De Beauvoir's first fiction, previously unpublished in English, is certainly a sign of work to come; but it's no mere juvenilia. In five separate but loosely connected tales (some of the characters know each other and show up in one another's stories), de Beauvoir chronicles the early lives of five women—most of whom become casualties, in one way or another, of French society's emphasis on "things of the spirit" (religiosity, piety, aestheticism, respectability) in preference to the "real world." Marcelle, a dreamy and devout little girl who offers her life to "a young fair-haired God," grows up to be victimized and deserted by her gigolo/husband as she acts out her spiritual piety in decidedly fleshy appetites. Chantal, in temporary exile from Paris as provincial schoolteacher, creates herself a sensitive persona devoted to beauty and the free spirit—but a real-life crisis caused by her fakery exposes her perfectly conventional narrow-mindedness. Lisa, a student at a Catholic boarding school in the briefest of these tales, is torn and finally baffled by her own body's insistent undermining of her struggle to be properly soulful. Anne is stifled into the "peace" of resignation and death by the combined efforts of her proper mother, her aesthete"lover," and her romantic friend (the phony Chantal again, whose existential "bad faith" breeds disaster everywhere). So only the autobiographical Marguerite—younger sister to deserted Marcelle and to the dead Anne's Swinburne-reading lover—successfully throws off her family's dedication to "the Christian virtues": introduced to Paris low-life by Marcelle's reprobate husband, Marguerite at last sees through even his tarnished luster to "look things straight in the face, without accepting oracles or ready-made values." Deceptively simple tales told with remarkably clear-eyed moral vision and pungent irony: a worthy opening to a shining career.
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1982
ISBN: 0233974628
Page Count: -
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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