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A review by chris_chester
How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell
4.0
This is basically a number of different kinds of works woven together into a tapestry that approximates a picture of it's main subject: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.
It is, at its simplest, a biography of a man. Bakewell sets the table for what 16th century France looked like. She sets the table with Montaigne's parents, explains his upbringing, his decision to "retire" at age 37 (Comme ç'est gentil!), the traumatic incidents that drive him to write, his relations with La Boetie, the creation of a family of his own, his travels and professional responsibilities, and his death.
As a writer, he was way ahead of his time and an inspiration to those attracted to a sort of Stoic way of living and experiencing the world. One of his ideas related by Bakewell that I find very compelling is that the act of observing and writing about one's experience of the world facilitates the goal of living in the present. Paying full attention to one's surroundings is, after all, one of the surest paths to enlightenment in any number of religious sects and philosophical schools. For somebody who often wants for an excuse just to write, this feels like permission to proceed, no matter how trivial the subject.
But almost more than a biography of a man, this book is biography of Montaigne's Essays. It's an exegesis not just of the text itself, but its reception too and its cultural legacy moving forward. You get an idea of where it sat with his contemporaries, how it came to be banned for a period by the Catholic church, how it was rediscovered by new generations and new groups like the Romantics, modernists, psychoanalysts, the English, post-modernists, feminists, etc.
And it doesn't stop there! She also explains in great detail the succession of editions of the Essays that would follow. Montaigne himself continuously updated the text almost until the day of his death. The ways in which subsequent editors and publishers pieced together what remained is a deeply-explored subject in itself. The relationship of Marie Le Jars De Gournay — the Lenin to Montaigne's Marx as Bakewell puts it — is especially interesting, spinning off a thread about what the reception and criticism of her editions of the book over the years say about evolving attitudes towards women and literature.
Then perhaps the outermost layer of this intricate amuse bouche is the extremely contemporary framing of this entire project as almost a self-help book. By presenting the book's 20 chapters as answers to the central question of "How to live?" you get lots of little aphorisms, supported if only tangentially by the actual content of the chapter. This has the pleasing effect not only of aping the style of Montaigne's Essays, with their deceptively simple titles, but it makes the reader feel as though he's actually getting some of Montaigne's wisdom second-hand.
As much as I enjoyed that, along with a reflection of that notion that Bakewell often returns to that almost all readers of Montaigne find something of themselves in his text, the only logical conclusion to me on finishing "How To Live" was that... well, I guess I have to read "The Essays" now! Knowing what I do now of the incompleteness of second or third-hand Montaigne, if I really want to feel kinship with the man, I'll have to read all 1,300 pages. By sucking me in with her promise of a biography wrapped in pleasant aphorisms, her work essentially turned into an extended preface for the work itself.
If that was her intention, then bravo! But let that be a warning to other fans of philosophy or relentless completionists: this is not a 330 page undertaking. It's more like 1,700 pages.
It is, at its simplest, a biography of a man. Bakewell sets the table for what 16th century France looked like. She sets the table with Montaigne's parents, explains his upbringing, his decision to "retire" at age 37 (Comme ç'est gentil!), the traumatic incidents that drive him to write, his relations with La Boetie, the creation of a family of his own, his travels and professional responsibilities, and his death.
As a writer, he was way ahead of his time and an inspiration to those attracted to a sort of Stoic way of living and experiencing the world. One of his ideas related by Bakewell that I find very compelling is that the act of observing and writing about one's experience of the world facilitates the goal of living in the present. Paying full attention to one's surroundings is, after all, one of the surest paths to enlightenment in any number of religious sects and philosophical schools. For somebody who often wants for an excuse just to write, this feels like permission to proceed, no matter how trivial the subject.
But almost more than a biography of a man, this book is biography of Montaigne's Essays. It's an exegesis not just of the text itself, but its reception too and its cultural legacy moving forward. You get an idea of where it sat with his contemporaries, how it came to be banned for a period by the Catholic church, how it was rediscovered by new generations and new groups like the Romantics, modernists, psychoanalysts, the English, post-modernists, feminists, etc.
And it doesn't stop there! She also explains in great detail the succession of editions of the Essays that would follow. Montaigne himself continuously updated the text almost until the day of his death. The ways in which subsequent editors and publishers pieced together what remained is a deeply-explored subject in itself. The relationship of Marie Le Jars De Gournay — the Lenin to Montaigne's Marx as Bakewell puts it — is especially interesting, spinning off a thread about what the reception and criticism of her editions of the book over the years say about evolving attitudes towards women and literature.
Then perhaps the outermost layer of this intricate amuse bouche is the extremely contemporary framing of this entire project as almost a self-help book. By presenting the book's 20 chapters as answers to the central question of "How to live?" you get lots of little aphorisms, supported if only tangentially by the actual content of the chapter. This has the pleasing effect not only of aping the style of Montaigne's Essays, with their deceptively simple titles, but it makes the reader feel as though he's actually getting some of Montaigne's wisdom second-hand.
As much as I enjoyed that, along with a reflection of that notion that Bakewell often returns to that almost all readers of Montaigne find something of themselves in his text, the only logical conclusion to me on finishing "How To Live" was that... well, I guess I have to read "The Essays" now! Knowing what I do now of the incompleteness of second or third-hand Montaigne, if I really want to feel kinship with the man, I'll have to read all 1,300 pages. By sucking me in with her promise of a biography wrapped in pleasant aphorisms, her work essentially turned into an extended preface for the work itself.
If that was her intention, then bravo! But let that be a warning to other fans of philosophy or relentless completionists: this is not a 330 page undertaking. It's more like 1,700 pages.