The 3 best books by Simone de Beauvoir

The novel towards existential thought. With the added burden of the vigorous feminism necessary in those times (remember that in France, the country of Simone de Beauvoir, the right to vote for women was recognized in 1944, when Simone was 36 years old)

Of course, while it lasted, the conversations in the Beauvoir-Sartre marriage would be most enriching. Two philosophers together could make the most of even the simple act of cooking vegetables.

But besides the novel, Simone de Beauvoir cultivated the test characteristic of her condition as a philosopher as well as a theater, exploring the transmitting possibilities of dramaturgy.

The second sex, a purely feminist essay, may be his most representative work. From this volume the necessary foundation and argumentation of women in modern societies is built. Despite the fact that certain aspects are already out of date, the validity of many of its concepts and expositions are still valid.

But as almost always I will focus on his strictly narrative production, the field of the novel, in which he masterfully moved.

3 Recommended Novels by Simone de Beauvoir

Mandarins

The resurgence of culture after a war presents singular nuances, from the extreme crudeness of the daily story to the search for escape in the fantastic. When the world becomes humanized again by silencing the weapons, creators can once again seek the place of the human being in their environment.

Summary: Anne Dubreuilh is a Parisian psychoanalyst in her late thirties who tries to put her life back together after the shipwreck of the war. Her husband is a celebrated writer who has been around for many years and is about to enter old age. Henri Perron, his closest friend, young and attractive writer, lives his creative fullness, and his first work after the Liberation is going to be unanimously acclaimed by the public.

All of them have participated in one way or another in the resistance during the occupation. The novel begins with a party at the apartment of Paule, Henri's wife, in December 44, the first Christmas after the August days, when the war has not yet ended.

We soon realize that what has begun as a celebration is but the threshold of a time of new tears and crises. Now that freedom is palpable and real, after a prolonged period of asceticism, it would seem natural that fear and misery give way to illusion and dreams, so long cherished in the long night of occupation, and that long-postponed projects should be reborn. strongly in the prospect of its possible realization.

But nothing is going to be that easy, surreptitiously a deep crisis is going to install itself in the whole of French society and in the lives of each of the protagonists.

the mandarins simone de beauvoir

The beautiful pictures

One of the most palpable characteristics of the thinker always resides in his critical perspective of everything that surrounds him. The seams of the bourgeois society in which Simone moved lacked any real virtue. The appearances, the tinsel, the betrayals and the amorality behind the scrupulous forms ...

Summary: Laurence thinks of that king who turned everything he touched into gold and who had turned his little daughter into a magnificent metal doll. Everything she touches becomes an image.

The setting and the protagonists of "the beautiful images" serve Simone de Beauvoir in this novel to show the hypocrisy and lies of the bourgeois model. Undoubtedly, an indispensable novel within the career of the interesting French author, Jean Paul Sartre's companion.

The beautiful pictures

The broken woman

The cruelest awareness of women can stem from the violence they face for the mere fact of being a woman. Custom, tradition, old morality ... the burden that still forces the image of women as a complement rather than as an element in a relationship ...

Summary: The broken woman is the title of a book that brings together three stories ('The broken woman', 'The age of discretion' and 'Monologue') with a common thread: the presence in them as protagonists of three women victims of relationships with their partners, but victims who are not always aware of their status as such or who discover themselves as such in an unexpected way.

Love leads them to a selfless attitude that sooner or later leads to dissatisfaction and isolation. Our times are different, but the different current situation of women in society has not changed a state of things that Simone de Beauvoir was able to perceive very early and managed to describe in a really shocking way, through three narratively very different stories.

The broken woman
5/5 - (7 votes)

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