La Trahison des Jerks

Now, after two years, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins can be looked at more objectively. The easily shocked have recovered. Nelson Algren is safe beside his lagoon in the Indiana dunes, and even the royalty checks have subsided to a trickle. The least we can offer this most intellectually ambitious of recent novels is the courtesy of a regular medical check-up… if not an autopsy.

Most mystifying, at first glance, is why the author was not immediately brought to the attention of the Better Business Bureaus, along with the vendors of grass seed guaranteed never to grow to a cuttable height, or dispensers of free coupons for baby photographs. By calling her novel The Mandarins, she misbranded it beyond all permissible advertising canons. We are offered philosopher kings whose massive intellects and fierce integrity dominate a society dedicated to the mind and art. Opening the package, we find merely another assortment of the sweat-stained wretches who have exhausted themselves and our patience dragging the junks of Communism up the gorges of the world.

GM

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Georg Mann

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Now, after two years, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins can be looked at more objectively. The easily shocked have recovered. Nelson Algren is safe beside his lagoon in the Indiana dunes, and even the royalty checks have subsided to a trickle. The least we can offer this most intellectually ambitious of recent novels is the courtesy of a regular medical check-up… if not an autopsy.

Most mystifying, at first glance, is why the author was not immediately brought to the attention of the Better Business Bureaus, along with the vendors of grass seed guaranteed never to grow to a cuttable height, or dispensers of free coupons for baby photographs. By calling her novel The Mandarins, she misbranded it beyond all permissible advertising canons. We are offered philosopher kings whose massive intellects and fierce integrity dominate a society dedicated to the mind and art. Opening the package, we find merely another assortment of the sweat-stained wretches who have exhausted themselves and our patience dragging the junks of Communism up the gorges of the world.