The Woman Destroyed (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

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The second of the three novellas, The Monologue is, amongst a plethora of other, more sophisticated descriptive phrases, exhausting. When she finds out her husband has been unfaithful, Monique goes through several emotional stages that make her question her entire life.

Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself - exactly oneself and no one else - and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else.With her focus firmly on the inner lives of three women, de Beauvoir somehow manages to be coolly analytical while still conjuring the searing emotions that both make and unmake her female protagonists.

Es preferible no desvelar mucho más y que cada lector los descubra por sí mismo, basta con decir que estos relatos ofrecen tres de las voces más auténticas y creíbles que he leído jamás. One of the most influential thinkers of her generationdraws us into the lives of three women, all past their first youth, all facing unexpected crises in these three “immensely intelligent stories about the decay of passion” (The Sunday Herald Times).

By doing so, the characters constantly occupy a sort of dual existence of living in the past and the present simultaneously, attempting to calculate how the events of the past have led to the realities of now. I went to fetch things out of the car: I spread a rug on the ground, cushions, the transistor, and I smoked, listening to Mozart. On a broader scale, this train of thought can be applied to our individual places in society; the question should not be ‘how did we get a president like this?