With thanks to Kenny Campbell for the review.
An immersive experience of a book, taking you into the emotional and practical lives of a group of Parisian intellectuals, writers, artists, former Resistance and current political activists immediately following the defeat of the German forces in France towards the very end of the Second World War.
Simone de Beauvoir remains famous and influential to this day principally for her philosophical books and essays on feminism, but this masterful novel distils her theoretical work on women’s roles and activism in a world dominated by men, into a superbly readable story. To this day it stands as immediately relevant in that context.
The main character (who observes and describes all that is happening around her) is a thinly-veiled self-portrait of the author, grappling with her professional work as a psychiatrist, her personal life as partner and
with her internal mental life, her own needs, desires and existential questioning, often as a result of her work with traumatised soldiers and other survivors.
The other principal characters in the story are also portraits of significant and/or intellectual figures in the life of the Left Bank in Paris in 1945. So we have accurately drawn character sketches that suggest Camus, Sartre, Derrida and others are all in the room, sitting in cafes, bars or wandering the streets.
I got lost in this book, in the best possible way. The details of daily lives and cares when combined with the depiction of a group of fascinating people trying to make sense of a France utterly transformed by trauma and victory made compelling reading: historically, politically and emotionally.
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