Simone Weil (Lives) - Hardcover

Gray, Francine Du Plessix

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297646273 ISBN 13: 9780297646273

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001

Synopsis

Francine du Plessix Gray's biography of the Marquis de Sade, At Home with the Marquis de Sade, was hailed by The New York Times Book Review as a "boldly imaginative retelling" of his life and garnered the critically acclaimed author a Pulitzer Prize nomination. In Simone Weil, du Plessix Gray vividly evokes the life of an equally complex and intriguing figure. A patriot and a mystic, an unruly activist plagued by self-doubt, a pampered intellectual with a credo of manual labor, an ascetic who craved sensuous beauty, Simone Weil died at the age of thirty-four prematurely after a long struggle with anorexia. But her tremendous intellectual legacy foresaw many of the twentieth century's great changes and continues to influence philosophy today. Simone Weil traces this seminal thinker's transformation from privileged Parisian student to union organizer, activist, and philosopher as well as the complex evolution of her ideas on Christianity, politics, and sexuality. In this thoughtful and compelling biography, du Plessix Gray illuminates an enigmatic figure and early feminist whose passion and pathos will fascinate a wide audience of readers.

About this title

Review

Writing with her customary grace and acuity, Francine du Plessix Gray, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated At Home with the Marquis de Sade, examines an equally extreme character at the opposite end of the moral spectrum in Simone Weil. Weil (1909-43) displayed early the ferocious intellect that took this daughter of affluent, highly assimilated French Jews to the peak of her country's rigorous educational system and made her an important modern philosopher. But Weil remains a beacon to activists because of her passionate, intensely personal commitment to the world's oppressed and her need to directly share their sufferings. This need had its neurotic aspects, and Gray's elegant biography does not gloss over Weil's lifelong anorexia, her distaste for physical contact, her peculiar brand of anti-Semitism, or the unyielding self-righteousness that led her to cut off friendships for minor offenses. Yet the overall tone is one of sympathetic respect for an extraordinary human being unable to develop the willed blindness that enables most of us to live comfortably while others go without. Weil gave up prestigious teaching jobs to do manual labor; she performed dangerous work in the Resistance; and, when threatened by a Vichy policeman who exclaimed angrily, "You little bitch, we'll have you thrown in jail with the whores!" she replied coolly, "I've always wanted to know that milieu." Her slow, exceedingly tentative movement toward Christianity grew from her need to affirm her solidarity with the world's "slaves," and her prescient denunciation of Communism at a time when most radicals embraced it arose from her understanding that Soviet apparatchiks abused the working class just as egregiously as their putative opponents, the fascists. This is an outstanding introduction for general readers to the influential thought and rivetingly conflicted life of a seminal figure in 20th-century intellectual history. --Wendy Smith

About the Author

Francine du Plessix Gray is the author of Rage and Fire, Lovers and Tyrants, Soviet Women, and the Pulitzer Prize finalist At Home with the Marquis de Sade.

Edition details

• Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0297646273
• ISBN 13: 9780297646273
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208
• Illustrator: Illus. With Photos