Writing with her customary grace and acuity, Francine du Plessix Gray, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated At Home with the Marquis de Sade, examines an equally extreme character at the opposite end of the moral spectrum in Simone Weil. Weil (1909-43) displayed early the ferocious intellect that took this daughter of affluent, highly assimilated French Jews to the peak of her country's rigorous educational system and made her an important modern philosopher. But Weil remains a beacon to activists because of her passionate, intensely personal commitment to the world's oppressed and her need to directly share their sufferings. This need had its neurotic aspects, and Gray's elegant biography does not gloss over Weil's lifelong anorexia, her distaste for physical contact, her peculiar brand of anti-Semitism, or the unyielding self-righteousness that led her to cut off friendships for minor offenses. Yet the overall tone is one of sympathetic respect for an extraordinary human being unable to develop the willed blindness that enables most of us to live comfortably while others go without. Weil gave up prestigious teaching jobs to do manual labor; she performed dangerous work in the Resistance; and, when threatened by a Vichy policeman who exclaimed angrily, "You little bitch, we'll have you thrown in jail with the whores!" she replied coolly, "I've always wanted to know that milieu." Her slow, exceedingly tentative movement toward Christianity grew from her need to affirm her solidarity with the world's "slaves," and her prescient denunciation of Communism at a time when most radicals embraced it arose from her understanding that Soviet apparatchiks abused the working class just as egregiously as their putative opponents, the fascists. This is an outstanding introduction for general readers to the influential thought and rivetingly conflicted life of a seminal figure in 20th-century intellectual history. --Wendy Smith


From Publishers Weekly
Gray, who as novelist and biographer has illuminated the mystery of human suffering (most recently in At Home with the Marquis de Sade, 1998, a Pulitzer Prize finalist), was the perfect pick to write a volume on Simone Weil (1909-1943) for the admirable Penguin Lives series of short, popular biographies. Weil, the Jewish-born but Christ-loving, intermittently blue-collar author of brilliant political essays and breathtaking spiritual aphorisms, was a complex of suffering on all levels. She suffered from a profoundly negative self-image, incapacitating migraines and self-starvation, voluntarily assumed factory labor of the most grueling kind, endured the defeat of France in WWII and distance from God. The paradox in this panoply of ills is that, while superficially humbling, they reveal Weil's enormous force of personal will. Gray is a wise and compassionate Virgil to the bewildered reader who chances upon this transfixing, even seductive inferno (or purgatory, or heaven the boundaries blur) of largely self-imposed pain. She clarifies the gradual transition in Weil's life from left-wing political activism to world-renouncing spirituality, and critiques what she sees as "priggish" and "perverse" tendencies in Weil's moral idealisms, from her Francophile fervors to her gnostic anti-Judaism. In some ways, Weil was simply a "spoiled brat," Gray notes. Finally, Gray absolves Weil of her excesses by revealing the intense spirituality beneath them and the love and admiration she elicited despite them. If Gray herself tends to excess, it is in her multiple citings (at least 13) of anorexia as medical cause of her subject's extremes. But her fine selection of perfectly apposite anecdotes more than compensates. The result is a virtuosic achievement, possibly unique among popular treatments of Weil: a short, measured biography of a short but startlingly unmeasured and unmeasuring life. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
This is a valuable and useful book, portraying a highly complex figure for general readers in a clear and easily readable style. The Parisian-born Weil (1909-43) has emerged as one of the most influential women of the 20th century. Labor organizer, educator, trade unionist, protofeminist, mystic, and prolific writer, she ultimately became one of the foremost modern philosophers. Herself an acclaimed thinker and writer, du Plessix Gray (At Home with the Marquis de Sade) movingly recounts the chronology of Weil's short life, all the while interweaving Weil's emerging political, philosophical, and spiritual ideas into the biographical narrative. She effectively explains Weil's deepening engagement with working-class problems and raises candid questions about Weil's "deep unease about her Jewishness." Drawing heavily on Weil's own writing, the author ends her brief biography with a summary chapter in which she pulls together the key elements of Weil's philosophy as it crystallized in the last two years of her life. Part of the well-received "A Penguin Life" series, this biography should be welcomed by students and informed lay readers. Marie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
This fine new addition to the Penguin line of brief lives is convincingly researched and gracefully written. But it is a lfe, not a "life and works," and the brilliant French intellectual Simone Weil was such an intractable neurotic that, while Gray admirably traces the intellectual and personal influences that shaped her strange, short, intense life, the reader who does not bring foreknowledge of her writings and her place in twentieth-century thought may wonder why she was worth putting up with. Given that limitation, Gray's portrait is fascinating, and Donada Peters's reading is, as usual, perfection. B.G. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
A writer of remarkable acuity and verve, du Plessix Gray is drawn to the lives of the enigmatic and the controversial. She last wrote about the Marquis de Sade and now movingly portrays the revered activist, philosopher, and mystic Simone Weil (1909-43). The indulged daughter of wealthy, nonreligious French Jews, Weil was a prodigy, but her gifts were funneled through an overwhelming empathy for those less fortunate than herself and the anorexia that distorted her religious quest and led to her early death. Thin, bedraggled, bespectacled, assaulted by migraines, clumsy, and perpetually on fire, Weil drove herself to extremes teaching the poor, working in factories, going to war, and always feverishly reading and writing. Half in awe, half appalled, and altogether embroiled, du Plessix Gray explicates Weil's staggering brilliance, integrity, and profound influence, as well as such disturbing biases as her wild condemnation of Judaism. Weil believed that suffering was the path to spiritual growth, and suffer she did, becoming a martyr to her principles and a polestar for all concerned with rights and obligations, affliction and grace. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Kirkus Reviews, April 4, 2001
A superbly nuanced portrait of a tortured character.


Book Description
Francine du Plessix Gray's biography of the Marquis de Sade, At Home with the Marquis de Sade, was hailed by The New York Times Book Review as a "boldly imaginative retelling" of his life and garnered the critically acclaimed author a Pulitzer Prize nomination. In Simone Weil, du Plessix Gray vividly evokes the life of an equally complex and intriguing figure. A patriot and a mystic, an unruly activist plagued by self-doubt, a pampered intellectual with a credo of manual labor, an ascetic who craved sensuous beauty, Simone Weil died at the age of thirty-four prematurely after a long struggle with anorexia. But her tremendous intellectual legacy foresaw many of the twentieth century's great changes and continues to influence philosophy today. Simone Weil traces this seminal thinker's transformation from privileged Parisian student to union organizer, activist, and philosopher as well as the complex evolution of her ideas on Christianity, politics, and sexuality. In this thoughtful and compelling biography, du Plessix Gray illuminates an enigmatic figure and early feminist whose passion and pathos will fascinate a wide audience of readers.


From the Publisher
5 1.5-hour cassettes


About the Author
Francine du Plessix Gray is the author of Rage and Fire, Lovers and Tyrants, Soviet Women, and the Pulitzer Prize finalist At Home with the Marquis de Sade.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In Simone Weil, du Plessix Gray vividly evokes the life a patriot, mystic, and activist, a pampered intellectual who believed in the redemptive value of manual labor, an ascetic who craved sensuous beauty, the daughter of a secular Jewish family who yearned to enter the Catholic Church, Simone Weil died at the age of thirty-four after a long struggle with anorexia. But her tremendous intellectual legacy foreshadowed many of the twentieth century's great changes and continues to influence religious thought today. Du Plessix Gray's biography traces Weil's transformation from privileged Parisian student to union organizer, activist, and philosopher, as well as the complex evolution of her ideas on Christianity, politics, and sexuality. This subtle and compelling biography illuminates an enigmatic figure and early feminist whose passion and pathos will fascinate a wide audience.

FROM THE CRITICS

Book Magazine

In this complex biography, Gray suggests that the French philosopher, activist and feminist Simone Weil (1906-1943) was a fiercely intelligent woman who continually sacrificed her personal welfare for the sake of her ideals. Rejecting her Parisian family's affluent lifestyle in her teens, she starved her body and "binged" on intellectual pursuits. When studying, Weil made formidable reading lists for herself, spreading volumes by the likes of Aristotle and Nietzsche on the floor, reading for days with little sleep. A frail woman with crippled hands, she took backbreaking factory jobs because she believed that work was "the truest road to self-knowledge." Determined to place herself in dangerous and unhealthy situations whenever possible, she signed up for the militia that served on the front lines during the Spanish Civil War. As the result of her severe approach to life, Weil died at the age of thirty-four of tuberculosis and starvation. Gray balances the accounts of Weil's misadventures by tracing the evolution of her inspired writing career. In the final chapter, she summarizes Weil's theories on Christianity, politics and sexuality for those who are unfamiliar with her work. A Pulitzer Prize finalist for her book At Home With the Marquis de Sade, Gray communicates her fascination with this enigmatic woman, but she treats the facts of Weil's life honestly, with both high esteem and skepticism. —Susan Tekulve (Excerpted Review)

Library Journal

This is a valuable and useful book, portraying a highly complex figure for general readers in a clear and easily readable style. The Parisian-born Weil (1909-43) has emerged as one of the most influential women of the 20th century. Labor organizer, educator, trade unionist, protofeminist, mystic, and prolific writer, she ultimately became one of the foremost modern philosophers. Herself an acclaimed thinker and writer, du Plessix Gray (At Home with the Marquis de Sade) movingly recounts the chronology of Weil's short life, all the while interweaving Weil's emerging political, philosophical, and spiritual ideas into the biographical narrative. She effectively explains Weil's deepening engagement with working-class problems and raises candid questions about Weil's "deep unease about her Jewishness." Drawing heavily on Weil's own writing, the author ends her brief biography with a summary chapter in which she pulls together the key elements of Weil's philosophy as it crystallized in the last two years of her life. Part of the well-received "A Penguin Life" series, this biography should be welcomed by students and informed lay readers. Marie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews