Product Description

"Simone Weil" traces the intellectual life of a woman whose "madness for truth", in the words of Albert Camus, allowed her "to understand, beyond her most natural prejudices, the illness of her approach and to discern the remedies". Born in 1909 in Paris, France, the second child of well-off Jewish parents, Simone Weil died in 1943 of self-starvation, leaving behind a collection of letters, notebooks, essays and poems that embodied the elements of her fiery, complex thought. Gabriella Fiori's biography of Simone Weil aims to set the woman and her thought within the context of her times. Fiori follows Weil from her childhood through her years in school, where she began to formulate the rigorous ideas that she later focused on a European world charged by war and revolution. As a teacher, activist, and worker, Weil felt every current that swept through Europe yet was carried away by none of them. Involved with unions and the Communist party, travelling to Germany to witness the rise of fascism and to Spain to fight with anarchists, Weil sought to pin each movement to the facts and to the truth of its ideals. Working in factories and later as a grape picker in the fields of southern France, Weil felt "the sense of not having any right" and wrote forcefully about the relation of man to the industrial machine. In her final work, "L'enracinement", Weil gives an account of what, in her view, are the symptoms, causes, diagnosis and therapy for the illness of Europe.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2298607 in Books
• Published on: 1989-10
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 408 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Anti-fascist intellectual Weil was a tangle of contradictions. She advocated pacifism yet fought alongside anarchists in Spain. Born in Paris to wealthy Jewish parents, she embraced her own semimystical version of Catholicism while seeking "a philosophical cleansing of the Catholic religion." Weil worked in a factory, lived an ascetic existence, neglected her health, slept on floors. She displayed, in Fiori's words, an "inner infantilism" that combined extreme purity of heart with an inability to accept the life of a grown woman. Weil died in 1943 of self-starvation, leaving behind notebooks and essays in which she poured out her thoughts on the need for a spiritual-political regeneration to overcome Nazi pseudo-religion and Soviet-style workers' bureaucracy. This empathetic philosophical biography by a retired Italian teacher only partially succeeds in illuminating her complex character.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This decade has been rife with the publication, translation, and critical study of Weil, whom the current biographer aptly characterizes as "thinking, writing, and living" in simultaneous coincidence. Claimed by various devotees as religiously inspired and inspirational, philosophically astute, and politically prophetic, Weil as she is chronicled here seems a likely candidate for all these descriptions. Published in Italian in 1981, Fiori's work relies on Weil's own papers, interviews with her friends, and the scholarship that had been published by that time. This solid biography offers no particular revelation or slant on its subject but is satisfyingly comprehensive, cogently documented, skillfully translated, and probably useful to scholars as well as to general readers who may not be familiar with Weil. For most general collections.
- Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Language Notes
Text: English, Italian (translation)