De Beauvoir’s 1960s heroine shows little has changed since

This is a new translation by Lauren Elkin of a shortish Simone de Beauvoir book, Les Belles Images, first published in 1966. The book’s aim is to identify the source of its heroine’s discontent. But on the journey inside her mind and life, we get a good account of how de Beauvoir saw the world in the 1960s — and in many ways, that world wasn’t a whole lot different from ours.