Scan barcode
A review by stefhyena
The Prime of Life by Simone de Beauvoir
5.0
This was a difficult, slow, thick with meaning, rich and sometimes irritating read. I did not like the young(ish) Beaver and I absolutely LOATHED Sartre until the war started and they did some growing up. I saw so much irony in their very mollycoddled seeming petit bourgeois lifestyle where they played at teaching but really went on endless holidays and theatre performances and pubs.
By the end of the book they are not reformed but just wiser with it and at times have shown a more resilient and ethical stance than just pure hedonism. I kind of related to Simone even when I was judging her (I mean I read the book over my relatively comfortable summer and largely in two motels by beaches and with a glass of shiraz in my hand so I am hardly some sort of ascetic. It was interesting to see Simone's (the Beaver's) struggles to write and she is pretty honest about being flawed in various ways (when she misses the point I don't know if she is being clever and post-structuralist or just unaware). I was not a fan of Sartre even by the end of the book, he had the easy entitlement of the relatively well off white man who is accepted and promoted everywhere.
I have to say I was expecting more observations about gender from the author of the second sex but what we get is a pretense at being unconventional but a heterosexual clinging and deference to Sartre, a focus on her appearance, willingness to take on a domestic role she is no more cut out for or interested in than he is and a mild trying-not-to-seem-a-prude-but-fear-of-lesbians that comes through a couple of times generally with mockery as an alibi. But the way they were joined by having minds that really appreciated each other as well as the trust (assuming she was being honest...she showed very little conflict or angst about Sartre) was beautiful in the long run. I think the war reconciled me to them as an item too though as the liberation approached and they became drunk hedonists I (hypocritically perhaps) judged how casual even maybe proud the author was of this part of their life.
It was gross how much meat and animal products they constantly ate (even foie gras) but I know that was accurate and I approve of describing food in a book. The constant philosophising and name dropping would have irritated me more from practically any other author (passages of the book were however tedious lists of people it was hard to keep track of and who were probably more important to the author than the reader). The switch to an "abridged" section of her journal during the war flowed surprisingly well.
This motivated me to write more, when my son went to his dad's to take myself off to a country town (even though I can't really afford it) and gorge myself on wonderful (in my case plant-based) food with some wine and dessert and pick wild flowers and WRITE. My writing is in some ways as not as serious as the Beavers (I am not writing a "great novel" that is an obsession I gave away in my 20s) but I have given myself permission to blog and write poems and all the rest of it.
This was a much nicer insight into something I would see as Bohemiam (I might be anacronystic there) than the book I read last year by Dulcie Deamer which was frankly a big pretentious disappointment. Much of the dark and horrible stuff around the rise of nazism and the beginning of the war both chilled me in parallels toward today and weirdly reassured me in how certain some of them were that the world would end. I feel inspired to write and be and oppose fascism, even imperfect and overeating as I am
By the end of the book they are not reformed but just wiser with it and at times have shown a more resilient and ethical stance than just pure hedonism. I kind of related to Simone even when I was judging her (I mean I read the book over my relatively comfortable summer and largely in two motels by beaches and with a glass of shiraz in my hand so I am hardly some sort of ascetic. It was interesting to see Simone's (the Beaver's) struggles to write and she is pretty honest about being flawed in various ways (when she misses the point I don't know if she is being clever and post-structuralist or just unaware). I was not a fan of Sartre even by the end of the book, he had the easy entitlement of the relatively well off white man who is accepted and promoted everywhere.
I have to say I was expecting more observations about gender from the author of the second sex but what we get is a pretense at being unconventional but a heterosexual clinging and deference to Sartre, a focus on her appearance, willingness to take on a domestic role she is no more cut out for or interested in than he is and a mild trying-not-to-seem-a-prude-but-fear-of-lesbians that comes through a couple of times generally with mockery as an alibi. But the way they were joined by having minds that really appreciated each other as well as the trust (assuming she was being honest...she showed very little conflict or angst about Sartre) was beautiful in the long run. I think the war reconciled me to them as an item too though as the liberation approached and they became drunk hedonists I (hypocritically perhaps) judged how casual even maybe proud the author was of this part of their life.
It was gross how much meat and animal products they constantly ate (even foie gras) but I know that was accurate and I approve of describing food in a book. The constant philosophising and name dropping would have irritated me more from practically any other author (passages of the book were however tedious lists of people it was hard to keep track of and who were probably more important to the author than the reader). The switch to an "abridged" section of her journal during the war flowed surprisingly well.
This motivated me to write more, when my son went to his dad's to take myself off to a country town (even though I can't really afford it) and gorge myself on wonderful (in my case plant-based) food with some wine and dessert and pick wild flowers and WRITE. My writing is in some ways as not as serious as the Beavers (I am not writing a "great novel" that is an obsession I gave away in my 20s) but I have given myself permission to blog and write poems and all the rest of it.
This was a much nicer insight into something I would see as Bohemiam (I might be anacronystic there) than the book I read last year by Dulcie Deamer which was frankly a big pretentious disappointment. Much of the dark and horrible stuff around the rise of nazism and the beginning of the war both chilled me in parallels toward today and weirdly reassured me in how certain some of them were that the world would end. I feel inspired to write and be and oppose fascism, even imperfect and overeating as I am