1954 novel by Simone de Beauvoir
The Mandarins () is a 1954 roman à clef 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 (in a translation by Leonard M. Friedman).
The book follows the personal lives of a close-knit group of French intellectuals from the end of World War II to the mid-1950s. The title refers to the scholar-bureaucrats of imperial China. The characters at times see themselves as ineffectual "mandarins" as they attempt to discern what role, if any, intellectuals will have in influencing the political landscape of the world after World War II. As in Beauvoir's other works, themes of feminism, existentialism, and personal morality are explored as the characters navigate not only the intellectual and political landscape but also their shifting relationships with each other.
The Irish novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch (in the "Sunday Times") described "The Mandarins" as "a remarkable book, a novel on the grand scale, courageous in its exactitude and endearing because of its persistent seriousness".
Characters.
In volume 3 of her autobiography, de Beauvoir denies that "The Mandarins" is a "roman à clef". She writes: "I loathe "romans à clef" as much as I loathe fictionalized biographies." However, she says that "Anne was made from me, true, ... but I have made her into a woman in whom I do not recognize myself." She does admit that "of all my characters, Lewis is the one who approaches closest to a living model... It so happens that Algren, in his reality, was very representative of what I wanted to represent." Regarding the other characters, she says, "Henri, whatever people have said, is not Camus; not at all. He is young, has dark hair, he runs a newspaper; the resemblance stops there." Furthermore: "[Henri] in his relations with the Communist Party and in his attitude to Socialism, resembles Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and not Camus in the slightest." And as for Dubreuilh, she writes, "The identification of Sartre with Dubreuilh is no less aberrant; the only similarities between them are their common curiosity, concern with the world and fanaticism in work; but Dubreuilh is twenty years older than Sartre."
References.
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