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paigeweb's review against another edition
reflective
sad
4.5
Religion could do no more for my mother than the hope for posthumous success could do for me. Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.
stephibabes's review against another edition
4.0
Intracately and painfully detailed account of her mothers death. Many ticker tapes poking out in relation to my PhD. Deeply moving and beautifully written.
pink_lobster's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
thebobsphere's review against another edition
5.0
Before Annie Ernaux, Simone de Beauvoir also documented certain aspects of her life and giving them a philosophical twist, I will stop with the comparisons as it’s not fair.
1964’s A Very Easy Death documents the last six weeks of Simone de Beauvoir’s mother, who was already the subject of 1958’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. In the book her mother slips while in the bath and breaks her femur, which leads to other complications.
Simone de Beauvoir portrays her mother as an emancipated woman, when her husband died, her mother began to do things she was not able to do such as travel and not meet her friends as her husband (Simone de Beauvoir’s father) banned her from doing, yet she also portrays her as a submissive person, within her marriage and to an certain extent during her illness. Thus she is a contradictory person.
As the illness gets worse de Beauvoir notices the decay of her body, at one point she calls her mother a living zombie, in which she then questions her mother’s existence and the imminent death. At this point we are seeing de Beauvoir’s main philosophies embedded in A Very Easy Death: feminism and existentialism, the former is because her mother was overpowered by a man, This crops up again through the incompetence of the male doctors tending to her mother. The latter is through her mother being on the brink of death.
When her mother dies, de Beauvoir wonders why she has taken it so badly and she comes to the conclusion that her mother had a bigger part in her life, which intensified her feelings towards her. As a conclusion de Beauvoir states that death is never natural or easy, it’s is always the cause of something.
As I said earlier A Very Easy Death was controversial because it was thought that de Beauvoir was capitalising her mother’s death, In fact, Ali Smith states in her excellent introduction to this Fitzcarraldo reissue, that de Beauvoir was taking notes by her mother’s hospital bed. Despite these accusations the book is an emotional one with many heartfelt moments. In a Very Easy Death, the topic is treated in a open and unflinching way but at the same time it’s not cold and calculating.