Paul Johnson
Slaying the Monstre Sacré
Tête-à-Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre
By Hazel Rowley
Chatto & Windus 429pp £20 order from our bookshop
The fuss the French are making about the centenary of Sartre’s birth is a sad commentary on the present state of French letters. It is not for want of money. They spend more state cash per capita on culture than any other country. There are over 3,000 literary prizes to be had every year – and no literature. Sartre was their last world figure of any importance, a monstre sacré in the tradition of Rabelais, Molière, Voltaire and Victor Hugo. So they make the most of his still-recent reverberations. But he has had no successor (any more than Bertrand Russell, a comparable figure, has had in England). Nor is there anyone on the horizon.
The way in which Sartre became world-famous is itself interesting and shows how useful it is for a writer to operate simultaneously in different fields. A schoolteacher, he had made a study of the phenomenalists, and in 1938 published a novel, La Nausée (a good title, thought up by his
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Any story about Eden has to be a story about the Fall; unchanging serenity does not make a narrative.'
@suzifeay reviews Jim Crace's 'eden'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trouble-in-paradise
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf
'The authorities are able to detain individuals in solitary confinement for up to six months at a secret location', which 'increases the risk to the prisoner of torture'.
@lucyjpop looks at two cases of China's brutal crackdown on free expression.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/xu-zhiyong-thupten-lodoe