Misunderstanding in Moscow by Simone de Beauvoir

Misunderstanding in Moscow by Simone de Beauvoir

French lit

Original title Malentendu à Moscou

Translator – Terry Keefe

Source – personal copy

I was looking in my local Waterstones for a book for this month I have a lot at home but was trying to get some other choices and I saw this I had recently brought her lost novel that came out last year and the French writer and  Simone de Beauvoir is some I had only e=read second sex in my late teens so not is time to read some more of her writing and this rediscover novella that came out a decade ago in France did catch my eye especially as I had read a couple of Gorges Simone works that were set in the Soviet Union from around this time . I know there is a strong connection between France and Russia as many Russian went to live in France. de Beauvoir herself spent time in the USSR during the sixties.

‘Your nationalism won’t be easily dislodged,’ he con-tinued, as they came out of the church. ‘The gist of what you have just explained is that you are no longer a revolutionary country and that that’s fine

‘Not at all. We have had the revolution and it is not in question. But in France you don’t know what war is. We do. We don’t want it.”

Macha had spoken angrily and André, too, felt annoyed.

‘No one wants it. What I’m saying is that if you give America a free hand, if you don’t stop the escalation, that’s when America is to be feared. Munich prevented nothing at all.’

One of the many discussions I loved these.

This is the story of three people: a retired couple Nicole and Andre are heading to Moscow f0or their summer holidays  as they are seeing Andres’s first daughter from his first marriage Macha who is living in Moscow. I loved a quip they made they could tell she is in Moscow because of her very tight perm this felt like a very French observation of Macha. The three are looking forward to the time to gather but this is a couple that are set in their ways like a pair of old slippers the spark has gone so this leads them into long discussions of the world lot about the two worlds easy and west. Talked about in what are often described in the book as a dull place of grey rooms and boring hotels. As they talk like they are on the left bank discussing in that loud way one almost pictures DE Beauvoir and Satre not Nicole and Andre as they discuss the Soviet world and how it impacts the West ad to this is the three-way relationship between father and daughter and that with stepmother love but at times there are cracks.

André found the hotel that they stayed at in Leningrad charming. Long corridors and pearl-grey doors opening onto them, with oval panes at the top framed by old-fashioned festoons and hung with silk curtains, which were pink, green or blue according to which floor you were on.

In their room there was an alcove, hidden by a curtain, and endearing old furniture: a heavy desk of false marble, a black leather sofa, a table covered by a tablecloth with fringes. Chandeliers with crystal pendants lit up the dining room, where a young, semi-naked woman in marble was adjusting her dress with a naughty smile – or was she taking it off?

There is a dullness to the hotel very unappealing how it is described here.

This was unfinished in her lifetime and there is a sense of it being a little unpolished, The Moscow she describes is the one we had imagined great building but the modern life for the everyday muscovites as grey almost murky at times. This is story of family, politics and life in general and these are subjects de Beauvoir always wrote about for me the beauty of this coming out is to imagine that it in part of her and Satre as the couple the way they discuss the world and being a fly on the wall almost. it is a couple at that age where the spark has gone and you can see that but a deep love and connection is still there  As a reader, I sit on the fence with post-HUMOUS WORKS. I think if like this they still have merit in the writer’s canon which I feel this does it comes from her own experience in the Soviet Union of the time. It is 110 pages and is what one would call a film book as it can be read in a couple of hours. Have you read any books by Simone de Beauvoir or this one , what are your thoughts on post homes publishing of unfinished for nearly finished works ?

Winstons score – b an insight into a bygone place soviet Moscow !