lost paws:

Beauvoir, Brazil & "Christina T." by Hazel Rowley in BookForum:

Excerpts: "It all began, as so many things do these days, with an e-mail. The sunshine was sneaking through my mustard-colored paper blinds, the jackhammers had just begun pounding at the nearby construction site, which meant it was 7 am in Manhattan, and when I swung out of bed, turned on my computer, and clicked into my e-mail, there, among the night's fresh haul in my in-box, was a message titled "Tête-à-Tête in Brazil." A man called Carlos Carvalho, from the publishing house Objetiva, in Rio de Janeiro, had written to say my book was going to be released in Brazil: Would I be willing to talk to the Brazilian press?

He meant phone interviews, of course, with me straying no further than my apartment. The "tête-à-tête" bit referred to my book Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (2005). But looking back, I believe that beguiling title line in my in-box seeded something in my head. Sure, I was willing to be interviewed, I wrote back. And I had another idea: Wouldn't it be good if we could find someone who had spent time with Sartre and Beauvoir on their trip to Brazil in 1960?

Nearly everything we know about the two-and-ahalf-month trip to Brazil comes from the usual source: Simone de Beauvoir. She was an adventurous traveler,brimming with curiosity, and her travel narratives,which range from whole books to the reportages she includes in her memoirs, make engaging and illuminating reading. Her account of the Brazilian sojourn, in La Force des choses (Force of Circumstance, 1963), is no exception, with its wealth of insights, encounters, impressions. Her stated aim is to give her French readers a better sense of a country they know almost nothing about. ("Those who are bored by this piece of reporting can always skip it," she writes.) It's quite a surprise, then, when, near the end of the sixty-page Brazil section—it happens when the existential couple go inland to the Amazon jungle—the narrative becomes as feverish as a Herzog film. Beauvoir has become desperate, simply desperate, to leave Brazil. "There was the feeling of panic at being cut off from the world. . . . I felt I had been put under a curse: I was never going to get away from here. . . . This continent was a great net from which we were never going to escape.""