How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
by Sarah Bakewell
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How to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love - such questions arise in most people's lives. They are all versions of a bigger question: how do you live? How do you do the good or honourable thing, while flourishing and feeling happy? This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), perhaps the first truly modern individual. A nobleman, public official and wine-grower, he wrote free-roaming show more explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. He called them 'essays', meaning 'attempts' or 'tries'. Into them, he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog's ears twitched when it was dreaming, as well as the appalling events of the religious civil wars raging around him. "The Essays" was an instant bestseller, and over four hundred years later, Montaigne's honesty and charm still draw people to him. Readers come to him in search of companionship, wisdom and entertainment - and in search of themselves. This book, a spirited and singular biography (and the first full life of Montaigne in English for nearly fifty years), relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored. It traces his bizarre upbringing (made to speak only Latin), youthful career and sexual adventures, his travels, and his friendships with the scholar and poet Etienne de La Boetie and with his adopted 'daughter', Marie de Gournay. And as we read, we also meet his readers - who for centuries have found in Montaigne an inexhaustible source of answers to the haunting question, 'how to live?'. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Recommendations
wandering_star Other memoirs by Athill also recommended - as she puts into practice the honest self-examination as recommended by Montaigne and Bakewell.
dajashby A similar technique of using biography to shed light on the subject's literature.
Member Reviews
Montaigne complained of books about books about books, but Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live demonstrates that sometimes, they are a good thing. Montaigne’s Essays always seemed daunting to me, and it was easier to approach them while having this book as a companion.
As the subtitle indicates, this is neither a standard life nor a traditional commentary. Fittingly, given their subject, these are short essays that explore how Montaigne, both through his life and writings, offers insight into how to live. Not how to live “well,” but how one life was lived. This is always done tentatively, sometimes even contradictorily (Montaigne, she notes, “never worries if he has said one thing on one page and the opposite overleaf, or, even in the show more next sentence”).
Counterintuitively, the first answer to the question of how to live that she draws from Montaigne is not to worry about death. She recounts how Montaigne’s attitude toward death changed once he’d passed through what we would now call a near-death experience. This helped sustain him through the loss of his father, a younger brother, all but one of his children, and (the death that affected him the most deeply) that of his best friend, Étienne de La Boétie.
In contrast, I got a good laugh out of another of the answers she finds: “Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted.”
Bakewell’s tone is by turns serious and light-hearted. She traces not only Montaigne’s life but also his afterlife, depicting the ways succeeding generations have found their own versions of the reclusive sage: the sceptic, the revolutionary, the romantic, and others. She readily admits that her own reading is likely conditioned by living after post-modernism. It is a testament to the power of Montaigne’s essays that they speak to a wide range of readers and historical situations. From beginning to end, Bakewell emphasizes that the essays represent a “centuries-long conversation between Montaigne and all those who have got to know him.” This is true of any book, but it seems particularly the case with this one.
Virginia Woolf was but one of the admiring readers. Bakewell tells of Woolf’s “beautiful vision of generations interlinked . . . . A chain of minds,” as Montaigne himself discovered in the pages of Cicero, Horace, Ovid, and other beloved writers he frequently quotes. He does so not as a pedant, but out of “the feeling of meeting a real person across the centuries.”
This is the second of Sarah Bakewell’s books that I’ve read and thoroughly enjoyed. I’m grateful for her taking me by the hand and leading me to the tower to which Montaigne withdrew, a moderate man in an immoderate time. show less
As the subtitle indicates, this is neither a standard life nor a traditional commentary. Fittingly, given their subject, these are short essays that explore how Montaigne, both through his life and writings, offers insight into how to live. Not how to live “well,” but how one life was lived. This is always done tentatively, sometimes even contradictorily (Montaigne, she notes, “never worries if he has said one thing on one page and the opposite overleaf, or, even in the show more next sentence”).
Counterintuitively, the first answer to the question of how to live that she draws from Montaigne is not to worry about death. She recounts how Montaigne’s attitude toward death changed once he’d passed through what we would now call a near-death experience. This helped sustain him through the loss of his father, a younger brother, all but one of his children, and (the death that affected him the most deeply) that of his best friend, Étienne de La Boétie.
In contrast, I got a good laugh out of another of the answers she finds: “Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted.”
Bakewell’s tone is by turns serious and light-hearted. She traces not only Montaigne’s life but also his afterlife, depicting the ways succeeding generations have found their own versions of the reclusive sage: the sceptic, the revolutionary, the romantic, and others. She readily admits that her own reading is likely conditioned by living after post-modernism. It is a testament to the power of Montaigne’s essays that they speak to a wide range of readers and historical situations. From beginning to end, Bakewell emphasizes that the essays represent a “centuries-long conversation between Montaigne and all those who have got to know him.” This is true of any book, but it seems particularly the case with this one.
Virginia Woolf was but one of the admiring readers. Bakewell tells of Woolf’s “beautiful vision of generations interlinked . . . . A chain of minds,” as Montaigne himself discovered in the pages of Cicero, Horace, Ovid, and other beloved writers he frequently quotes. He does so not as a pedant, but out of “the feeling of meeting a real person across the centuries.”
This is the second of Sarah Bakewell’s books that I’ve read and thoroughly enjoyed. I’m grateful for her taking me by the hand and leading me to the tower to which Montaigne withdrew, a moderate man in an immoderate time. show less
The best nonfiction book to come along in at least a year is set in 16th-century France. Without a single boring page, "How to Live" rolls conversationally through the much-analyzed life of Montaigne, the brilliant and approachable French essayist who has been called the Original Blogger for his tendency to philosophize about everyday life situations and dilemmas. Author Sarah Bakewell is great company along the way -- evenhanded, devoted to her subject but not slavishly so, erudite and in full command of very tricky material. Plus, she's always ready with a joke or odd tidbit, like the one about the French king who popularized a shirt with four sleeves.
After two somewhat lacklaster reading experiences at the end of January, I'm happy for the opportunity to write about a book with which I was passionately engaged: Sarah Bakewell's How to Live is, in my opinion, how literary biography should be written. Or, more specifically, it's the way this literary biography should be written: a perfect match of subject and approach which was a joy from cover to cover.
Given that I just went into my love affair with Montaigne's peregrinatory style of "accidental" philosophizing, I won't wax lyrical about it again. Suffice to say, in starting How to Live the evening after I finished that post, I was nodding and chuckling along with Bakewell's characterizations of the Renaissance essayist, checking to show more make sure I myself hadn't written her book in a moment of more-than-characteristic narrative fluidity and verve. And indeed, in placing Montaigne's life and work in their evolving historical contexts, Bakewell points out over and over that this was a reaction readers often had to Montaigne himself: they found, in the Essays, a reflection of themselves and their own times, and ignored or rejected those aspects that didn't mesh with their worldviews. Thus, the same writer could be embraced by his contemporaries as a provider of helpful mental tricks in the tradition of Stoical skepticism, while seventeenth-century libertins could read him as a rebellious free-spirit, and early twentieth-century modernists find inspiration in his attempts to analyze his own consciousness.
Indeed, Bakewell's book, while incorporating throughout a thread of traditional biography (Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born, grew up unconventionally, wrote steadily, died), interweaves another, equally prominent thread concerned with the intellectual conception and after-life of the Essays: fitting, since Montaigne himself said that he and his book were one and the same. These sections were my particular favorites. It's probably true that any author who is read for five hundred years will be subject to many versions and interpretations, but Bakewell makes a good case that Montaigne's own propensity to look at an argument from all possible perspectives, and chart the bending and winding of his own mind without passing judgment, has lent him to an especially large number of interpretations over the years—often ones he would never have predicted, but which, she argues are nonetheless fascinating for what they reveal of the readers' own times and characters. Two of my favorite examples demonstrate Bakewell's narrative range, which is always engaging and readable but moves with ease from clever and humorous to quite tragic.
In the chapter on late 18th-century reception to Montaigne, Bakewell relates how the Romantics basically invented the idea of literary tourism—the instinct to make pilgrimages to the homes and haunts of writers one admires. One of the sites so honored was Montaigne's château, which left his descendants a bit bemused at all the scruffy, overly-earnest young men suddenly showing up and wanting to tour the old man's tower. The post-Rousseau generation was deeply struck by Montaigne's fascination with people from the New World, interpreting his open-mindedness about the arbitrariness of custom as agreement with the idea of the uncorrupted "noble savage" (conveniently ignoring all the times when Montaigne points out cruel or unjust customs practiced by "savage" peoples). They were also drawn to the heat of his youthful passion for Étienne de la Boétie. Despite their initial enthusiasm, however, many Romantics became disillusioned with Montaigne's insistence on moderation, on keeping an even keel. Bakewell writes,
Bakewell goes on to make the intriguing point that, by advocating moderation over the (perhaps sexier but unsustainable) frenzy, be it of war or doomed poetic brilliance, Montaigne was actually proving himself rebellious,
Yet the "ecstasy" of war, something Montaigne was forced to see at close quarters throughout the forty years of France's bloody civil wars of the 1560s through 1590s, proved an understandably unconvincing answer to the question "How to live?" as far as he was concerned. A more serious yet still occasionally wry Bakewell does a remarkable job bringing these wars, with their prevalent spirit of religious extremism, to life for the reader. Of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacres, which left ten thousand dead throughout France, she relates this mind-bending rationale:
I am no theologian, but if anything does NOT say "divinely sanctioned" to me, it's little children slaughtering people in the street. Montaigne, too, rejected the romanticized furore tradition, arguing that ideally, even a soldier in the midst of battle should be able to turn away from killing a friend if he recognizes him on the field. Reading about the extremism with which he was surrounded throughout his life gave me new respect for the doctrine of moderation that was one of the most consistent elements of Montaigne's work.
Montaigne's own secularism is an interesting subject, especially in light of this ongoing religious conflict, and it's one Bakewell treats with sensitivity. Although he remained a nominal Catholic throughout his life, the essayist hardly ever takes his arguments in a religious direction, even in cases where one might expect him to do so. Among his answers to the "How to live?" question, one never finds, for example, "trust in Jesus Christ," or "Obey the dictates of the Church." This makes it easy for a secularist like me to relate to the Essays, but Bakewell points out that Montaigne's lack of religious fervor probably doesn't indicate that he was a complete non-believer: hardly anyone was, in sixteenth-century France. More likely, he was moderately religious in a way that didn't intrude much on his day-to-day life, and at the same time was likely attempting to steer clear of trouble with either set of the extremists demolishing his country, by not seeming to hew too closely to the theology of either group.
I could go on in Montaigneanly unending style about How to Live; it brings up a plethora of fascinating points about a favorite author of mine, placing him in his time and place as well as analyzing how his work has been transplanted into other contexts, including our own. There are so many juicy tidbits I didn't even touch on in this post: Montaigne's extremely unorthodox childhood, for example, or the bizarrely strong aversion certain seventeenth-century philosophers felt for the Essays. Suffice to say, I gobbled up every page of this book, and was sorry to see it end. show less
Given that I just went into my love affair with Montaigne's peregrinatory style of "accidental" philosophizing, I won't wax lyrical about it again. Suffice to say, in starting How to Live the evening after I finished that post, I was nodding and chuckling along with Bakewell's characterizations of the Renaissance essayist, checking to show more make sure I myself hadn't written her book in a moment of more-than-characteristic narrative fluidity and verve. And indeed, in placing Montaigne's life and work in their evolving historical contexts, Bakewell points out over and over that this was a reaction readers often had to Montaigne himself: they found, in the Essays, a reflection of themselves and their own times, and ignored or rejected those aspects that didn't mesh with their worldviews. Thus, the same writer could be embraced by his contemporaries as a provider of helpful mental tricks in the tradition of Stoical skepticism, while seventeenth-century libertins could read him as a rebellious free-spirit, and early twentieth-century modernists find inspiration in his attempts to analyze his own consciousness.
Indeed, Bakewell's book, while incorporating throughout a thread of traditional biography (Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born, grew up unconventionally, wrote steadily, died), interweaves another, equally prominent thread concerned with the intellectual conception and after-life of the Essays: fitting, since Montaigne himself said that he and his book were one and the same. These sections were my particular favorites. It's probably true that any author who is read for five hundred years will be subject to many versions and interpretations, but Bakewell makes a good case that Montaigne's own propensity to look at an argument from all possible perspectives, and chart the bending and winding of his own mind without passing judgment, has lent him to an especially large number of interpretations over the years—often ones he would never have predicted, but which, she argues are nonetheless fascinating for what they reveal of the readers' own times and characters. Two of my favorite examples demonstrate Bakewell's narrative range, which is always engaging and readable but moves with ease from clever and humorous to quite tragic.
In the chapter on late 18th-century reception to Montaigne, Bakewell relates how the Romantics basically invented the idea of literary tourism—the instinct to make pilgrimages to the homes and haunts of writers one admires. One of the sites so honored was Montaigne's château, which left his descendants a bit bemused at all the scruffy, overly-earnest young men suddenly showing up and wanting to tour the old man's tower. The post-Rousseau generation was deeply struck by Montaigne's fascination with people from the New World, interpreting his open-mindedness about the arbitrariness of custom as agreement with the idea of the uncorrupted "noble savage" (conveniently ignoring all the times when Montaigne points out cruel or unjust customs practiced by "savage" peoples). They were also drawn to the heat of his youthful passion for Étienne de la Boétie. Despite their initial enthusiasm, however, many Romantics became disillusioned with Montaigne's insistence on moderation, on keeping an even keel. Bakewell writes,
The poet Alphonse de Lamartine was one such frustrated reader. When he first came across Montaigne he hero-worshiped him, and kept a volume of the Essays always in his pocket or on his table so he could seize it whenever he had the urge. But later he turned against his idol with equal vehemence: Montaigne, he now decided, knew nothing of the real miseries of life. He explained to a correspondent that he had only been able to love the Essays when he was young—that is, about nine months earlier, when he first began to enthuse about the book in his letters. Now, at twenty-one, he had been weathered by pain, and found Montaigne too cool and measured. Perhaps, he wondered, he might return to Montaigne many years later, in old age, when even more suffering had dried his heart. For now, the essayist's sense of moderation made him feel positively ill.
Bakewell goes on to make the intriguing point that, by advocating moderation over the (perhaps sexier but unsustainable) frenzy, be it of war or doomed poetic brilliance, Montaigne was actually proving himself rebellious,
bucking the trend of his own time as much as that of the Romantics. Renaissance readers fetishized extreme states: ecstasy was the only state in which to write poetry, just as it was the only way to fight a battle and the only way to fall in love.
Yet the "ecstasy" of war, something Montaigne was forced to see at close quarters throughout the forty years of France's bloody civil wars of the 1560s through 1590s, proved an understandably unconvincing answer to the question "How to live?" as far as he was concerned. A more serious yet still occasionally wry Bakewell does a remarkable job bringing these wars, with their prevalent spirit of religious extremism, to life for the reader. Of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacres, which left ten thousand dead throughout France, she relates this mind-bending rationale:
In most places, the bloodshed was done more chaotically [than in Bordeaux] and by people who would have been reasonable folk the rest of the time. In Orléans, the mob stopped at taverns between killings to celebrate, "accompanied by singing, lutes and guitars," according to one historian. Some groups were composed mainly of women and children. Catholics interpreted the presence of the latter as a sign that God Himself was in favor of the massacres, for He had caused even innocents to take part. In general, many thought that, since the killings were on no ordinary human scale, they must have been divinely sanctioned.
I am no theologian, but if anything does NOT say "divinely sanctioned" to me, it's little children slaughtering people in the street. Montaigne, too, rejected the romanticized furore tradition, arguing that ideally, even a soldier in the midst of battle should be able to turn away from killing a friend if he recognizes him on the field. Reading about the extremism with which he was surrounded throughout his life gave me new respect for the doctrine of moderation that was one of the most consistent elements of Montaigne's work.
Montaigne's own secularism is an interesting subject, especially in light of this ongoing religious conflict, and it's one Bakewell treats with sensitivity. Although he remained a nominal Catholic throughout his life, the essayist hardly ever takes his arguments in a religious direction, even in cases where one might expect him to do so. Among his answers to the "How to live?" question, one never finds, for example, "trust in Jesus Christ," or "Obey the dictates of the Church." This makes it easy for a secularist like me to relate to the Essays, but Bakewell points out that Montaigne's lack of religious fervor probably doesn't indicate that he was a complete non-believer: hardly anyone was, in sixteenth-century France. More likely, he was moderately religious in a way that didn't intrude much on his day-to-day life, and at the same time was likely attempting to steer clear of trouble with either set of the extremists demolishing his country, by not seeming to hew too closely to the theology of either group.
I could go on in Montaigneanly unending style about How to Live; it brings up a plethora of fascinating points about a favorite author of mine, placing him in his time and place as well as analyzing how his work has been transplanted into other contexts, including our own. There are so many juicy tidbits I didn't even touch on in this post: Montaigne's extremely unorthodox childhood, for example, or the bizarrely strong aversion certain seventeenth-century philosophers felt for the Essays. Suffice to say, I gobbled up every page of this book, and was sorry to see it end. show less
I suspect that 2017 is going to be the year of Sarah Bakewell, as far as I am concerned. I was enchanted by her ‘At the Existentialist Café’ a couple of months ago, and found this book even more delightful: informative, insightful and immensely entertaining.
Michel de Montaigne lived in France during the sixteenth century and his collection of ‘Essays’ (a term that he coined) is one of the most important and enduring works of the late Renaissance. His life was spent in the pursuit of knowledge and a relentless quest to sate his boundless curiosity. Having been born into the nobility, his father sent him out to be fostered by a family of local peasants for the first two years of his life. Thereafter he was brought back to the show more family home, but his father insisted that the child be brought up as a natural speaker of Latin, employing a tutor to teach the infant from the onset of his attempts to talk. From his father he inherited a love of books, and a position of relative ease, though he embarked on a career in local government, eventually being appointed joint Mayor of Bordeaux. This was not a sinecure, and his administration required tactful navigation of a time when religious sectarianism was flaring out of control throughout France.
Montaigne’s ‘Essays’ defy definition incorporating elements of autobiography, political commentary and personal observation along with highly imaginative speculation about the nature and wonders of life. The ‘Essays’ were written over a considerable period spanning most of Montaigne’s life, and his position did not remain consistent. While nominally a Roman Catholic, many commentators have speculated whether he was actually an atheist; others suspect him of Protestant sympathies.
Sarah Bakewell’s book is equally hard to categorise. While essentially telling the story of Montaigne’s life, it also presents a high quality literary critique of the ‘Essays’, analyses the prevailing philosophical views of the time and offers an enthralling history of France in that troubled century. She also provides an extensive exegesis of the responses to Montaigne in the centuries following his death. It is, indeed, nothing less than a rhapsodic paean to Montaigne’s work, fired by Bakewell’s extensive knowledge and clearness fondness for the book. It is not, however, a hagiography, and she does not refrain from criticising some of the weaknesses that she identifies in Montaigne’s approach.
Like Montaigne himself, who has been feted for centuries as a surprisingly accessible writer, Bakewell has an appealing lightness of touch, and the book is a joy to read throughout. show less
Michel de Montaigne lived in France during the sixteenth century and his collection of ‘Essays’ (a term that he coined) is one of the most important and enduring works of the late Renaissance. His life was spent in the pursuit of knowledge and a relentless quest to sate his boundless curiosity. Having been born into the nobility, his father sent him out to be fostered by a family of local peasants for the first two years of his life. Thereafter he was brought back to the show more family home, but his father insisted that the child be brought up as a natural speaker of Latin, employing a tutor to teach the infant from the onset of his attempts to talk. From his father he inherited a love of books, and a position of relative ease, though he embarked on a career in local government, eventually being appointed joint Mayor of Bordeaux. This was not a sinecure, and his administration required tactful navigation of a time when religious sectarianism was flaring out of control throughout France.
Montaigne’s ‘Essays’ defy definition incorporating elements of autobiography, political commentary and personal observation along with highly imaginative speculation about the nature and wonders of life. The ‘Essays’ were written over a considerable period spanning most of Montaigne’s life, and his position did not remain consistent. While nominally a Roman Catholic, many commentators have speculated whether he was actually an atheist; others suspect him of Protestant sympathies.
Sarah Bakewell’s book is equally hard to categorise. While essentially telling the story of Montaigne’s life, it also presents a high quality literary critique of the ‘Essays’, analyses the prevailing philosophical views of the time and offers an enthralling history of France in that troubled century. She also provides an extensive exegesis of the responses to Montaigne in the centuries following his death. It is, indeed, nothing less than a rhapsodic paean to Montaigne’s work, fired by Bakewell’s extensive knowledge and clearness fondness for the book. It is not, however, a hagiography, and she does not refrain from criticising some of the weaknesses that she identifies in Montaigne’s approach.
Like Montaigne himself, who has been feted for centuries as a surprisingly accessible writer, Bakewell has an appealing lightness of touch, and the book is a joy to read throughout. show less
A well-written, very well-structured book--surprisingly so, given everything that Bakewell is trying to do: biography, reception history, philosophy, history... But I confess, her Montaigne gives me hives. In these pages, he is reliably contemporary; by far the most interesting thing about Montaigne is his untimeliness. The answer to how to live given here is, depressingly, "do what you, reader of books like this, already do: hedonism, moderation, liberalism, naturalism, centrism, agnosticism, Heracliteanism; be anti-philosophical, empathetic, unique, rebellious and, preferably, vegetarian. And, above all, seek therapy everywhere you look. "Modern readers," Bakewell writes, "who approach Montaigne asking what he can do for them are show more asking the same question he himself asked of Seneca, Sextus, and Lucretius...", which is both false--inasmuch as Montaigne seems to have been a notably disinterested reader, looking for other people, rather than trying to see how they can profit him--and obnoxious, because it implies that this just is how modern readers approach Montaigne. For Bakewell, and readers like her, Montaigne's only relation to his own time was to stand in opposition to it, while his only relation to our time is to conform to it. It would be nice if we could approach him in the opposite manner: a man deeply at odds with many of our own preconceptions about what it is to lead a good life. Montaigne spends most of his time writing about things other than himself, because he is interested in things other than himself. Predictably, but tiresomely, Bakewell tries to turn Montaigne into a kind of proto-deist: Montaigne commends his spirit to God on his death bed; for Bakewell, this is "a final act of Catholic convention: a brief acknowledgment to God in the life of this joyfully secular man"--as if our divisions of secular and religious can be read back into the sixteenth century, not to mention our divisions of convention and sincerity). But there's no reason to doubt that he was a genuinely devoted Catholic, as he understood that.
Also, any readers of Descartes are advised to stay well clear of his appearance in the book; Descartes, a man who famously died because he was told to get out of bed before noon, is here a Puritan who hated everything except mathematics.
I'm torn between genuine, gob-smacked admiration for Bakewell's ability to structure a book this complex, and rage at her inability to find in a sixteenth century Frenchman anything other than a twenty-first century American. show less
Also, any readers of Descartes are advised to stay well clear of his appearance in the book; Descartes, a man who famously died because he was told to get out of bed before noon, is here a Puritan who hated everything except mathematics.
I'm torn between genuine, gob-smacked admiration for Bakewell's ability to structure a book this complex, and rage at her inability to find in a sixteenth century Frenchman anything other than a twenty-first century American. show less
I enjoyed this book tremendously. It's really a history of Montaigne's Essays, rather than a life of Montaigne. Obviously Montaigne himself is a very important figure in that history, and Bakewell gives him ample space, but the ideas, reception, interpretation and use of the Essays also feature very prominently.
The structure of the book is brilliant, being organised in three dimensions at once: Montaigne's life, the history of the Essays before and after publication and Montaigne's philosophy. Incredibly, despite all that going on, it's easy to follow. The organisation is so neat that when I was reading about Montaigne's life I thought I was reading a biography, when I was reading about the book's reception I thought I was reading a show more history of the Essays and when I was reading about his thought I thought it was a Montaigne primer. And which of these modes the book is in can change from paragraph to paragraph, even sentence to sentence.
Bakewell achieves this complexity through a combination of meticulous organisation and crystal clear, engaging prose. I imagine Bakewell's planning documents for this book would look like the exploded diagram of a luxury car - it takes a lot of work to allow you to tap the accelerator and glide forward effortlessly and an incredible eye to also make it a beautiful experience.
I'm looking forward to reading some of the Essays and finding out what all the fuss was about. show less
The structure of the book is brilliant, being organised in three dimensions at once: Montaigne's life, the history of the Essays before and after publication and Montaigne's philosophy. Incredibly, despite all that going on, it's easy to follow. The organisation is so neat that when I was reading about Montaigne's life I thought I was reading a biography, when I was reading about the book's reception I thought I was reading a show more history of the Essays and when I was reading about his thought I thought it was a Montaigne primer. And which of these modes the book is in can change from paragraph to paragraph, even sentence to sentence.
Bakewell achieves this complexity through a combination of meticulous organisation and crystal clear, engaging prose. I imagine Bakewell's planning documents for this book would look like the exploded diagram of a luxury car - it takes a lot of work to allow you to tap the accelerator and glide forward effortlessly and an incredible eye to also make it a beautiful experience.
I'm looking forward to reading some of the Essays and finding out what all the fuss was about. show less
Biographies tend to follow a predictable format - birth, life, death; for most, this is a perfectly acceptable route to follow, and I'm put in mind here of the success that Selina Hastings had with 'The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham.'
But there would be something almost perverse about offering the same treatment to the great French essayist Montaigne, given how his own writing looped and spiraled around, dodging the point when you most expected him to face it head-on, exploring tangents that shed new light on the main issue... and so Sarah Bakewell's 'Life', which takes the form of an ultra-literary self-help manual, is the perfect kind of biography for one of history's greatest, most unusual, deep thinkers.
But there would be something almost perverse about offering the same treatment to the great French essayist Montaigne, given how his own writing looped and spiraled around, dodging the point when you most expected him to face it head-on, exploring tangents that shed new light on the main issue... and so Sarah Bakewell's 'Life', which takes the form of an ultra-literary self-help manual, is the perfect kind of biography for one of history's greatest, most unusual, deep thinkers.
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It is hard to imagine a better introduction-or reintroduction- to Montaigne than Bakewell's book. It is easy to imagine small improvements, however.
added by Shortride
Bakewell, cleverly, has nonetheless managed to tap into the booming modern market for such “quick boosts” of wisdom (not all of them by any means as harmless as tips on eyebrow shaping), while actually writing a serious biography of a serious thinker from an age less like our own that we might solipsistically think. She’s not the first to take on such a task, of course. Superior literary show more lessons for life have become an established sub-genre of the self-help boom: How to Win Friends and Influence Readers of the Paris Review. Thus books such as Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life or John Armstrong’s Love, Life, Goethe have explored this territory in their different ways. Bakewell’s life of Montaigne combines some of the merits of de Botton’s knowing, entertaining intellectual squib and Armstrong’s thorough and absorbing biographical study. If her work enjoys a popular resonance greater than theirs—and I think it may—it’s most likely a tribute to its subject, Montaigne. show less
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Sarah Bakewell was a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library before becoming a full-time writer, publishing her highly acclaimed biographies The Smart and The English Dane. She lives in London, where she teaches creative writing at City University.
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Hoe te leven Een leven van Montaigne In één vraag en twintig pogingen tot een antwoord
- Original title
- How to live, or A life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer
- Alternate titles
- How to live; Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer
- Original publication date
- 2010
- People/Characters
- Michel de Montaigne; Marie de Gournay; Ètienne de La Boétie; Jean de Léry; Roberto Fernández Retamar
- Important places
- Bordeaux, Gironde, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France; France
- Important events
- St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (1572);
- Dedication
- For Simo
- First words
- The twenty-first century is full of people who are full of themselves.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)The two of them can be left there, suspended in the midst of their lives with the Essays not yet fully written, while we go and get on with ours—with the Essays not yet fully read.
- Publisher's editor
- Cárdenas, Yvonne E. [Other Press]; Uglow, Jenny [Chatto & Windus]; Samuel, Alison [Chatto & Windus]; Ebrahimi, Parisa [Chatto & Windus]; Humphries, Beth [Chatto & Windus]; Amaradivakara, Sue [Chatto & Windus]
- Blurbers
- Lopate, Phillip
- Original language
- English
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
Classifications
- Genres
- Biography & Memoir, Philosophy, Literature Studies and Criticism, Nonfiction
- DDC/MDS
- 848.3 — Literature & rhetoric French & related literatures French miscellaneous writings Renaissance 1500–1600
- LCC
- PQ1643 .B34 — Language and Literature French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese literatures French literature Modern literature 16th century
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 2,241
- Popularity
- 8,916
- Reviews
- 91
- Rating
- (4.12)
- Languages
- 9 — Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 32
- UPCs
- 2
- ASINs
- 15