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.
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
'In their needling, selfish, dry-as-dust way, these three books are works of cumulative power and never less than consistent interest.'
@lieutenantkije weighs up the final novel in J M Coetzee's Jesus trilogy.
http://ow.ly/TuWo50xqrL0
'It remains a poem comprised of clay fragments, short and long, and though the desert delivers up occasional additional text, we are a long way from a whole poem.'
Michael Schmidt on the oldest surviving poem in the world.
http://ow.ly/7OLF50xqr91
'Apparently if you’re a teenager and you send a declaration of love to someone heart emoji, heart emoji, heart emoji and they come back smiley face, that’s the worst.'
Thomas Blaikie tries to get his head round the language of the internet.
http://ow.ly/TU6d50xroRc