THE INSEPARABLES
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR TRANS. LAUREN ELKINS
Vintage Classics, 176pp, £12.99 Simone de Beauvoir’s 1954 semiautobiographical novella The
Inseparables has been published in English for the first time. Critics received this story of two teenage girls from Catholic bourgeois backgrounds rapturously. In the Spectator, Sarah Ditum described it as ‘slim, achingly tragic and unaffectedly lovely in its evocation of the closeness between girls – and the pressures that sunder them’. While Sylvie, noted Ditum, is ‘on a path towards education and self-reliance, Andrée’s destiny is marriage, and Sylvie watches helplessly as her friend succumbs to expectation’.
De Beauvoir’s childhood friend Elizabeth Lacoin, the model for Andrée, is also the figure of Zaza in her autobiography: their passionate friendship began in Paris in 1917 and lasted until Zaza died of viral encephalitis in 1929. In the Guardian, Deborah Levy reflected on the importance of Zaza for de Beauvoir who ‘spookily, vampirically, admits that she “believed that I had paid for my own freedom with her death”.’ ‘In my view,’ wrote Levy, ‘she never quite managed to write up the spectre of Zaza entirely convincingly, which is why she kept returning to try to catch her on the page. Maybe this is because her own fierce desire for Zaza to finally claim the life she deserved might have been stronger than Zaza’s own desire to risk all she would lose in doing so: God, her family, bourgeois respectability.’ The novella was, thought Boyd Tonkin in the Times, a ‘succinct, scorching tale of adolescent love and loss’. It grips, thought Tonkin, ‘not just as a portrait of semi-requited teenage ardour … but because de Beauvoir gives the torments of belief their due.’
Lauren Elkins’s translation was widely admired. Tonkin enjoyed the ‘lucid, sculpted prose [which] can flare into starbursts of introspective sensuality’ and Ditum called it ‘beautifully accomplished’. The prose, she said, ‘feels like a living voice and not, as is too often the case with translation, like a heavy-footed performance of respect for an inaccessible original’.