It’s a horrible thing, a woman who labors to lead a man’s hands to her body by appealing to his mind.The irony of the author of The Second Sex having published this five years after the previous kills me, it really does. What's worse is her having won the Prix Goncourt for it, a weighty stamp of approved literature prowess that says nothing less than, yes, this is how you discuss philosophical theories in the midst of love and warfare: trot the men out trigger happy and reduce the women to self-hating despair. I can imagine a younger self of mine picking this up before TSS; imagining what would have inevitably resulted makes me sick.Beauvoir did not publicly declare herself a feminist till 1972. I don't envy the life that made her forbear from such a declaration until TSS was nearly a quarter of a century old. I don't envy what ignorant bliss the characters in this book must have been in until WWII rolled around and the world transformed into a geography of atomic bombs and concentration camps. I don't envy the balancing act they all had to maintain, bandying political agendas and philosophical jargon and standing up for the oppressed via paper, all the while dehumanizing every female within reach and then some. Women and men alike, self-contempt for one and indulgent solipsism for the other, a mutilation that cannot help but be inextricably mixed with any and all of their good intentions. If Beauvoir's portraits of her fellow thinkers are as keen as some say they are, their crises of existentialism and absurdism don't surprise me. It's hard to live with yourself when your definition of freedom is psychopathology. “If others don’t count, it’s meaningless to write. But if they do count, it’s wonderful to gain their friendship and their confidence; it’s magnificent to hear your own thoughts echoed in them.”"All that writing about the melancholy of the Portuguese and how mysterious it is. Actually it's ridiculously simple: of seven million Portuguese, there are only seventy thousand who have enough to eat."When I was a child, a teacher seemed to me a much greater person than a duchess or a millionaire, and through the years that hierarchy had not changed appreciably.However. Those up there are only a few of many of the wonderful things Beauvoir pens in regards to education, literature, the intersection of humanity with the written word. A few years ago, for the sake of these pearls, I might have excused her atrocious double standards when it came to characterizing both shell and core of the gendered dichotomy. I even gave her the benefit of the doubt until the last page was turned, hoping this all too rigorous misogyny would be flipped over, left wriggling and wailing on its thickened carapace with its soft and sickening underbelly all too clearly exposed. There are instances, perfectly gorgeous instances where the author could have stepped forward and outfitted phrases like these: To maintain that I alone hold our affair in my hands is to substitute a puppet for Lewis, to transform myself into a ghost and our past into anemic memories. Our love isn’t a story I can pull out of the context of my life in order to tell it to myself. It exists outside myself; Lewis and I bear it together. Closing one’s eyes isn’t enough to do away with the sun; disavowing that love is only blinding myself. No, I rejected cautious thinking, and false solitude, and sordid consolations.“You throw men into a war and then, at the first rape, you hang them!”with the sharp and incisive insight I knew in TSS that they so rightfully deserve. Instead, the malaise extends to all reaches of the third person man and the first person woman, generating a plot with girlfriends in a refrigerator, male characters with not a physical description or unsubstantiated denigration in sight, and the good old colonialist mindset. Practice reducing those around you to ciphers long enough, and something's gotta give. "I don't want to think about myself any more," she said violently. "I've had enough of thinking about myself. Don't give me bad advice."You can't think yourself out of feeling alienated. You can think yourself into it right quick if you insist on dressing it up in the word "freedom", treating your interpersonal relationships like trash, and pretending your work and your money will see fit to care when you're lost and alone and thinking of ending it all. You'll be free when you're dead, not only dead but forgotten, not only forgotten but negligible in the impact you made on the reality of others through your ideologies, your habitus, how you lived and what you learned and the whys and wherefores of the things you said. You'll be free when what you did in the name of what you held dear is so warped by the ones who come after you that no one will believe the origin of it all was you, and you alone. "The freedom of a writer—it would be interesting to know what that means,"Beauvoir wasn't free, and so I don't blame her. I don't blame any woman who views thought as equivalent to self-immolation and conducted/conducts/will conduct herself as such. What I will do is remember my introduction to feminism, when it first became clear that it was not and had never been just me. What I will do is not sacrifice my political ideals just because I can't sway millions in a day. What I will do is better myself with the ideas and live for the humans, for at the end of the day and the triumphs and the horrors and the same old same old, it is awfully nice to sit down and reaffirm one's existence with someone who cares.
Mandarinler, İkinci Dünya Savaşı sonrası Paris'te yaşamakta olan bir grup entelektüel yazarın hayatlarıyla ve birbirleriyle olan ilişkilerini, mücadelelerini konu alıyor. Ve bu yazarlar Simone'nin hayatındaki insanların ta kendisi. Henri karakteri yazar Albert Camus'u, Anne karakteri Simone'nin kendisini, Anne'in kocası Robert ise tabi ki de Jean Paul Sartre'ı canlandırıyor. Olaylar Henri ve Anne'in ağzından aktarılmış. Bu sebeple Simone'nin yaşadıkları dolayısıyla neler hissettiğini çok iyi bir şekilde anlayabiliyoruz.Nazilerin yenilmesinden sonra Paris entelektüelleri bir ikilemde kalırlar. Stalin'in uyguladığı yöntemlere karşı olsalar da sosyalist bir Avrupa için Sovyetler Birliğine ihtiyaçları olduğunu düşünürler ama o dönemin komünistleriyle beraber çalışmaları imkansızdır. Troçkistlere yapılanlar ve sol kesimdeki kendinden başkasını düşman görme tavırları onları bu ayrışmaya iter. Birleşip sol görüşlü ama komünist olmayan bir hareket kurmaya karar verirler.Tabi böyle olunca hainlikle suçlanma olasılığıyla karşı karşıya kalırlar. Daha sonra Sovyetlerin "çalışma" kampları tüm acımasızlığı ve kesinliğiyle karşılarına çıkınca kendi aralarında da kopmalar yaşanır. Tam 9. 800. 000 insan yargılanmadan suçlu bulunarak bu kamplara gönderilmiştir. En ağır koşullarda çalıştırılıp, hastalanınca da ölüme terk edilirler. Gestapo kamplarından farkı nedir peki bunun?Fark yoktur.Henri bu kampları kamuoyuna duyurmazsalar aşağılık bir tavır olacağını savunur. Ama Robert duyurmalarına karşı çıkar. Amerikan Emperyalizmine karşı sadece Sovyetlerin şansı olduğunu, bu belgeleri yayınlarlarsa antikomünist damgası yiyeceklerini söyler. Henri onu dinlemez ve belgeleri yayınlatır. Tabi herkes ayağa kalkar. Bu bir nevi o herkesin eşit olacağı muhteşem dünya hayallerinin sonu gibidir.Kitapta Henri ve Robert bir süre küs kalsalar da sonra yine barışırlar. Kurdukları oluşumun başarısız oluşu ve Amerika'nın özellikle Hiroşima'ya atom bombası attıktan sonra ki gücü onları büyük umutsuzluğa sürükler. Yine de yazmaktan vazgeçemezler. Simone o günkü şartlarda insanın değerlerine ihanet etmeden yaşamasının nasıl zor olduğunu çok iyi anlatmış. Örneğin Henri Josette isimli bir kadın yüzünden, Gestapo'ya muhbirlik yapmış biri için sahte tanıklık yapmak zorunda kalır ve adam kurtulur. Bu kendisine sosyalist diyen bir insan için ne alçaltıcı bir harekettir oysa! Fakat insan kendisiyle yaşar ve bir tuzaktan başka bir tuzağa çekilir. Bu tuzaklar onu hayal bile edemeyeceği yerlere götürebilir.Anne karakteri okudukça bağlandığım bir karakter oldu. Aklı, zekası, kibarlığı, devrimciliği! Muhteşem bir kadın. Keşke tanıma en azından görme şansım olsaydı. Ama bütün hayran olunacak insanlar geçmişte yaşamış sanki ! Ne talihsiz bir zamana doğmuşuz.Simone okumadan geçirilen bir yaşam eksik kalmıştır bana göre. İnsanın hayalleri, inançları, hem iyiliği hem kötülüğü o kadar güzel anlatılıyor ki! Ruh bu kadar iyi çözümlenebilirdi ancak diyorsunuz. Sonsuza kadar yaşayamasa bile yazdıklarıyla zamanın hiç eskitemeyeceği bir kadın Simone de Beauvoir.
What do You think about The Mandarins (2005)?
My reactions to Simone's massive novel about life with J.P. Sartre, Albert Camus, and Nelson Algren are violently mixed. It's fascinating to read about an era where prize-winning novelists were resistance fighters and political organizers, and though they're continually bemoaning their powerlessness, I'm amazed by how much what they do and say matters in their vanished world. On the other hand, it's discouraging the way Simone turns Sartre into a plaster saint, and Camus into a heroic godlike creature every woman desires. The big revelation this novel delivers is how focused on men the author, a feminist icon, was, and how hostile she is to all women other than herself. It wasn't just the era she lived in, because Colette, born a generation before Simone, wrote many warm and appreciative portraits of women, and didn't delude herself about the flaws in the characters of the men she loved.One of the philosophical preoccupations of the novel is Sartre's idea of "Bad Faith", which as I interpret it, is the creation of a morality or an ideology that protects us from the anxiety of having to make choices about our life. The Camus character in the novel is continually struggling with one anguished choice after the next about freedom, betrayal, life and death, but the choices of the women are limited to choices between one man and another. And even then, the choices about when to end the love affairs are almost always made by the men. Perhaps Simone's bad faith about the inability of women to be happy without being the acolytes of men is what makes her style pedantic and turgid, resembling James Michener far more than her literary predecessor, the clear-eyed and elegant Colette, so that the novel is slow going, relying on the basic vitality of the times and the characters to pull you along.
—Cdrueallen
The book looks at the lives of left bank french intellectuals immediately after the liberation of Paris in 1944,famous for including thinly veiled versions of the author, Albert Camus and Jean Paul Satre along with other members of their social circle. The large cast of characters is a little bewildering at first but it's to de Beauvoir's credit that all of them are developed well enough that none of them seem two dimensional or forgotten about. That said I preferred she came to stay generally because I liked the fact that it was more focused on fewer characters and a single situation and I felt that the mandarins was so large and wide in scope that it can seem a little alienating at times, but this is entirely down to personal preference on my part. de Beauvoirs ability to flesh out the emotional drive behind her characters actions remains excellent as per usual and here it enable you to develop a sense of empathy for characters whose actions are not particularly noble.
—Daniel Morrison
This book is an amazing achievement. Ambitious, intelligent, engaging. It's the first of her fiction that I've read, and I was delighted to find that Simone de Beauvoir's characters were so varied and three-dimensional. But they are not just well-drawn fictional characters; they are interesting people, the intellectuals of post-war France. A couple of well-known (fictional) writers who were heavily engaged in the resistance during war years, continue to grapple with rebuilding a free France in the years after the war. A successful psychoanalyst grapples with loyalty to her family now that her daughter is grown, and her marriage is deeply loving but sexless. A talented singer sacrifices everything for an illusion of love. de Beauvoir would have benefited from a more ruthless edit to save readers from a number of long passages that detailed the back and forth, repetitious debates that characters had with each other and themselves about how committed they were to the new politics of France. But the novel was written in different times, with different technology, and her ability to delineate the nuances of her characters and her society in a loaded historical moment more than makes up for the lack of a good editor.
—Erika
