A Dangerous Liaison
A Revelatory New Biography of Simon de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The renowned biographer offers a tale of intellectual and romantic rivalry in this "dazzling portrait of Sartre and De Beauvoir's relationship" (The Guardian).
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were two of the twentieth century's most prominent authors and philosophers, and the story of their decades-long relationship is one of the most famous literary romances of all time. From the corridors of the Sorbonne to the cafés of Paris's Left Bank, Sartre and de Beauvoir were intimate rivals in both intellectual debate and sexual conquest.
In A Dangerous Liaison, Carole Seymour-Jones vividly describes how the beautiful and gifted de Beauvoir fell in love with the squinting, arrogant, hard-drinking Sartre. We learn about that first summer of 1929, filled with heated debates and dangerous ideas that led them to experiment with new ways of living. We hear how Sartre compromised with the Nazis and fell into a Soviet honey-trap. And, thanks to recently discovered letters written by the avowed feminist de Beauvoir, Seymour-Jones reveals the full story behind the couple's philosophy of free love, including de Beauvoir's lesbianism and her pimping of younger girls for Sartre in order to keep his love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sensationalist account of the unconventional private and public lives of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Seymour-Jones (Painted Shadow) offers Sartre's "incestuous" relationship with his mother as a psychosexual backdrop to his adult life as Beauvoir's lover. While generally more sympathetic to Beauvoir, the author presents her with distaste as an exploitative manipulator, a "paedophile" with a predilection for "girl-on-girl action" who busied herself procuring young women for Sartre's "harem." Woven through these accounts of sexual exploits is the story of their intellectual development, the genesis of their writings and their deeply problematic relationship to Marxism and the Soviet Union. However, all too often, we are returned to cheap psychologizing ("murder was in Beavoir's heart") and prurient detail. With frequently unreferenced quotes and claims, the book offers little more than insinuation, eschewing clear evidence and demonstration in favor of conflating the lives of the writers with their fictional characters. Any value such a biography might have as a revisionist antidote to its subjects' own hagiographic tendencies is fatally undermined by the author's questionable use of source material, judgmental tone and preference for cheap effects.
