Tete-a-Tete: The Tumultuous Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (P.S.) (Paperback)

~ Hazel Rowley (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A lively and fulfilling portrait... [A] wonderfully crafted narrative... Thoroughly researched and well-written." (Library Journal )

"TETE-A-TETE has just about everything... Hard as I tried, I could not put it down." (Barbara Ehrenreich )

"[Rowley] draws from vast stores of published and unpublished writings, correspondence and interviews." (Publishers Weekly )

"Enormously rich and utterly absorbing . . . a short, concise, penetrating look into the famous couple who changed their century." (Brenda Maddox )

"Exhilirating." (Houston Chronicle )

"Compulsively readable... The surprise page-turner of the season... [A] fascinating study of a passion that transcended convention." (Los Angeles Times Book Review )

"The surprise page-turner of the year." (Newsday )

"Engrossing... Tells Beauvoir and Sartre's repellent, inspiring and unlikely tale more completely and concisely than it has ever been told." (New York Times Book Review )

"An in-depth, unflinching account . . . TETE-A-TETE provides a valuable cultural history." (Boston Globe )

"Fascinating . . . A neatly assembled record of people behaving badly in the name of literature, philosophy and amour." (Kirkus Reviews )

"A fast-moving yet vast saga, spanning the bulk of the 20th century and much of the world." (Seattle Times )

"[A] sympathetic but clear-eyed history of Sartre and Beauvoir's lifelong partnership." (New York Times )

"An enthralling book." (Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World )

Product Description

Passionate, freethinking existentialist philosopher-writers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre are one of the world's legendary couples. Their committed but notoriously open union generated no end of controversy in their day. Biographer Hazel Rowley offers the first dual portrait of these two colossal figures and their intense, often embattled relationship. Through original interviews and access to new primary sources, Rowley portrays Sartre and Beauvoir up close.

Tête-à-Tête magnificently details the passion, daring, humor, and contradictions of a remarkably unorthodox relationship.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (October 17, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060520604
• ISBN-13: 978-0060520601
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #594,798 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Vivid and engaging portrait of a relationship -- but philosophically unenlightening, December 19, 2006

By	Nathan Andersen "film lover, philosophy profe... (Florida) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This well-researched and detailed portrait of a remarkable and unique relationship between two remarkable and unique people is never less than engaging. It is well worth reading for anyone who has even a passing interest in the intellectual climate in France just preceding, during and after WWII, a period that produced an amazing list of artists and philosophers: Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir, Lanzmann (all of whom figure in this narrative), the nouvelle vague in cinema, and many more. For that matter, it is well worth reading for anyone who is interested in life, and the details of these lives are intrinsically fascinating (which is not always to say admirable). Rowley had an almost unprecedented access to historical materials, and to many of the people involved, and put together a sensitive and coherent picture of Sartre and Beauvoir from roughly the time they met to their deaths. That she is able to paint such an intimate and compassionate portrait that does not shy away from depicting faults and inconsistencies in their lives and thought is a testament to Rowley's skills as a writer and as a historian.

The major weakness of the book is that her talent with philosophy is not equally on display here. In the course of telling her story, Rowley mentions the philosophical works of Sartre and Beauvoir, but says very little to illuminate the connection between their thinking and their lives. Even where she does discuss such connections, the links are fairly superficial. (Or, the connections are of the sort that can be made at the level of pop psychology between an artist and his or her work.) Existentialism comes across in her book in its fairly popular form: that there is no essence of human being and that we define ourselves through our actions. The connection between Sartre's existentialism and phenomenology gets summarized in the claim that Sartre learned from phenomenology that philosophy could be about everyday life. What she doesn't note is that beyond the fact Sartre learned from phenomenology to focus on everyday life, he also engaged in a systematic effort to redescribe life -- to show that our ordinary ways of conceiving everyday life are deeply flawed. Beauvoir's own significant and original philosophical work (apart from "The Second Sex") is hardly discussed -- her "Ethics of Ambiguity," for example, is never even mentioned. What she doesn't note is that Beauvoir had developed a powerful typology of ways in which one might respond to and realize freedom in one's life, in her "Ethics of Ambiguity" -- and it would be interesting to consider where she must have fit on that continuum. Perhaps most egregiously, she fails to emphasize that for both Sartre and Beauvoir, existentialist freedom is not primarily about the rejection of traditional bonds but about the recognition of the ways in which we bind ourselves to others through our projects and commitments -- so that "authenticity" is not just about being oneself but about the discovery that one cannot avoid belonging to others and to deny one's commitments to others is bad faith. If Sartre painted this inevitibility as a kind of hell in "No Exit," Beauvoir especially in the "Ethics of Ambiguity" depicts an acceptance of the ambiguous commitments that emerge from our being with others as the only genuine freedom and the only possible salvation. (In spite of her desire to depict Beauvoir as independent of Sartre, and her emphasis of Sartre's unwavering respect for her as a thinker, Rowley doesn't really give a sense of the independence of Beauvoir as a thinker -- and what comes across for the most part here is the popular but I think misleading picture of Sartre as the philosopher and Beauvoir as the memoirist who occasionally also applied philosophy to subjects like women and aging.) On this reading, then Sartre and Beauvoir come across primarily as writers whose ideas and commitments evolved over time to become more political, who rejected standard morality including and especially the moral prescriptions that reinforce the family, and who shared a unique form of relationship (that involved fidelity to each other in the sense that they would always tell each other the truth, even where they were willing to lie to others with whom they had secondary relationships). One might have wished for a more detailed account of their thinking if only because such an account would help to pose the question how their life must have been conceived by themselves, in accordance with their own thinking. Otherwise, and in spite of the book's other merits as a piece of history and biography that can complement a study of their work (or of the period), the book ends up reading like a soap opera for intellectuals. While I think this point deserves emphasis I don't want to overemphasize this. One of the merits of Rowley's book is that she takes as her model of biography the autobiographical works of Beauvoir -- and to that extent she does employ a similar approach to reflection on their lives that Beauvoir employs in her published works. I just would have liked to see a bit more reflection in the book about the relation between their lives and their more focused philosophical reflections. First and foremost, Sartre and Beavoir are engaged thinkers and a biography that rarely engages with their deepest thinking except at the superficial level of brief summary, seems to me to be lacking. Having said that, I should reiterate that apart from such misgivings I found the book to be very well written and thoroughly enjoyable and could hardly put it down.

5.0 out of 5 stars compelling.....addicting.... scandalous, February 10, 2009

By	M. Reyes - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I loved the story line and the philosophical questions confronted in this work that certainly changed my view on traditional relationships and the significance of marriage.