Les Mandarins

Although it marked Beauvoir’s entry into the field of fiction, Les Mandarins was, to its author’s surprise, favorably received by contemporary critics and found in Queneau an appreciable supporter.

Following Sartre, who had bluntly told his companion that this literary undertaking “did not please him,” Beauvoir returned to the task: for several months, without respite, she worked to recast a book that she intended to be — in her own words — “neither an autobiography, nor a piece of reportage. But an evocation.”

Marked by a kind of resigned fatalism, the text, partly written at the same time as Le Deuxième Sexe, is shadowed throughout by the theme of feminine failure, as Beauvoir painfully addresses the awareness of aging, the dread of illness, the fear of death, and the anguish of failed love.

Championed by the Goncourt jury, the book sold some 200,000 copies in its first year, after an initial printing of 11,000 copies, securing its author worldwide recognition.

A very fine copy.