THE FOLIO SOCIETY

Paris 1944. The German occupation is over and a mood of euphoria is sweeping the streets, but ex–Resistance fighter Henri is finding it ‘a peace without sweetness’. He wants to travel, to write, to sleep with whom he pleases, but long–term partner Paula wants to revive their relationship. Best friend Robert has an appetite only for politics (though ‘it was whispered that he drank and frequented brothels’) and Anne, his wife, takes relief from the sheer complexity of it all in her long–distance affair with gritty Chicago writer, Lewis Brogan. These are Paris’s intellectual elite. But while their parties sparkle with starlets and champagne, the daily revelations about concentration camps, Russian labour camps and reprisals cast long shadows.

When it was first published, The Mandarins was praised for its depiction of the heady mix of excitement and despair that ran through Paris after The Liberation. But even more noted, perhaps, was the insight it gave into some of most brilliant minds of the day. Here was one of France’s most celebrated writers revealing the sexual and political lives of her glamorous friends. Jean Paul Sartre (de Beauvoir’s long–term lover) is Robert, Albert Camus is Henri, and Nelson Algren (with whom she had a much publicised affair) is Lewis. The book was awaited, as Doris Lessing explains, ’with the lubricious excitement used for fashionable gossip’, and readers were not disappointed. In this, the centenary year of de Beauvoir’s birth (2008), its power has not diminished.

Chosen by Kirsty Wark – 2008 Castaway’s Choice

Scottish journalist Kirsty Wark is best known as one of the presenters of BBC2’s Newsnight and its weekly arts programme, Newsnight Review. A seasoned political correspondent, her most famous interview was a headline–making clash with then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1990. She has also presented the Man Booker literary awards for BBC2 and BBC4.