An intense female friendship forms the core of this remarkable novella, written in 1954 but never published. Nine-year-old Sylvie Lepage is looking forward to her first day at the Collège Adelaïde. She's a good student and obedient girl. In that first class she meets Andrée Gallard. Andrée has had some worldly experience: she tells Sylvie about a near death experience. She suffered serious burns and has the scars to prove it. And so begins a close – inseparable – friendship that will last into their early twenties. Sylvie narrates her story but the focus remains on Andrée. Her friend suffers through the vagaries of love. One boyfriend in particular, Pascal, proves a problem as he seems more devoted to study and work than romance. Andrée's relationship with her domineering mother is fraught and complicated. She loves her dearly, but her mother's conservatism makes life extremely difficult. As her adult years approach, Andrée feels so hemmed in by societal and familial expectations that she starts to self-harm. Sylvie describes a beautiful friend, intelligent and stimulating, who is crushed by the world around her. Based on a youthful friendship, Simone de Beauvoir wrote this novella in 1954, but put it aside, feeling it wasn't up to scratch. De Beauvoir was wrong. The Inseparables is a brilliant, full bodied portrait of intense friendship. The writing is gorgeous, beautifully simple and evocative, some of it close to poetry. It's astonishing that this gem has been hidden for sixty-five years. Published in a lovely little hardback, the book comes with archival photos of the real life Andrée, de Beauvoir's friend Zaza. There are also facsimiles of their correspondence which relate events that De Beauvoir would use in her novella. A lost fiction that grapples with latent existential and feminist issues. The Inseparables, by Simone de Beauvoir. Random House. $24.99 Review by Chris Saliba |
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