This is a new translation by Lauren Elkin of a shortish Simone de Beauvoir book, Les Belles Images, first published in 1966. The book’s aim is to identify the source of its heroine’s discontent. But on the journey inside her mind and life, we get a good account of how de Beauvoir saw the world in the 1960s — and in many ways, that world wasn’t a whole lot different from ours.
The heroine is Laurence, a copywriter for an advertising agency. She has a handsome husband whom she married young, two little daughters, an ardent lover (this being Paris), good looks and, since her response to any crisis is a glass of water and exercise, a good figure. She’s liberated: unlike her dowdy sister, she isn’t Catholic. She’s good at her job and is making the most of oral contraceptives. Her husband is a technological optimist about the future — we know how wrong he was. But her mother has lost her lover (this being France) and is distraught. Laurence’s daughter, Catherine, has a new Jewish schoolfriend who is perceptive about the cruelties of the world and so she has started to ask questions about why she exists and why children are hungry.
