Parisian Lives
Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir
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Parisian Lives
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Narrateur(s):
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Suzanne Toren
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Auteur(s):
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Deirdre Bair
À propos de cet audio
A Pulitzer Prize Finalist
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
National Book Award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair explores her 15 remarkable years in Paris with Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, painting intimate new portraits of two literary giants and revealing secrets of the biographical art.
In 1971, Deirdre Bair was a journalist and a recently minted PhD who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. He agreed that she could be his biographer despite her never having written a biography before. The next seven years of probing conversations, intercontinental research, singular encounters with Beckett's friends, and peculiar cat-and-mouse games resulted in Samuel Beckett: A Biography, which went on to win the National Book Award and propel Bair to her next subject: Simone de Beauvoir.
Where Beckett had been retiring and elusive, Beauvoir was domineering and all encompassing. Plus, there was a catch: Beauvoir and Beckett despised each other - and lived in the same neighborhood. Bair, who resorted to dodging one subject or the other by hiding out in the great cafés of Paris, learned that what works in terms of process for one biography rarely applies to the next. Her seven-year relationship with the forceful and difficult Beauvoir required a radical change in approach and yielded another groundbreaking literary profile while also awakening Bair to an era of burgeoning feminist consciousness.
Drawing on Bair's extensive notes from the period, including never-before-told anecdotes and details considered impossible to publish at the time, Parisian Lives gives us an entirely new perspective on the all-too-human side of these legendary thinkers. It is also a warmly personal reflection on the writing life - its compromises, its joys, and its rewards.
©2019 Deirdre Bair (P)2019 Random House AudioCe que les critiques en disent
"Sparkling... Bair spent seven years on Beckett and ten on Beauvoir, and her dedication to her subjects is apparent. Into her accounts of working with these eminent, often exasperating writers she weaves recollections of malfunctioning tape recorders, grandstanding sources, and her travails as a professional and a mother commuting across the Atlantic, working in a field dominated by men." (The New Yorker)
"Gripping... In Parisian Lives, which reads much like a ‘making of...’ documentary, Bair gives us her off-camera take on her first two biographies. And, to our delight, we become voyeurs. Can this inexperienced young American tame these two monstres sacrés? Will she be hoodwinked by two larger-than-life writers who want to influence, manipulate, control, even censor her - even as, all the while, they appear to cooperate?... A story well told." (Alan Riding, The New York Times Book Review)
"This juicy book, which [Bair] dubs a ‘bio-memoir,’ is at once a record of triumph over the skepticism and sexism she encountered on her path from journalist to academic and biographer and a valuable lesson in the art of biography.... Parisian Lives is an unqualified success." (Heller McAlpin, The Wall Street Journal)
Ce que les auditeurs disent de Parisian Lives
Moyenne des évaluations de clientsÉvaluations – Cliquez sur les onglets pour changer la source des évaluations.
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Au global5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Histoire5 out of 5 stars
- Roberta W
- 2024-05-19
Memoir of two biographies of writers
Nothing about the main title of the book (Parisian Lives) led me to have any sense of what it was about…. so it hid in my audiobook library for some time before I looked closer and read the subtitle (Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir). Ah, such is the reality of a virtual library with postage stamp size images…. I had managed to file it under “Paris” instead of “Bios: Writers” so it was like a misfiled physical bookstore or library book, “discovered” only when browsing Paris travel writing. True, much of the story takes place in Paris…
Anyways, this was a great book and I’m glad I eventually re-found it. It’s like three writer biographies in one: the author’s two (very interesting) subjects and her. How she found herself writing biographies was one of the most interesting aspects of the work.
I’m paraphrasing, but it was almost as simple as - when looking for a substantive subject to write about - thought about the possibility of writing a biography, when Beckett jumped into her mind, and that was that! She hadn’t been preparing for years, didn’t know someone who knew him, and didn’t know the first thing about the right way to approach a project like this. As a result, as she would learn much later, she missed using many of the common tricks and tools of the trade, and invented her own. I was intrigued by all this as much as I was by the stories of meeting and penning the lives of Beckett and de Beauvoir. Highly recommended.
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