Inseparable: A Never-Before-Published Novel
Simone De Beauvoir, Tr. Sandra Smith
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Inseparable: A Never-Before-Published Novel
Simone De Beauvoir, Tr. Sandra Smith
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
... an exciting surprise.
The drama...lies in the tension between these competing and imperfectly requited loves for Andrée: first the loves of Sylvie and Madame Gallard, then the love of Pascal, a joyful Catholic philosopher (the Merleau-Ponty figure) who allows Andrée to imagine that she might reconcile duty and happiness—at least until he begins to delay proposing marriage to her. The problem that preoccupies the novel is not who loves Andrée best but what kind of love would grant her the freedom she craves.
Fluidly translated by Sandra Smith.
Andrée’s bold and playful tone is captured perfectly in Lauren Elkin’s translation from the French, which conveys, in pared-down prose, Andrée’s beguiling sensibility and the ways in which Sylvie is enraptured by her.
A piñata’s worth of surprises bursts from this novella of just 128 pages.
It's a book that unfolds through a series of intense, intimate scenes, saturated by the sensory world of childhood.
The book...is heavy-handed, schematic, and thin. It’s about the length and scope of de Beauvoir’s novellas but has been packaged as a complete novel, padded with a laudatory introduction, a defensive afterword asserting the project’s significance, and selected letters between de Beauvoir and Zaza. Still, it has obvious merits: most of all the prose and the psychological insights, which are wry and movingly direct in turn.
This bildungsroman...runs on verve, wit, and pathos mediated through the lens of an enigmatic friendship.
A lively introduction by Margaret Atwood gives the history of Beauvoir's friendship with Zaza Lacoin, the Andrée of the story.