Force of Circumstance

Force of Circumstance is Simone de Simone de Beauvoir’s frank account of her life with Jean-Paul Sartre since 1945, the years of her greatest literary achievements, The Second Sex and The Mandarins.

Genet, Leduc, Moravia, Giacometti, Koestler, Aron – the personalities and ideas of Europe’s leading artists and intellectuals crowd these pages, and fresh light is thrown on Sartre’s famous quarrel with Camus. This is a record of unflinching commitment in the cold-war politics of the Berlin airlift, Vietnam, Suez, Cuba (which Mme de Beauvoir visited in the spring-time of its revolution) and the Algerian liberation struggle.

But above all it exposes with unique insight her most intimate problems and preoccupations – her notoriety in middle age, her affair with Nelson Algren, her unconventional relationship with Sartre (one undoubted success in my life’), and her thoughts on the life and death of herself and her friends.