Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Penguin Modern Classics)

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She seeks for meaning at one stage falling under the influence of a young man who from his experience of comradeship in the first world war was forming a catholic youth movement, this was quite paternalistic in style, for instance de Beauvoir is enrolled to lecture working class men and women on literature.

Ce coup-ci, l'envie de faire quelque chose de grand, de devenir ce qu'on peut être me rend surtout mélancolique. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. Quand j'étais petite je relisais toujours les mêmes livres, je me tannais pas; drôle que ça m'arrive tellement peu maintenant.In a lot of ways the memoir is a tragedy about two of the closest people to her throughout her childhood and her teenage years: her older cousin Jacques and her best friend Zaza. They are very elegantly written, but show a candor and honesty few people are brave enough to have when looking back at their own lives. E' una biografia leggera, ricca di aneddoti, ma al tempo stesso pesante di analisi lucidissime e perfette, geometriche (a posteriori di 30 anni, e di tante altre letture, so anche come l'ha ricostruita (con omissioni e abbellimenti, ma non toglie niente al suo fascino). Beginning with birth and ending with the completion of her secondary schooling, some of the most interesting passages in this book map to what are often the "boring bits" of biography and autobiography: de Beauvoir's early childhood. She goes, within the space of a page or two, from being in love with life to being in the absolute pits of despair.

She detests the idea that it is acceptable for young men to sow their wild oats and have a variety of sexual escapades before marriage, but if a woman does the same thing then she, and her family, are ruined. One of these ways is " partial blindness " , which I think is a somewhat common phenomenon for women who grow up in close contact with a culture created almost exclusively by men. But neither Zaza nor Jacques are able to break free from yoke and expectations placed on the by bourgeois life. In this mindset she could understand letters as objects (an "a," for example) but not as building blocks representing sounds that make up words.I knew too little of the habits of adults to be able to guess where they were going in such a hurry, or what the hopes and fears were that drove them along. Parfois, l'œil rêveur, la voix subtile, on nuançait: "C'est curieux" ou d'un ton plus sévère: "C'est spécial.

Non solo perché sono nata settant’anni dopo, non solo perché sono italiana e non francese ma soprattutto per il contesto famigliare di alta borghesia conservatrice. Raised devoutly Catholic, for example, she realizes sometime in her early teens that she no longer believes in God.There comes a period in her teenage years when language, the necessity of interpreting language, becomes her enemy for just this reason: when we express our thoughts, feelings, and intentions, there is always a chasm between the thing itself—our interior landscape—and our expression of it; often this chasm is only widened when our words are interpreted by another person. In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, de Beauvoir included travel stories, set pieces, metaphors, intimate portraits, philosophical musings, and desultory political comments as she described her early years, when she tried to “get other people interested in her soul. and while books play a certain part in her narrative she points out that it is far more the record of moods and prolonged feelings, partly perhaps because from about half way through she mentions that she started to keep a diary and no doubt her emotional state was something she wrote about, this stands in ironic counterpoint to her engagement in studying philosophy which does move her at so profound a level.

Of course had life panned out as her parents wished it she would have emerged from the shell of childhood in the parental house to the shell of marriage in the husbands, as it was history intervened, slowly, but with decisive effect and we see her building a different kind of life for herself even if she is still at that point in her life herself looking for some grand unifying structure. La storia della scoperta di sé che, ognuno a suo modo e seguendo indole e sogni, ognuno di noi dovrebbe almeno provare a compiere. Simone de Beavoir describes her early life, from her birth in Paris in 1908 to her student days at the Sorbonne, where she met Jean-Paul sartre - 'the dream-companion I had longed for since I was fifteen'. The Rights of Man are along with pesky Bolshevik revolutions (destroying the value of de Beauvoir pere's investment in Russian debt) the threats to a careful, cloying, controlled, catholic culture.

Fundamentally a study of identity, this book was no less of a personal experience for me as a reader, than it obviously was for Beauvoir herself. Que l'image qu'elle se fait des autres se soit craquelée, surtout celle de sa famille, est cause d'une frustration triste, mais pas de regret. As she grows older, she gradually loses her faith and questions the double standards for men and women placed on her not only by the rules of religion but also by the demands of the bourgeois society that she has grown up in. But their faces, their appearance, and the sound of their voices captivated me; I find it hard now to explain what the particular pleasure was that they gave me; but when my parents decided to move to the fifth-floor flat in the rue de Rennes, I remember the despairing cry I gave: 'But I won't be able to see the people in the street any more! O povestire era un lucru frumos, suficient sieși, ca un spectacol de marionete sau o fotografie; percepeam necesitatea acestor construcții cu început, cuprins și încheiere, în care fiecare cuvânt și fiecare frază se distinge, în individualitatea sa, precum culorile unui tablou.