The ruthlessness with which Simone de Beauvoir documents Sartre's deterioration is, at first, appalling. The puddle of piss he leaves on a chair is recorded. So is the dribble on his shirt. Nothing is shameful to de Beauvoir if it is true: the ugliest, the least dignified truth is beauty.
The staccato rat-a-tat of the years of Sartre's faltering final decade, 1970–1980, shatters our and the 19th-century's obsession with immutable Grecian urns, with adolescent 'perfection', with euphemism. This book is an extraordinary achievement, precisely the right encomium for a man whose passion was mind….
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