I loved reading this short novella by Beauvoir. I had never read any fiction by her but after this I am surprised this one was unpublished for so long! It really gives you another queer perspective into Beauvoir reading The Inseparables, as it is based on a real-life friendship.

This is a very short story though story is probably not the right word as it is based on real events of the authors life. I was totally swept away by the story and was enthralled by the characters and descriptions within the book. The relationship between the two main characters is portrayed as well as any classic novel ever has and it could be set in any time period and would stand up against the likes of Dickens or Bronte.
This really is a great piece of literary work and I can not recommend it highly enough.

Novellas are the perfect way to get hard hitting concepts and thought provoking scenes into a story and this book goes beyond that. I was literally enthralled by the characters and their relationship. 5 stars, easy recommend.

Really good book I loved it I give it five 🌟 I would recommend it to any one that likes a good book. I will be reading more books by this author. It is just the type of book I like

Having read Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter it is impossible for me to ignore the echoes of de Beauvoir's autobiography in this novella - in many ways, it's not so much fiction as a candid ode to Zaza/Andrée's tragically brief life. This is very much Andrée's story: the character of Sylvie/Simone only really exists as a shadow to her brilliant and ephemeral friend. Here, de Beauvoir has done all she can to efface herself and give Zaza centre stage.

It's probably fair to say that The Inseparables is more powerful as a historical artifact than a piece of literature; it's the context in which this novella was written, rather than its content, that makes it so compelling.

The Inseparables is short but perfectly formed - one of those rare, truly poignant stories that seems to slip through your fingers as you read.

This is very hard hitting and thought provoking. Lots packed into a short book. Fascinating insight in what we know to be a sort of real life situation for the author. Interesting takes on love, and growing up.

The brevity of The Inseparables feels to mirror the abrupt and early death of Zaza, and the missing 'pages' of what her life could have been were it not for religion and 'society'.

The putting limits and expectations upon individuals is universal. In this case, it is religion, the class system, and the patriarchy which crushes a fascinating and charismatic character who no doubt could have led a similarly fascinating life. The outward strength and disregard for 'rules' displayed when the girls are in school is gradually picked at and worn down by the world. I wonder if everyone feels this wearing down to greater or lesser extents.

I found the conflicting impressions of Zaza's mother interesting - early on she is seen by others as allowing her daughter too much freedom, and her house seems relaxed and happy. Zaza's mother herself was 'worn down' and married someone she did not want to marry, and I wonder if she did still wish for her daughters to have some freedom but society simply was too powerful for her, and so she conformed to expectations of motherhood - and therefore contributed to this crushing of Zaza, not because she wanted to but because it is what society expected.

'Must I spend my life fighting against the people I love?'

An unpublished novel by Simone de Beauvoir, this may lack the sophistication of her published fiction, especially Les Mandarins, but it's still a searing indictment of how a young woman can be crushed by the bourgeois, gendered and religious expectations piled upon her in the interwar years.

Drawing on the her own youthful friendship with the girl known as Zaza in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, de Beauvoir has written a short novella in pared back, deceptively simple prose. In places it reminds me of André Gide's La Porte étroite/Strait is the Gate for the religious element that plays out here, but it is as much about catholic culture as Catholic.

This edition translated by Lauren Elkin comes with an introduction by Deborah Levy and a useful afterword by de Beauvoir's daughter, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, who also appends copies of letters between Zaza and de Beauvoir. Unmissable, I'd say.

Presented as a lost Simone de Beauvoir novel, but 'novel' may be pushing it, both in terms of length and fictionality. Not that she was ever averse to rooting her fiction in her own life, but the blurb, and translator Lauren Elkin's note, both point up the roots in de Beauvoir's own life, right down to passages which appeared in very similar form in the memoirs. I haven't read those, but it's hard to resist the suspicion that de Beauvoir made a conscious decision to leave this to one side after cannibalising selected passages for use elsewhere. I wasn't expecting it to be up there with She Came To Stay or All Men To Mortal, but The Inseparables feels fragmentary even compared to a relatively minor work like Les Belles Images. Had it come out decades ago, it might be another matter, but read in the 2020s, a story about the ebbs and flows of power in a girlhood friendship, further constricted by the demands of stifling social expectations in a world suffused with Catholicism, can't help but recall a posher Neapolitan Quartet – and of course, that had so much more space to work with. Though some of the most interesting threads come when, perhaps because of the different era and milieu, faith looms larger here; I was particularly taken with the section on how it was pretty much accepted that fathers could be quietly agnostic, with believing yet another family/social duty which devolved on the mother, and de Beauvoir's avatar's younger self seeing pious men as somehow effeminate. And bloody hell, having seen in detail quite how constricted the time and choices of girls and young women were when de Beauvoir was coming up, you can understand how freedom became such a fixation for her in later life. There's also a real sense, though, of how for all that both believers and atheists can easily think of faith as a comfort blanket, to a certain mindset it can just as easily be a scourge, inwards as easily as outwards. Sometimes, there's that sudden crystal flare of de Beauvoir at her best: "Madame Gallard was visibly distracted; I tried, in vain, to find the youthful girl from the album in her yellowed face. And yet she has memories, I said to myself. What are they? And what use does she make of them?" Elsewhere, though, sentences fall into inadvertent comedy: "Andrée went to the stables and caressed her small chestnut horse" had me giggling even before the sentence concluded "but she never mounted him anymore". I don't think this is any failing on Elkin's part – as with the last de Beauvoir translator I read, Patrick O'Brian, I know full well from her own work that she can write. Rather, I tend to blame an inherent difficulty of rendering French seriousness into ever-irreverent English, and one which presents even more of a hurdle when you're dealing with a great writer, but a minor and on some level incomplete work.

(Netgalley ARC)