, in that she did not “suffer fools and [was] never to be bound by the traditional constraints of marriage, family or housework”, Simone did suffer Sartre’s foolery often, compromised her relationship with Algren to remain available constantly to Sartre (constraints, if not traditional), replicated child relationships in Slyvie (and Sartre in Arlette) and truly was constantly doing his housework--running Les Temps Modernes in its entirety because he simply grew bored.