The Mandarins
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The Mandarins (French: Les Mandarins) is a 1954 novel by Simone de Beauvoir. The novel is perhaps de Beauvoir's most celebrated, and in 1954 it won her the Prix Goncourt.
The Mandarins is about the life and works of French intellectuals during the time from Christmas 1944, just after France has been liberated. It's a kind of chronicle of existentialism. The book describes (slightly veiled) the struggles between Jean-Paul Sartre (here called Robert Dubreuilh) on the one side, and Albert Camus (called Henri Perron) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (called Victor Scriassine) on the other side. Then, it also tells the story of Anne Dubreuilh, wife of Robert Dubreuilh, who's an alter ego of author de Beauvoir herself. The narrative switches between the viewpoints of Anne and Henri and the time even overlaps between chapters.
World affairs are considered in detail - for instance the three main characters hear together about the US bombing of Hiroshima whilst they are on a sunny cyling holiday together. Collaboration with the Germans by some French people during the war is a consistent theme, as is the rise of the Communist Party and the discovery of the labour/death camps in Russia, later written about by Solzhenitsin in such detail. Political changes happening in France after the war are also at the heart of the novel - there is a sense that France is going to be 'swallowed up' either by the US or by Russia.
Anne lost her Catholic faith in early years but still preserved some principles of her conservative upbringing. This leads to her conflict between freedom and dutifulness. She loves her husband Robert and her daughter Nadine (a prickly, aggressive character) and cares about her patients and other friends such as Paula. After resisting a trip to the US for reasons of duty, she goes, and meets an American writer Lewis Brogan (i.e. Nelson Algren)and has a deep affair with him, by returning to him in the summer time, and travelling with him eg to Guatemala. However, this relationship ends when he falls out of love and she cannot bear merely to be friends.
The whole story has a more pessimist atmosphere. It's about the moral conflicts coming from the question whether one's supposed to always tell the truth and the problem of authors' engagement per se. So, Dubreuilh and Perron are just Mandarins, restricted to the power(lessness) of Literature and journalism by which they try to influence politics. Anne's soliloquiesare interspersed by long, existentialistically painted dialogues. The Author confronts the reader with philosophical axioms by Sartre and the change from the first person "I" for Anne and third person "he" for Perron. At the end, there's the feeling of isolation, solitude and especially the realization that all the characters are irreconcilable.
The British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch described the book as "endearing because of its persistent seriousness".
