Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Fundamentally a study of identity, this book was no less of a personal experience for me as a reader, than it obviously was for Beauvoir herself. L’amore, l’amicizia con tutti i rimescolamenti del caso non sono il punto focale di queste pagine che va, piuttosto, rintracciato nelle connessioni con il pensiero intellettuale di una generazione che si affacciava allora sul primo dopoguerra schifata dall’oppressiva mentalità reazionaria.

Goodness what a shock, Schama paints a picture of France on the eve of revolution in which you might struggle to find a priest who believes in God, where disrespect for the royal family is near universal, the ideas of Rousseau and the classical world as an ideal were on all minds, here de Beauvoir pere, while an atheist, is a royalist admittedly it is far easier to be a royalist once there are no actual kings or emperors and what not to deal with, the parents censor de Beauvoir's correspondence until she was almost twenty, her loss of faith is a profound blow to de Beauvoir mere. Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin. For me, beyond the pleasure of reading, ( because SB knows how to describe and make the atmosphere ) - it was an instructional book. I remember an awful feeling of dread, and of impotence: I didn't want to become this future self I foresaw, but presumably I could do nothing to stop it: "I"—the "me" looking at the polar bears—would be consumed in teenage-ness and no longer care about "my" (toddler-age) preferences. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here.

How some autobiographies I have read recently seem bland and empty to me now, in the face of this one!

In the family photographs taken the following summer there are ladies in long dresses and ostrich feather hats and gentlemen wearing boaters and panamas, all smiling at a baby: they are my parents, my grandfather, uncles, aunts; and the baby is me. In the afternoons I would sit out on the balcony outside the dining-room; there, level with the tops of the trees that shaded the boulevard Raspail, I would watch the passers-by. One of the many threads running through the book traces de Beauvoir's evolving understanding of signs: where they come from, how they work, and the inescapable gap (despite her early naïvete) between the thing itself and the sign humans have invented to indicate it.There were two books in particular that had a lasting impression, 'Little Women' and 'The Mill on the Floss', both featuring female characters that Simone felt so strongly about she was driven to tears. but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation. I was a democrat and a romantic; I found it revolting that, just because he was a man and had money, he should be authorized to play around with a girl's heart. Yet their love was always doomed from the state; one day or other, their lover would throw them over for a well-bred young lady. I love how books meant just so much to her, and all those descriptions of her spending day after day of her youth reading outdoors in some lovely garden just demands the reader should enjoy this book in the same way.

Her father looms large in this history, as both the object of her childhood and adolescent idolatry, and as a conservative blow-hard who says things like "a wife is what her husband makes her; it's up to him to shape her personality," and bitterly regrets the fact that his loss of money means that his daughters will be earning their own livings, rather than marrying well into good society (never mind that they PREFER to earn their own livings; that's not the point). Je voyais dans l'image graphique l'exacte doublure du son qui lui correspondait: ils émanaient ensemble de la chose qu'ils exprimaient si bien que leur relation ne comportait aucun arbitraire. The very lucid way she remembers the pangs of puberty, the strange and mysterious agonies of trying to understand oneself and others as you grow up were fascinating and moving. la relecture, je me disais, quelle chance malgré tout de ne pas pouvoir faire autrement qu'être soi-même. In 1929 she became the youngest person ever to obtain the agrégation in philosophy at the Sorbonne, placing second to Jean-Paul Sartre.At the age of five or six Beauvoir has vivid memories and intense feelings of love and devotion towards the people who are closest to her: her parents, her younger sister and her nanny, Louise. Ogni volta che decido di leggere un autobiografia sono, quindi, conscia del fatto che sto per guardare ciò che chi scrive ha deciso di farmi vedere. It is a book that charts the trajectory of her childhood and youth, and yet does so in a way that doesn’t make it feel removed from these moments. The book is absent of drama and those hoping for a pageant of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll are encouraged to look elsewhere, but de Beauvoir's prism of introspection, intellectual curiosity, virtue, integrity and honesty are an intoxicating read. Young girls suffering from thwarted and impossible loves, boys encouraged to get their hands on low-income young women before entering into marriage.