Book Review June

So I think I'm going to try a monthly book review, for two incentives. The first is to keep readers of the blog updated regularly and to share my monthly companions with you. The second is my personal incentive to keep reading; which admittedly over the last few months has been a great weakness...though it is understandable that I read and re-read Jane Eyre for my literature exam while neglecting Theo Decker and his art thievery. But anyway; that's the plan, and I hope I can hold it up because what I read is often the greatest telltale of what I'm feeling at the time.






The most recent book I read will be my first review and it will probably be the hardest review I have to write. Not because I disliked the novella, not because it was confusing or embarrassing to talk about. But because Simone de Beauvoir was not a woman I had encountered before stumbling upon The Blood of Others in Oxfam; but with genuine honesty her words have moved me so explicitly and dashed many of my approaches to literature, replaced with a raw and ragged outlook on what I read on the page.

The mere 240 pages span across the entire life of an unexpected love between a cynical and calculating Jean Blomart and the romantic and wild Hélène Bertrand, beginning the story with Jean suffering at his lovers deathbed. What then captured my attention in the following pages was the jump between third, first and  second person, that really grips the reader's wrists and draws them into the words and the world of a World War II ravaged Paris.  
I cannot admit, though, that the story itself was entirely gripping, that the sudden turn towards Jean's earlier life was encapsulating at all. In fact, I did not begin to understand the immensity of these characters until Hélène, and I through her, began to fall in love with Jean. 
At the two protagonists meeting a reader then ventures beyond the usual romantic novel, realising that love itself is not the main focus of the story but a side effect, a catalyst even, of the greater journey the characters follow. 

While the novel is exploring a time and place I had personally little literary experience it was the moments of raw emotion which most impressed on my new sort of experience; one I had not been invited to in my readings of young adult literature, where love is sugar coated or dowsed in bitterness. The love in The Blood of Others was neither of these things, it was entirely untouched, Beauvoir herself allowing the emotion free reign while she led the line of political injustice and French patriotism. Whether it be the second person narrative or my own belief of untainted expression since reading The Blood of Others I have found myself returning time and time again to a particular page (150 if you wanted a small taste of  the novella). From the narrative of Hélène a disturbing amount of reliance, of trust, and of simple devotion is expressed. Beauvoir does not hold back on her passion, on her need for self expression.

Veering away from emotion and focusing on that wider picture, that of France briefly before and during the Second World War, the setting is put in perspective; not from a varied point of a French mind, but from the varied point of people who understand their actions will be futile, but their attitude towards the horrors is too great, goodness too ingrained in them to turn a blind eye. 
Other characters beside the central couple perhaps becoming vital organs to the mechanism of a story so dependant of the interwoven relationships of the each character. Marcel's apathy is challenged by his wife's conviction, which is fueled by Hélène's passion. While Paul is reckless, distant, falling into disarray following the lost control he held over Hélène; then his strained friendship with Jean, his inability or want to follow orders from Jean as the leader of the patriot resistance. All these interwoven relationships, the difficulties between the group of characters lead and guide readers toward the climatic and destructive event at the close of the novel; the event which ultimately distinguishes The Blood of Others as different from any other romantic novella. 

What Beauvoir felt in 1935 is not lost in the pages or in reprinted editions of ink that her novella lives through. In fact, as the years have moved I feel that the story only increases in passionate fury and love and need. At age seventeen I have read The Blood of Others for the first time, knowing that if and when I revisit the story in the future my outlook will be different, but it will still be raw, the way I feel towards Jean, Hélène and the others will not be clean and perfect; it is meant to be unfinished, unexplained and uncommon, not a product that can be reproduced for a new cover or new setting.