Intro: Can I pinch a bit myself? Me, practically a no one, with no literary training, I am reviewing - although for a very very small audience - sure 1, hopefully at least 5 -, Simone de Beauvoir? That Simone whose books were my inspiration for my rebelious teenage years. The Simone de Beauvoir whose Tous les gens sont mortels or The Third Sex or The Mandarins were my bread and butter and the red wine of my teenage years. I even dreamed one day to have a life partner so smart and famous like Sartre - not the case any more. Who I am to scribble out in the air my thoughts and bits of self-made literary criticism? I asked the wind. No one, comes the answer back, but still do it because it´s your mission to write and there is nothing else you can do better, anyway.
Inseparables translated from French by Sandra Smith, a story of a teenage friendship inspired from a real-life female friendschip, by Simone de Beauvoir was published this September, 35 years after de Beauvoir´s death. I rarely read French novels in translation but I was so eager to get this particular novel that I made an exception. Smith who translated, among others, all the books by Irène Némirovosky as well as Camus and Maupassant, offered an excellent English rendition that reads as fluently as an original version.
The novel was initially finished in 1954. De Beauvoir made no secret in have written it, as she mentions in her memoirs of having showed it to her lifetime companion, Sartre, who ´held his nose´ after reading it. She recognize herself that the novel is not worth publishing it and ignore it. 75 years later, her adopted daughter and companion for over 25 years, Sylvie le Bon de Beauvoir in charge with her literary legacy - who wrote the postface of my edition adding some letters exchanged between Simone and the female inspiration of the character of Andrée - discovered it and published it.
Is this fair to risk such a publishing decision? Although there is no explicit mention in de Beauvoir´s will regarding the publishing of this book, doing it without the explicit agreement of the author may affect the literary legacy as such. Maybe a critical, annotated edition will be important in order to create the proper context and eventually avoid a negative reflection on her literary works. Was she really convinced that Sartre´s rejection was deserved or just accepted it for intellectual connivence reasons? We would definitely not have the answers to this questions, and one can speculate that Sartre tried in fact to belittle her - and probably he did it more than once - but as for now, that´s all we have, speculations...
But we have something else as well, which is Inseparables, labelled in France as ´a tragic lesbian love story´. A short - around 200 pages long - book about the friendship between Sylvie, a shy Catholic schoolgirl, and the rebelious Andrée Gallard. They met - in the book - as they were ten and stayed friends until Andrée´s death of encephalitis shortly after her 21st birthday. The model of this friendship was inspired by Simone de Beauvoir´s own relationship with Zaza, Elisabeth Lacoin, who died of the same malady as a young woman. Andrée´s fiancé, Pascal, is inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, another important existentialist French philosopher at the time.
For me, personally, the book was a pleasure, my Proustian Madeleine as the style and the topics, as well as the approach in building the story and the characters reminded me of the times when I couldn´t wait to find my voice - as a woman and writing-addict. The meeting between the conventional - Sylvie - and the unconventional - Andrée - and the efforts towards outliving a social system based on caste and prestige, inamovible and rigid, is a typical feature of many novels written at the time, particularly by women. De Beauvoir herself developped such topics in her memoirs and novels.
Reading such novels with the eyes of the 21st century, used with literary complexities and fine constructions of stories and characters may lead to the conclusion that books like this belong to the past. Many of the constraints and approaches of the characters, women characters, are obsolete and awkward and there is no fine style take to be found.
However, a contextualisation of the story - in terms of mentality and social evolution - may prove that although maybe Inseparables is more ´intimate´ than a literary achievement, it is a novel shaped according to the classical literature matrix which does have something to say to an out-of-time audience. About women, about love, about what we expect from each other.
Rating: 3.5 stars (but stars are largely relative in this case)
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