This short novella by the brilliant Simone de Beauvoir was a bit of a strange one for me. On the one hand, I really enjoyed the depth of the story and the premise itself: an older, retired couple visiting the husband’s daughter in Moscow. It’s their second trip to the city, and the experience prompts them to reflect on their previous visit, on their marriage, and on the shape of their relationship as they age.
There are some feminist threads running through the novella. The wife’s sense of having given up parts of herself over the course of the relationship feels very recognisable. In fact, de Beauvoir captures the emotional compromises of long-term partnership with precision and honesty.
At the same time, I found myself frustrated. A happily married, healthy couple retired at sixty, essentially on a leisurely holiday, constantly misunderstanding each other and becoming wounded over fairly trivial slights! I kind of wanted to shake them both.
Yet beneath that pettiness are interesting philosophical layers. The novella explores the promise of communism and socialism: what they meant to an earlier generation of idealists, and what happens when those ideals meet the lived reality of ageing, political shifts, and disillusionment. For the characters, there’s a question of how you make peace with the fading of your beliefs.
Written in 1965 and published in a relatively new translation in recent years, Misunderstanding in Moscow feels stylistically in line with her The Inseparables or She Came to Stay.
One word: curious.
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