Der Lauf der Dinge (Beauvoir: Memoiren 3)

by Simone de Beauvoir

Die Lebensgefährtin Jean-Paul Sartres schildert in diesen Aufzeichnungen ihre Beziehungen und ihre zahlreichen Reisen mit Sartre, die Wandlungen und Wendungen von Sartres Verhältnis zum Kommunismus, ihre Liebesaffären, vor allem ihre Liaison mit dem amerikanischen Romancier Nelson Algren, und ihre Freundschaften und Zerwürfnisse mit berühmten Zeitgenossen wie Camus, Koestler, Giacometti, Merleau-Ponty und Raymond Aron. Ein faszinierendes Zeitdokument über das Leben europäischer Intellektueller des 20. Jahrhunderts.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Biography, Memoir, Feminism, Autobiography, France

906 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Works of Simone de Beauvoir, French writer, existentialist, and feminist, include The Second Sex in 1949 and The Coming of Age , a study in 1970 of views of different cultures on the old.


Simone de Beauvoir, an author and philosopher, wrote novels, monographs, political and social issues, essays, biographies, and an autobiography. People now best know She Came to Stay and The Mandarins , her metaphysical novels. Her treatise, a foundational contemporary tract, of 1949 detailed analysis of oppression of women.

Reviews

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a long but enriching read this was. The Force of Circumstance is the third volume of the autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir. The physical book itself, which I got in hardcover from the library, weighed so much that my wrists and hands would tire. I only managed to read about 30 pages per sitting. In addition, the subject matter was heavy in the extreme.

This volume covers the years (1945-1963) when Beauvoir and Sartre watched their dreams for a just society (called socialism and at times communism) crumble and fade in France at the hands of monied fascistic right wing politicians. It was compelling to read about this from the viewpoint of a French intellectual. While the United States poured dollars into Europe via the Marshall Plan, fought communism in Korea, and took over Vietnam from the French by stealth and "diplomacy," Beauvoir watched the resurgence of the bourgeoisie in her country. The manic changes in communism as Stalin gave way to Khrushchev, and the attempts to misinterpret, ridicule and discredit Sartre along with Existentialism led her to bouts of depression.

Meanwhile she kept falling in love, traveling, and writing books. She relates in the memoir her entire relationship with American novelist Nelson Algren; then explains how she fictionalized it in The Mandarins. The years she spent researching and writing The Second Sex, then experiencing the subsequent fallout in France (negative) and America (wildly positive), as well as the effects on her of fame and wealth, are portrayed as much from the heart as from the mind.

There is so much more: her changing relationship with Sartre as he turned increasingly to politics; her long love affair with Claude Lanzmann; the horrid, bloody, endless and completely shameful Algerian War for independence. She and Sartre went everywhere: the USSR multiple times, China, Cuba, Brazil, the Sahara Desert and more. They were looking for any evidence that socialism and human rights activism were being successful.

As I read on and on, I kept being struck by the parallels between her life and mine in terms of joys and sorrows at any given age, because she lived through these things 40 years before I did. I wondered if other women would find similar parallels.

I admire this woman for many qualities but most of all for her seamless melding of heart and mind. The ability to bring strong emotion as well as keen intelligence to the business of living is, in my opinion, the most important aspect of women. This ability does not always lead to personal happiness (though when one or the other is suppressed you get a deranged woman), but it is ultimately good for humankind.

Beauvoir writes an epilogue in the last pages of The Force of Circumstance, summing up the meaning of life to her at age 55. She compares the young dreamer she was at 20 to the disillusioned, aging woman she feels she has become. She looks at death and is terrified. She longs for those dreams, for her loves in their earliest bloom, for the energy and passion she once had. It is not despair; just a clear-eyed look at what it all amounts to. When I closed the book, my eyes were streaming with tears, but I felt strong and validated for who I am.


(The Force of Circumstance is out of print in hardcover, though can be found in libraries. Some used booksellers have paperback copies of it, split into at least two volumes. I think a hardcover reprint is long overdue.)

[Maryam · Rating 3 out of 5]

موفق نمی شوم که باور کنم. وقتی نام سیمون دو بووار را به صورت چاپ شده می خوانم ، با من از دختر جوانی که کسی جز من نیست سخن می گو یند.غالبا وقتی که می خوابم، خواب می بینم که در خواب پنجاه و چهار ساله ام ولی بیدار می شوم و می بینم که سی سال دارم.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not want to hear the voices of people who had consented to the death of millions of Jews and resistance members; I did not want to find their name in any publication side by side with my own. We had said: 'We shall not forget'; I was not forgetting that.

So many things have happened since 1945, and hardly any of them have really been expressed in books. Future generations will have to look to sociological works, statistics, or simply the newspapers, if they want to find out about us.

[The French] were told: 'You're like the Germans under the Nazis!' And they answered — I heard it with my own ears, and it was the prevailing sentiment — 'Yes, the poor Germans; one realizes now it wasn't their fault.'

The truth was that they gave a great sigh of relief, as though all the crimes of colonialism and all the exploitation of capitalism had been annulled by the camps in Siberia.

To give this work less than five stars would require succumbing to self-hatred to such a degree as to practically negate the last five years of my personal growth. I gave into Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter as into a dream of youthful revelation I so wished to have had myself, absorbed Prime of Life as a record of one of the most sensationalized periods of the 20th century transcribed and participated by the narrator as I would hope to have transcribed and participated myself, and came to this expecting increased distance but instead finding the crux of poisonous self destruction that is a common side effect of combating injustice on a worldwide scale, a commitment I have been reckoning with since my college years. The further along the narrative, the more painful the reading, and certain judgments of Beauvoir's make me want to scream in her face, but that is several pages out of nearly 700, and ultimately I am supremely grateful to her for writing history as holistically as it should be, not the superficialities slathered over atrocities dictated me from cradle to a supposed grave. Everything has changed, and yet nothing has changed, and the political infighting, the panic attacks, the morose cutting off of entire swatches of pleasures and the fierce grasp on the utmost humanizing pursuits necessary to one's soul: all are here, and if I were ask whether I'd trade places with Beauvoir, I, for once, would have to say no. I would have loved, however, barring the violating rigmarole of the Euro latter 20th century, to be one of those young ones who reassured her that her dreams had not died, even as I inevitably wounded her with my youth. I would feel less agonized over finishing this if there were other writers who funneled all their refusal to accept individual privilege as substitute for worldwide equity. Sartre, Fanon, and Amado will all likely have their revisits; beyond that, for the sweet, fulfilling, heartrending balance of well crafted prose and bloody truth: who else?

For years I had been opposed to the official governments of France; but I had never before been in a position where I found myself rejoicing over a defeat; it was even more shocking than spitting on a victory.

On 7 August — I had just got back to Paris — the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. This meant the end of the war, and a revolting massacre; it heralded the possibility of perpetual peace, and also the possibility of the end of the world. We argued about it endlessly.

True political action must necessarily contain an implicit moral evaluation of itself. (Sartre, Le Fantôme de Staline)

I was — like Sartre — insufficiently liberated from the ideologies of my class; at the very moment I was rejecting them, I was still using their language to do so. That language has become hateful to me because, as I now know, to look for the reasons why one should not stamp on a man's face is to accept stamping on it.

Everyone, in some way, has been impacted by World War II. What is less interesting to mass media is the impact of the WWII aftermath, as the test prep material I teach gives a very different picture of de Gaule and the protests, warfare, and terrorism that surrounded his reign. Beuavoir's words put me in touch with many a famous and infamous name, along with a litany of others that threatened at times to inundate my reading. For the most part I was extremely pleased, even when the narration was at its most harrowing, to recognize so many names and find them sometimes dismissed but mostly praised in ways that made me proud of having found my way to these figures esteemed by Beauvoir under my own power. As I said previously, though, individual figures are less important than what she has to say about death and living with oneself after one wishes all would die because of the web of inhumanity one finds oneself trapped within.

[W]ith prosperity, we returned once more to hierarchies, distances, barriers.

...Morality yes, but sewers first.

Obsessed as ever with its greatness, the seat of power had seen fit to deprive civil servants of their daily bread but not to appear in the eyes of the world as the persecutor of famous writers.

'You know, what we've found out about Djamila Boupacha doesn't look too good!' he said, as though I'd recommended her as a house-maid. 'A high official who knows all about the case says she's under the gravest suspicion,' he added. 'I don't see that that's any justification for sticking a coke bottle into her,' I said. 'No, obviously not...' And while we were on the subject, he asked me to change the word 'vagina', which was the one Djamila had used, to 'womb'. In case teenagers read the article,' he explained. 'They might start asking their parents for explanations...' Is that the only question they're likely to ask?

I received a great deal of insight into the creation process of The Second Sex, The Mandarins, and the first two entries into this autobiography, which contextualized my various approvals and disapprovals into a more informed stance. Beavuoir discussed many of her other works that I am reading at least one of, and I look forward to seeing how I engage with The Blood of Others now that I am aware of the motivations and receptions on the part of the author herself. The Death of the Author and all that jazz, but Beauvoir herself was unafraid of forcing literature to take on political responsibility in the realms of the living and the dead, and considering the circumstances of her past, with its prison camps, near starvation, assassination attempts and all that informed her choices, I won't be the one to argue that she was wrong to think such. All in all, this is a powerful meditation on a life and its decisions across continents and ideological divides, filled with grand successes, miserable failures, and the deadening, horrific complacency those on the cusp of historical 'progress' often find themselves trapped within that give the lie to the idea that the passage of time guarantees the gradual uplift of all humanity. The cathedral of Notre Dame was recently affected by a fire. Watch the antisemitic, Islamophobic, bigoted hate crime rates begin to rise.

In my eyes, this courage effaced nothing; it is the Fascists who attach more importance to how we die than to our acts.

To smile at opponents and friends alike is to debase one's commitments to the status of mere opinions, and all intellectuals, whether of the Right or the Left, to their common bourgeois condition.

...[I]f one really does think one's opinions are at all worthwhile, why shelter behind one's name, one's reputation, one's past achievements? The self-important man either affects contempt for people or demands their respect. This is because he hasn't the courage to face them as equals; he renounces his freedom because he is afraid of its dangers. This blindness, this deceit, shocks me particularly in writers, whose first virtue — no matter how fantastic their flights — should be a fearless sincerity.

The government had shed blood in order to disperse fifty thousand demonstrators; it was now obliged to allow seven hundred thousand of them to march through the heart of a Paris on strike.

Fora all Beauvoir's pain in later years, she at least made it past her 20s and the currently completely unimaginable by me landscape of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and right now, the 20s seem bad enough. However, she fought when she could and rested when she needed to, so I'm going to learn from her inability to live the perfect/safe life and ride the aggravating circumstances out with my eyes on the eventual prize. The prize may be as much as a lie as Beauvoir's dreams of humanistic revolution ended up mostly being, but it's a matter of having impact, and even here at this transitory period of life, I find myself positively affecting many youngsters who have similar views of the world and a similar drive to not take injustices as something 'normal' that accompanies growing up. On a less bombastic scale, it's been a very long time since I composed a review this lengthy, which gives to show how much of an influence Beauvoir has had and continues to have on my life and my decisions. My hopes are that she continues to sustain me with more fortifications in both the fourth and final volume of her autobiography and anything other works of hers I can get my hands on. Beggars can't be choosers, and while I'm not begging yet, I aim to at least kick myself out of bed to ensure that. Beauvoir had panic attacks all throughout her wondrous existence. That's a hell of a relatable uplift.

People would come up to me with beaming smiles and say: 'I don't agree with you politically; but I liked your book so much!' 'Let's hope you don't like the next one' I replied to one of them.

They do not want happiness: they want to live.

What good is happiness if it not only does not bring me truth, but even hides it from me?

Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.

[MaSuMeH · Rating 3 out of 5]

کتاب را دوست داشتم چون سیمون دوبووار را دوست دارم. دوبووار برای من زنی است بی همتا که شاید از نظر خط فکری ب�� هم در یک سمت و سو هم نباشیم اما به عنوان تصویری که از زن فکور قرن بیستم ارائه می دهد همیشه قابل احترام و قابل ستایش است. دوبووار برای من زنی است که برخلاف الگوی رایج از زنان هرگز نمی توانم او را در حال آشپزی تصور کنم اما در کتاب هزاران تصویر از او در حال خواندن و استدلال کردن و بحث کردن موجود است. او زنی است که فکر می کند اما نه فقط به خودش نه فقط تا حد مرز مشخصی و ...بلکه او به چیستی انسان و چرایی انسان می پردازد و بعدها با "جنس دوم خیلی واضح و روشن به نوع بیان ما زنان در جهان می پردازد و درستی و نادرستی این نوع بیان را زیر سوال می برد. و همه ی اینها کافی است که من بخواهم از دوبووار بیشتر و زیادتر بدانم. کتاب اما همه ی کنجکاوی مرا در مورد او پاسخ نمی دهد. کتاب بیشتر گزارش رویدادهای سیاسی زمان خود و نقش سارتر و دوبووار در برابر این جریانات سیاسی است اما اینقدر عطش من برای دانستن از دنیای شخصی او زیاد هست که هر خط و پاراگرافی که او به وضوح خود را عریان می کند و فکر و حسش را می نویسد را به کام بکشم و خوشحال باشم که دوبووار را از زبان خودش می شناسم.
مرداد 96

[Zahra · Rating 3 out of 5]

«نه. هیچ چیز روی نخواهد داد. پرچین درخت فندق را که باد تکان می‌داد باز می‌بینم و نوید هایی را که، وقتی زیر پایم معدن طلا را تماشا می‌کردم با آن ها قلبم را آشفته می‌گرداندم، نوید هایی دربارهٔ زندگی ئی که باید می‌گذراندم. این وعده هاصورت پذیرفته است. با این همه، وقتی نگاه دیر باورم را به سوی این نوجوانی زودباور می‌گردانم با حیرت می‌سنجم که تا چه حد گول خورده ام.»

جلد های این خاطرات نمونه‌ای از خود زندگی هستند. جلد سوم میان‌سالی ست و کمی ملال آور است؛ شبیه به یک زندگی واقعی! احساس می‌کنم بزرگ شدن آن دختر کوچک را از نزدیک شاهد بودم؛ همان زنی که در پنجاه سالگی به بحران پیری دچار شدست. زمان مار هولناکی است که در هر لحظه زندگی را می‌بلعد.

[Boaz Frissen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Het is niet niks om doorheen te komen, maar wat een wijsheid en wat een LEVEN had zij.

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This third volume of Simone de Beauvoir's memoirs begins with the liberation of Paris in 1944 and ends in the early '60s after the long-awaited independence of Algeria. This volume feels somewhat more fragmentary than the earlier two, with less of a clear thread holding it all together, but it is nonetheless moving and powerful. She tracks the shift from the relief of the liberation and the hope of something better following the horrors of fascism and death and oppression during the war years to the disillusionment of the 1950s and beyond. That hope was betrayed as France doubled down on colonialist repression and violence in Algeria, leading to repression and violence not only against Algerians and Muslims (which was extreme and horrifying) but also against anyone speaking up against the rising tide of hatefulness and fascist oppression within France. In the face of this horror, de Beauvoir becomes increasingly disgusted by France and more eager to find a source of hope for the future elsewhere. She particularly looks to socialist and communist countries such as the USSR (especially after the death of Stalin), China, and Cuba, hoping that there, despite problems and setbacks and stumbles and suffering, some hope for a better future might be found. She needs to believe that all the suffering and horrors of the mid-twentieth century might be redeemed somewhere, somehow, and one can hardly blame her for that.
A large part of this book concerns her travels, particularly with Sartre, Nelson Algren, and Claude Lanzmann. Long sections describe her travels in and impressions of places like the US, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Germany, Italy, north Africa, China, Cuba. She was an eager traveller, open to experiences and willing to take pleasure where and how she can.
Another major thread, of course, is her lifelong relationship with Sartre, which she calls the "one undoubted success of [her] life." Whatever their involvements with other people (and I think she underestimates, in this volume and the earlier ones, the damage both of them did to others--the complexities of their relationship and the primacy they gave to it made sense to them, but often caused real pain to others, as later comments by some of them have confirmed), they seem to have maintained an unbroken personal and intellectual commitment to one another.
The book ends with a long and very moving contemplation of aging and death. "Old age. From a distance you take it to be an institution; but they are all young, these people who suddenly find that they are old. One day I said to myself: 'I'm forty!' By the time I recovered from the shock of that discovery I had reached fifty. The stupor that seized me then has not left me yet." And she captures beautifully the strangeness of living in an aging body: "I often stop, flabbergasted, at the sight of this incredible thing that serves me as a face." Her relationship to time is fraught: "How is it that time, which has no form nor substance, can crush me with so huge a weight that I can no longer breathe? How can something that doesn't exist, the future, so implacably calculated [sic] its course?" Writing her memoirs has in some ways deepened the complexities of her relationship to time: "And at this point, suddenly, I feel strangely disconcerted. I have lived stretched out towards the future, and now I am recapitulating, looking back over the past. It's as though the present somehow got left out. For years I thought my work still lay ahead, and now I find it is behind me: there was no moment when it took place." Someday soon, she knows, everything that is her will be gone, all her experiences and perceptions and gathered understandings will be annihilated--"that unique sum of things, the experience that I lived, with all its order and its randomness...there is no place where it will all live again." The tone of bewildered grief in the final lines is startling: "I can still see the hedge of hazel trees flurried by the wind and the promises with which I fed my beating heart while I stood gazing at the gold-mine at my feet: a whole life to live. The promises have all been kept. And yet, turning an incredulous gaze towards that young and credulous girl, I realize with stupor how much I was gypped."

[Liza Niniashvili · Rating 3 out of 5]

Как итог: все мы жертвы конформизма, в той или иной степени, признаем мы этого или нет. Фрустрация :

"Как-то в январе во второй половине дня я была одна у Сартра, когда зазвонил телефон. «Камю разбился на машине», – сказал мне Ланзманн. Он возвращался с одним другом с юга, машина врезалась в платан, и Камю погиб на месте. Я положила трубку, у меня перехватило дыхание, губы дрожали. «Не стану же я плакать, – говорила я себе. – Для меня он уже был никто». "

Очень печально называть "посторонним" (абсурд в квадрате) Камю, кто был другом и перестал им быть из-за расхождения в потилических взлядах. Левые, правые, социалисты, капиталисты, какая разница, если в итоге любое из данных направлений - социальный констурктивизм.

Позитив:

"Я посмотрела «В ожидании Годо». У меня вызывают недоверие пьесы, которые в виде символов представляют человеческий удел в целом; но я восхищалась тем, как Беккет сумел покорить нас, попросту изобразив то неутомимое терпение, которое, вопреки всему, удерживает на земле наш род и каждого из нас в отдельности. Я была одним из исполнителей драмы, а моим партнером был автор. В то время, как мы ожидали – чего? – он говорил, я слушала: моим присутствием и его голосом поддерживалась бесполезная и необходимая надежда."

С точки зрения безценной информации - 5 !
Но рукопись с ненужной информацией (какое на ком было платье той весной и какое дерево как пахло) меня утолима.

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

The third volume of de Beauvoir’s autobiography opens with the discovery that in post war France, the diverse elements making up the Resistance have lost their coherence, and the country has fallen back into the hands of the bourgeoisie and the collaborators. Aspirations for social progress within France are dashed, while across the French Empire the violent reimposition of colonial rule brings to a halt hopes for greater freedom or even just basic respect for native people, many of whom fought for France in WW2.

While there is an atrocious massacre in Algeria and the outbreak of a war of independence in Vietnam, the French army seems to have demonstrated the true face of French fascism most immediately in Madascar. Here, the 1947 – 1949 Malagasy Uprising was suppressed with extreme violence, killing an unknown number of from 10,000 to 100,000. The French military force carried out mass execution, torture, war rape, torching of entire villages, collective punishment and other atrocities such as throwing live Malagasy prisoners out of an airplane (death flights). These were to be the methods used to retain control whenever challenged, and after the French suffered a stunning defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, losing their colony in Vietnam, the only lesson learned by the humiliated French army was to implement its disgusting and counter-productive tactics with far greater ferocity in other colonies.

The colonial wars recur in the text at frequent intervals, dominating the entire volume. For instance: “Things were beginning to stir in North Africa. After two years of peaceful efforts and disappointed hopes, Bourguiba no longer saw any way of making Tunisia independent other than violence; his arrest provoked riots and a general strike throughout the country; order was restored by scouring Cap Bon, arresting 20,000 people, terrorizing the population and by torture. In December 1952 there was a protest strike in Capablanca after the murder of Ferhat Hached; a deliberately provoked riot and the killing of four or five Europeans enabled M. Boniface to bludgeon the budding Moroccan trade unionism to death; he had five hundred workers massacred.” [p303]

This large scale and long term rampage of the French army, largely reliant on conscripts, and of its colonial settlers, would unavoidably corrupt the internal politics of France itself at every level. De Gaulle presided over a government that was no less fascist than its Spanish neighbour, civil liberties were trampled over, press and academic freedoms were crushed, policing was partisan and still in the hands of Nazi collaborators, torture was practised routinely within France and not just abroad; right wing terrorism – including outrageous behaviour by the army – reached levels of intensity such that bombings became a daily occurrence in Paris, while protests were suppressed with severe levels of police brutality. As the French were conclusively driven out of Algeria, they enacted near genocidal levels of violence against the Muslim population. A late strategy was to deprive the FLN of support by gathering much of the rural Muslim population into concentration camps in appalling conditions, holding several millions in total among whom rates of death through violence and neglect were immense.

De Beauvoir’s account dwells on the extent to which fascist behaviour by the French army and its government had popular support, and the enormous risks taken by anyone protesting against the violence and racism or supporting Algerian and other appeals for self government. Indeed, even the French Communists refused to campaign effectively against the colonial wars, fearing the loss of support among racist and militarist French workers. Algerian Independence, and the end of empire generally, which de Beauvoir, Sartre and (surely) right thinking people anywhere welcomed and celebrated, was experienced by most French people as a national humiliation and a disgrace, leaving De Beauvoir ashamed of her own French nationality.

French fascism was not limited to its colonial wars. The USA emerged from the war as the world’s greatest military power, initially with exclusive access to the atomic bomb, and also with the understanding that war was something that could be entered into very profitably. The French right cheerfully endorsed America’s early eagerness to take on the USSR in a new war of aggression, and gave full vent to the hatred of communism which was so strong a feature of US politics, internally and abroad. De Beauvoir and Sartre had always maintained firm differences with the French Communists, but insisted that these be based on substantive arguments and criticisms, not on a merely tribal affiliation with a monolithic “Left” or “Right”. De Beauvoir looked on with horror at the West’s apparent eagerness to engage in a new world war, which for many years was seriously expected to take place not deep in the Siberian wastes, and not on America’s great plains, but in the heart of Europe.

“In July, De Gaulle had called the Communist separatists and the Communist Party ‘Public Enemy Number One’. The French bourgeoisie was already dreaming of preventive war. They were having a fine time reading books by Koestler and Krvchenko, and other works of the sort written by repentant communists. I met a number of these converts, and they astonished me by the lyric ecstasy of their hatred. None of them proposed an analysis of the USSR or offered any constructive criticism; they were content to grind out romantic novelettes.” [p146]

Alongside her principled and often lonely position (alongside Sartre) in relation to the Cold War and the Algerian War, De Beauvoir found the space to provoke further torrents of hostility with the publication of The Second Sex. It is hard to appreciate now that her exploration of the conditions in which women lived their lives was novel and original, although it would seem that every generation since has sorely needed a re-statement of its arguments which have never yet become less stimulating or less necessary. The overwhelming rage of her male critics was in turn expressed in the ludicrously irrational terms which have since become so familiar, through tedious repetition and recycling, without ever progressing to a level of intelligent critical thought. “Above all I was attacked for the chapter on maternity. Many men declared that I had no right to discuss women because I hadn’t given birth; and they?” [p201]

De Beauvoir was clear headed about the potential impact of feminism. “ I never cherished any illusion of changing women’s condition; it depends on the future of labour in the world; it will change significantly only at the price of a revolution in production. That is why I avoided falling into the trap of ‘feminism’. Nor did I offer remedies for each particular problem I described. But at least I helped the women of my time and generation to become aware of themselves and their situation.” [p202] The comment about feminism is interesting, and can be balanced with a remark on page 47 of the next and final volume, where she writes: ”It does not worry me to be called an intellectual or a feminist: I accept what I am.” She obviously is a feminist, and draws attention to many forms of oppression that are specific to women, but she is not of the school that imagines equal opportunities within a capitalist system and social hierarchy will transform their condition. [ A recent illustration of her attitude would be the "faux feminism" of Hillary Clinton, seeking to break through the glass ceiling of politics by becoming president, and helping her high class friends to achieve similar exhalted status in the corporate world, without any commitment to improve conditions for the great mass of American women.]

These major political themes run through a stimulating volume which nevertheless has a much wider scope and follows many different strands of her private and public life; it deals in chronological order with her life from 1945 through to 1962. Her relationships with other significant figures of French political and cultural life are interesting, and of course much of her writing belongs to literature rather than politics, not least her novel The Mandarins.

As the book reaches its conclusion, she displays a very dismal attitude to the process of becoming older, which I felt a bit dismissive about while reading it, since she was only 54 years old in 1962, she would cover a further decade in her next volume and she would live on to be 78. She returns at length to the topic of age in volume 4 and defends her rather downbeat assessment. What she insists upon, and it is clearly correct, is that by 1962 she had already produced her major contributions to the world of ideas, the achievements that she would be most remembered for. It does not follow that her work was now finished; she would in fact go on to produce further stimulating and fresh contributions in the coming years.

[Lynda · Rating 3 out of 5]

3rd volume of de Beauvoir’s four autobiographical series (GIANTS)

Year 1944 - 1962, Paris

I’ve been taking multiple major breaks on reading during this book for many reasons. One of which being I generally find any memoirs related to the post war/cold war era depressing. There are very dark moments and I could only imagine how emotional life could be as part of the intellectual group in Paris.

I also skipped the 80 pages of Algerian War and got really annoyed through the whole section when Sartre got very politically social active.

I did however, enjoyed reading her travel diaries (She basically went EVERYWHERE with Sartre. how envious one can be at this age of time)

de Beauvoir also relates in this volume of memoir her entire relationship with American novelist Nelson Algren and how she fictionalized their relationship into the basis of storyline for "The Mandarine" (which i’m also currently reading, very. very. slowly...)

[Ines · Rating 5 out of 5]

„Ein Menschenleben ist eine seltsame Angelegenheit, von einem Augenblick zum anderen sonnenklar und im ganzen undurchsichtig, etwas, das ich mir selber zurechtmache und das mir aufgezwungen wird, dessen Substanz mir die Welt gibt und nimmt, zermahlen durch die Ereignisse, zerstückelt, zerfetzt, zerhackt und dennoch ein einheitlich Ganzes.“

[Askorbinka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Яркая личность, интересно читать. Одно "но", очень много политики утомляло под конец. Но, понимаю, активная жизненная позиция.

[charlots · Rating 3 out of 5]

wenn einem die ersten zwei bände der autobiographie simone de beauvoirs das gefühl geben, dass das kindliche leid ewig, dass die extase der jugend unendlich sind, dann macht „der lauf der dinge“ auf erschreckende weise klar, wie begrenzt ein leben in der realität durch die unausweichlichkeit des alterns ist.

während der dritte teil zunächst mit einem aufbäumen beginnt — spannende reisen durch nordafrika, letzte affären in den usa — so ereilt das buch in der letzten hälfte eine derartige melancholie, dass man es am liebsten ganz verschreckt zuklappen würde. wohin hat sich diese lebensfreude beauvoirs verflüchtigt? wohin ihre scharfsinnigkeit? ist das buch zeugnis davon, dass man am besten lieber nicht „aus dem affekt“, über das gegenwärtige schreiben sollte? sondern die verschleierungen und schönen formen des andenkens abwarten, die aus einzelnen tagen nur noch die lebendigsten sequenzen essenzialisiert?

vielleicht ist es einfach nur ein fehler, dieses buch zu lesen wenn man selbst noch mit einigen jahren der jugend rechnen kann, und den glauben an ihre ewigkeit noch bewahrt. in jedem fall ist „der lauf der dinge“ mit seinen 600+ seiten untypisch verworren und langatmig. es ist das erste buch von simone de beauvoir, bei dem ich beschämt urteilen würde, es sei in der tat ein wenig schlecht gealtert.

[Kevin Karpiak · Rating 1 out of 5]

How many different autobiographies can one person write, re-writing the same events each time? see John Irving for the answer...

[Cherie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A- The journals continue. In this one, we see Simone develop as a writer, France liberated after WWII, Simone develop as an activist, the drama with French & Algeria…really interesting, good writing.