The Inseparables
The newly discovered novel from Simone de Beauvoir
Published on 2. June 2022
Book
Paperback/Softback
176 pages
978-1-78487-718-7 (ISBN)
Description
When Andree joins her school, Sylvie is immediately fascinated. Andree is small for her age but walks with the confidence of an adult.
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 as the girls grow into young women, the pressures of society mount, threatening everything.
This novel was never published in Simone de Beauvoir's lifetime. It tells the story of the real-life friendship that shaped one of the most important thinkers and feminists of the twentieth century.
'Slim, elegant, achingly tragic and unaffectedly lovely in its evocation of the closeness between girls - and the pressures that sunder them' Spectator
TRANSLATED BY LAUREN ELKIN - INTRODUCED BY DEBORAH LEVY
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 as the girls grow into young women, the pressures of society mount, threatening everything.
This novel was never published in Simone de Beauvoir's lifetime. It tells the story of the real-life friendship that shaped one of the most important thinkers and feminists of the twentieth century.
'Slim, elegant, achingly tragic and unaffectedly lovely in its evocation of the closeness between girls - and the pressures that sunder them' Spectator
TRANSLATED BY LAUREN ELKIN - INTRODUCED BY DEBORAH LEVY
Reviews / Votes
This 'lost' novel by a giant of 20th-century letters reads surprisingly like a French Elena Ferrante... Lauren Elkin's translation is undistractingly smooth * Daily Telegraph * Translated by Lauren Elkin with exquisite finesse, it utterly conveys both de Beauvoir's heady sensuality and its immediate opposite, observant restraint... The Inseparables is a ravishing work of art * Financial Times * A succulent taster for those who don't know de Beauvoir's work and, for everyone else, a treat * Daily Mail * A poignant and sensitive portrait of female friendship which acutely captures the agonizing mysteries of intimacy. The translation was gorgeous, and there were lines that absolutely punched me in the gut -- Anbara Salam author of Belladonna Slim, elegant, achingly tragic and unaffectedly lovely in its evocation of the closeness between girls - and the pressures that sunder them * Spectator * A passionate and tragic autobiographical story * Vanity Fair * Gorgeously written, intelligent, passionate, and in many ways foreshadows such contemporary works as Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend * Oprah Daily * Here is an attentive and unintimate love, one that relishes the idea of imagining, but never knowing and never delimiting, the infinite expanses of another person's mind -- Merve Emre * New Yorker * In Lauren Elkin's fine translation, the lucid, sculpted prose can flare into starbursts of introspective sensuality... Its focus and restraint show that, even in maturity, Beauvoir could write like a dutiful daughter of the French classics * The Times * [An] absorbing novel... The Inseparables is a moving coming-of-age tale about two girls battling with who and what they want to be in 20th-century Paris * Monocle *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 191 mm
Width: 122 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
149 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78487-718-7 (9781784877187)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
09/2021
Vintage Digital
€8.99
Available for download
Persons
Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908. In 1929 she became the youngest person ever to obtain the agregation in philosophy at the Sorbonne, placing second to Jean-Paul Sartre. She taught at the lycees at Marseille and Rouen from 1931-1937, and in Paris from 1938-1943. After the war, she emerged as one of the leaders of the existentialist movement, working with Sartre on Les Temps Mordernes. The author of several books including The Mandarins (1957) which was awarded the Prix Goncourt, de Beauvoir was one of the most influential thinkers of her generation. She died in 1986. Lauren Elkin is the author of several critically-acclaimed books, including Scaffolding, Art Monsters, and Flaneuse. Her essays on art, literature, and culture have appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Granta, Harper's, Le Monde, Les Inrockuptibles, and Frieze, among others. An award-winning translator, she lives between Paris and London. Deborah Levy was born in 1969, studied theatre at Dartington College of Arts, and now lives in London. Her plays include Pax, which City Limits considred 'remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination' and Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, 'An ambitious, imaginative, sometimes funny, sometimes touching, passage across a terrain where moral parables and folk fancies meet' (Marina Warner, Independent). She has also published a collection of short stories, Ophelia and the Great Idea, and a novel, Beautiful Mutants, and, most recently, Swallowing Geography, all of which are published by Vintage.