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Winner of the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography How to get along 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 honorable thing, while flourishing and feeling happy? This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Monatigne, perhaps the first truly modern individual. A nobleman, public official and wine-grower, he wrote free-roaming 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 in search of companionship, wisdom and entertainment—and in search of themselves. This book, a spirited and singular biography, relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored. It traces his bizarre upbringing, youthful career and sexual adventures, his travels, and his friendships with the scholar and poet Étienne de La Boétie and with his adopted “daughter,” Marie de Gournay. And we also meet his readers—who for centuries have found in Montaigne an inexhaustible source of answers to the haunting question, “how to live?”
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This was a fabulous read. I tried to postpone reading it until I'd finished Montaigne's essays, and I'm very glad that I didn't. Bakewell provides a lot of backstory and history and context - things that a contemporary Montaigne reader would know, but we, 400 years later, don't have access to off the tops of our heads. Now I'm ready to jump in and start Montaigne over with a better understanding of the world he lived in.
So many important books, so little time. Why read this book instead of jumping straight into Montaigne? For one, because I didn't know that I needed to read Montaigne. Now I do, and I will.
Another reason to read this book: Context. Some people can dive head-first into a book without understanding its origin; the ethos of the time, the spirit of the author. Some people skip the Introduction. Not I. This may be a rather long Introduction, but it's both thorough and riveting. Kudos to Bakewell.
Montaigne is the first essayist, a philosopher, an ordinary person. Sarah Bakewell takes a careful look at Montaigne's life and writings in this book and shares her thoughts on the ways Montaigne teaches us to live, with one question and twenty answers, including:
Question everything.
Live moderately.
Be convivial.
Be ordinary and imperfect.
Brilliant, I think. In an ordinary way.
And now I shall attempt to read the essays themselves.