All Men Are Mortal

"My second choice is a novel called All Men are Mortal. One of the things I find fascinating about Simone de Beauvoir is that she has an explicit philosophy of fiction. She said that she published the philosophy that was in Pyrrhus and Cinéa s in three different literary forms. There was the philosophical essay, but she also wanted to show it as an imaginary experience in a novel, All Men Are Mortal. She also wrote a play form of the philosophical insight. No, she only wrote one play—it wasn’t a form that she decided to keep writing in. There are many things to like about All Men Are Mortal , but one of the reasons I’m recommending it is that there is no Jean-Paul Sartre character. Many people read Beauvoir’s resistance novels and the novels that are set in 1940s or 1950s Paris and think, ‘This is telling us what it was like to be Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus and this stellar cast of French philosophers.’ Get the weekly Five Books newsletter That’s been very problematic in terms of the reception of Beauvoir’s life, because people have assumed that they can read her fiction as if it’s an accurate representation of real life. Although there are cases where she says explicitly that it is, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the entire novel is autobiographical. All Men Are Mortal is about a man who makes a deal in the medieval period to become immortal. He thinks that if his life isn’t limited by death, he will be able to right the world’s wrongs, and do away with greed and pestilence and famine. He starts off with this aristocratic life in Italy and lives through huge moments in European history, including the Reformation and the Wars of Religion and the conquest of the New World. He manages to amass tremendous amounts of wealth through this long life, but neither his efforts nor his wealth can cure humanity of its will to destruction. “Women start to be what Beauvoir calls ‘the eye that sees’ instead of subjects written about by male historians” It’s this fascinating narrative about an immortal man, Count Fosca, but also about the women who fall in love with him. One of the things that Beauvoir does that is very insightful is that she shows how the situation of women in the different centuries spanning Count Fosca’s life are radically different. In the later centuries, women start to have access to education; they start to fund scientific research and found universities. They start to be what Beauvoir calls ‘the eye that sees’ instead of subjects written about by male historians. Women begin to speak in their own voice as the novel’s narrative goes on. I’ve also chosen this novel in part because many people think that Beauvoir doesn’t become a political person until the writing of The Second Sex . In fact, her fiction from the 1940s shows that a lot of the preoccupations she had about women’s role in society and the way they’ve been conditioned by history stretch quite a way back into her past. Yes. In fact, another genre question that people have about Beauvoir when she started to write autobiography was whether she was trying to use her own life as a bildungsroman for young women. As I said, she did see fiction as providing imaginary experiences, but another phrase that she used to describe the experience of reading was that it could be ‘an authentic spiritual adventure.’ She thought that there was something about reading—when the book is done well—that appeals to the freedom of the reader and helps them reflect on their own possibilities in life. The Euan Cameron translation, which is based on the Friedman one, is a good one."