I believe this to be her best work. It's long, probably too long, but that's a small niggle compared to all that's so good about it. 'The Mandarins' gives us a brilliant survey of the post-war French intellectual. It's accuracy and its objectivity combine to present a dazzling panorama of the men and women caught up in ever-changing times. As a fan of the existentialist movement this was no-brainer for me to read, it's an expression of her unique style, represented with such vibrancy, that diffe...

This book reads like a French version of an Ayn Rand novel (and this is not compliment). "The Mandarins" is full of flat characters whose voices are scarcely distinguishable, awkward dialogue, insipidly clunky internal monologue, and a surprising lack of atmosphere (how can de Beauvoir make Paris so boring?). The book has pretensions to being philosophical and rich, but it is unfortunately dated and vapid. If this novel represents French intellectual life immediately following WWII, then its mos...

I totally enjoyed this book. Like some other reviewers here, I found the first few pages to be challenging to go through: so many characters are introduced and the narrative seems sparse. By the second/third chapters though, I was captured by the book and could barely put it aside.I don't think I have so far come across any better illustration of the classical idea of "intellectual" in the pure French tradition, that which was started with Zola's public stance during the Dreyfus Affair. de Beauv...

A lot of people appear to dislike Les Mandarins, which I think is a pretty excellent novel, so let me try and explain what I think is good about it. To me, it's basically about what happens to people (particularly to women) when they realize that they are no longer young. This has several consequences. To start off with, not being young means that you're no longer as physically attractive as you were. Of course, you can go into denial, and say that as long as you eat healthily, exercise, and thi...

Magnificent! A novel that makes friends with you. De Beauvoir writes in a sense imperfectly, rather like real life. The novel lurches between turgid passages (particularly the anachronistic political discussions and the endless agonizing about the periodicals) and literary flight (in particular the last few passages). Sometimes confusing , at other times clear as crystal The Mandarins is justifiable considered her greatest fictional work.Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:Working

for all of my bitching and moaning, this was one of those books that answered on one of those Rilkean crying out nights, and it did such a lovely job of telling at least three different stories, and yes, six hundred pages was sometimes a slog, and yes existentialism sometimes makes me reach for a sweater, but I still loved this book and it will be living in my head for a long time.

I learned that Simone de Beauvoir was one smart cookie. I learned about existentialism for the first time and absuridty and the French resistance and Paris bars. I took this book to Paris and read it there. I went to the bars and cafes and read it there. I was on a late and horrible honeymoon and still have the book but the husband.....non

Les Mandarins = The Mandarins, Simone de BeauvoirThe Mandarins is a 1954 roman written by Simone de Beauvoir, for which she won the Prix Goncourt, awarded to the best and most imaginative prose work of the year, in 1954. The Mandarins was first published in English in 1956.The book follows the personal lives of a close-knit group of French intellectuals from the end of World War II to the mid-1950's. The title refers to the scholar-bureaucrats of imperial China. The characters at times see thems...

This was my first time reading Beauvoir's fiction, and I'm rather ashamed I'd waited this long. Having proven herself in The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity to be one of the smartest, nimblest thinkers of the 20th Century as well as one who made her ideas perfectly clear all of the time, without any of the usual French obfuscation, it's only natural that her fiction should follow suit. And what I loved about The Mandarins was its take-no-prisoners approach. Not a single character was abov...

I first read this in my teens and took it away with me when I left home.Its ideas weren't strange to me: my Dad and his friends would natter on about philosophy in smoke filled rooms, my mother dragged me to women's liberation conferences, my first boyfriend took me on a pilgrimage to Les Deux Magots.What I thought on rereading was pretty much what I thought then, that there's a lot of pretentious chat in this book surrounding a total gem of a love story between Anne (de Beauvoir) and Lewis (Nel...

It's hard to separate what I think about this novel from how fascinating I find her as a person and a thinker.

Volume 1: This is the first volume of de Beauvoir's huge and compelling depiction of the left-wing French intelligentsia in the last years of the second world war. Opening at Christmas 1944, the first Christmas after the liberation, this follows our main characters through the last year of the war and into the aftermath as they struggle to deal with the fall-out of the Occupation, the reckoning of collaboration, and the uneasy negotiations between the socialist left and the communist party.This

There is more than one way to peel the Mandarins, this is my second attempt.The Mandarins were a scholarly elite in Imperial China, word of them was brought, if I remember correctly, by the Jesuits to France during the reign of Louis XIV (or maybe the XVth, then abouts anyhow) and it was a notion that seemed to have taken possession of the minds of the French Philosophes by the Enlightenment - one can see the attraction to literary men (and the occasional literary women) of wise, or at least wit...

I might be alone in really loving this book. I'm not sure if I understand what is not to love. This book is a bright light in a period of self-important post-war literature-- our 1984s and Wastelands-- in that it carefully avoids the moral preachiness and overabundant heavy-handed symbolism by which the supposed major works of this period are so weighed down. The Mandarins is a treatise on life in suspended animation: when the war ends how does life continue? One way to look at it is the book is...

Now that's how to write a lightly fictionalized kiss 'n' tell memoir.

It’s a horrible thing, a woman who labors to lead a man’s hands to her body by appealing to his mind. The irony of the author of The Second Sex having published this five years after the previous kills me, it really does. What's worse is her having won the Prix Goncourt for it, a weighty stamp of approved literature prowess that says nothing less than, yes, this is how you discuss philosophical theories in the midst of love and warfare: trot the men out trigger happy and reduce the women to s

This book was absolutely amazing. It was written by one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. The author was a great philosopher and phemonist of her era. I suggest all read this book and any others you can find by her.Enjoy and Be Blessed.Diamond

My reactions to Simone's massive novel about life with J.P. Sartre, Albert Camus, and Nelson Algren are violently mixed. It's fascinating to read about an era where prize-winning novelists were resistance fighters and political organizers, and though they're continually bemoaning their powerlessness, I'm amazed by how much what they do and say matters in their vanished world. On the other hand, it's discouraging the way Simone turns Sartre into a plaster saint, and Camus into a heroic godlike cr...

This book is an amazing achievement. Ambitious, intelligent, engaging. It's the first of her fiction that I've read, and I was delighted to find that Simone de Beauvoir's characters were so varied and three-dimensional. But they are not just well-drawn fictional characters; they are interesting people, the intellectuals of post-war France. A couple of well-known (fictional) writers who were heavily engaged in the resistance during war years, continue to grapple with rebuilding a free France in t...

I enjoyed every page, reading it to me was an enriching journey. The post-war intellectuals struggle to survive and make a difference, was enlightening. I couldn't avoid comparing that to the state of the Egyptian resistance and the euphoria we lived in February 2011 and all the helplessness we fell in afterwards. I know a lot of differences lie in between. However the slight similarities touched my heart.