Beauvoir, Simone de | Anne Duchêne (review date 1982)
Anne Duchêne (review date 1982)
SOURCE: A review of When Things of the Spirit Come First, in The Times Literary Supplement, July 30, 1982, p. 814.
[In her laudatory estimation of Beauvoir's stories, Duchêne observes Beauvoir's attack of bourgeois society in the collection.]
Simone de Beauvoir has always been a very economical writer as well as a prolix one, and used all her experience twice: once as material for her lengthy memoirs, and again as material for her usually lengthy fictions. With these "five early tales", written in the mid-1930s, in her own late twenties (the original title, La Primauté du Spirituel, was "ironically borrowed" from Maritain; the present translations, by Patrick O'Brian, are very happy ones) she takes economy one stage further, by discussing them, in a Preface, in the same words as she used when describing them in the second volume of her memoirs, La Force de l'Age, in 1960. Thus...
[The entire page is 764 words long]
Navigate
