Hazel Rowley's Tête-à-Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre is reviewed in "The Guardian" by Todd McEwen and Lucy Ellmann: "The lack of authorial comment on these shenanigans [their sexual activities] makes Tête-à-Tête strangely uninvolving. But more alarmingly, Hazel Rowley has decided not to talk about Satre and De Beauvoir as writers. They worked like dogs all their lives, to a punishing schedule, bouncing ideas (and 20-year-olds) off each other. Their partnership and their love existed most vividly in their literary work. Without an acknowledgment of its meaning, and its place in their lives, this book descends into a litany of dreary hangers-on, telephone calls, appointments in cafés, plane trips and girls, girls, girls."
Eliot Perlman's collection of stories, The Reasons I Won't be Coming is reviewed in this week's "Washington Post". Seems rather late for publication there. Maybe it's riding on the back of his recent novel Seven Types of Ambiguity. Anyway, the reviewer John McNally, is rather ambivalent with the result: "My chief complaint with these stories is that their endings are more inevitable than surprising. The revelations aren't always as startling as we were led to believe, and so the stories read like domestic fiction written by Edgar Allan Poe."
Andrew McGahan's The White Earth is starting to get reviews in the US, with SF Gate and Powell's delivering this week. Doubtless there will be more to follow.
