The Inseparables
Author: Simone de Beauvoir
Published by: Vintage
Pages: 150
Format: Hardback
My Rating ★★★★★
Published by: Vintage
Pages: 150
Format: Hardback
My Rating ★★★★★
When Andree joins her school, Sylvie is immediately fascinated. Andree is small for her age, but walks with the confidence of an adult. Under her red coat, she hides terrible burn scars. And when she imagines beautiful things, she gets goosebumps... Secretly Sylvie believes that Andree is a prodigy about whom books will be written.
The girls become close. They talk for hours about equality, justice, war and religion; they lose respect for their teachers; they build a world of their own. But they can't stay like this forever.
Written in 1954, five years after The Second Sex, the novel was never published in Simone de Beauvoir's lifetime. This first English edition includes an afterword by her adopted daughter, who discovered the manuscript hidden in a drawer, and photographs of the real-life friendship which inspired and tormented the author.
The girls become close. They talk for hours about equality, justice, war and religion; they lose respect for their teachers; they build a world of their own. But they can't stay like this forever.
Written in 1954, five years after The Second Sex, the novel was never published in Simone de Beauvoir's lifetime. This first English edition includes an afterword by her adopted daughter, who discovered the manuscript hidden in a drawer, and photographs of the real-life friendship which inspired and tormented the author.
My thoughts:
This is an emotional, very intimate, and poignant novella from Simone de Beauvoir, only recently published for the first time in English. This edition is translated by Lauren Elkin and includes an afterword by her adopted daughter, who discovered the manuscript hidden in a drawer, alongside photographs of the real-life friendship which inspired and tormented the author.
The Inseparables tells the story of two friends, Andrée and Sylvie, following their lives from school where they meet, into adulthood. They initially seem similar but their contrasting family dynamics and opinions about religion show them to be quite different.
Andrée is brilliant and not too diligent, talented, and audacious. She dares to express her opinions to teachers, and in school she and Sylvie become so close that the teachers call them “inseparable.”
Sylvie, our narrator, recounts the enigmatic nature of her bond with Andrée. She is fascinated by her.
The book tells a beautifully written story about an unusual friendship between these two very individual girls, exploring how a friendship can mean such different things to the people in them. The story challenges the expectations that society had for women at this time and sees the girls struggle with the conventions of the French bourgeois of the early twentieth century. Despite the rules, they keep up a correspondence and talk at length to each other, earning themselves the disapproval of Andrée’s mother who frowns upon their long and possibly intimate conversations.
Autobiographical in nature and written in 1954, the story was inspired by the inseparable friendship between Simone de Beauvoir and her friend Elisabeth ‘Zaza’ Lacoin. Zaza tragically died of encephalitis at the age of twenty-one.
There are several Simone de Beauvoir books that I’ve been meaning to read for a while, and I’m even more looking forward to reading them now. I love this type of intimate writing and was completely drawn in by the way de Beauvoir shows the intensity of adolescent friendships. I’m hopeful that the rumours are true, and this is only the first of other unpublished novels yet to follow.
Overall reaction:
This is an emotional, very intimate, and poignant novella from Simone de Beauvoir, only recently published for the first time in English. This edition is translated by Lauren Elkin and includes an afterword by her adopted daughter, who discovered the manuscript hidden in a drawer, alongside photographs of the real-life friendship which inspired and tormented the author.
The Inseparables tells the story of two friends, Andrée and Sylvie, following their lives from school where they meet, into adulthood. They initially seem similar but their contrasting family dynamics and opinions about religion show them to be quite different.
Andrée is brilliant and not too diligent, talented, and audacious. She dares to express her opinions to teachers, and in school she and Sylvie become so close that the teachers call them “inseparable.”
Sylvie, our narrator, recounts the enigmatic nature of her bond with Andrée. She is fascinated by her.
The book tells a beautifully written story about an unusual friendship between these two very individual girls, exploring how a friendship can mean such different things to the people in them. The story challenges the expectations that society had for women at this time and sees the girls struggle with the conventions of the French bourgeois of the early twentieth century. Despite the rules, they keep up a correspondence and talk at length to each other, earning themselves the disapproval of Andrée’s mother who frowns upon their long and possibly intimate conversations.
Autobiographical in nature and written in 1954, the story was inspired by the inseparable friendship between Simone de Beauvoir and her friend Elisabeth ‘Zaza’ Lacoin. Zaza tragically died of encephalitis at the age of twenty-one.
There are several Simone de Beauvoir books that I’ve been meaning to read for a while, and I’m even more looking forward to reading them now. I love this type of intimate writing and was completely drawn in by the way de Beauvoir shows the intensity of adolescent friendships. I’m hopeful that the rumours are true, and this is only the first of other unpublished novels yet to follow.
Overall reaction:
