Sarah Bakewell

Originally published: London: Chatto & Windus, 2010.

Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

How to Live

rumbledethumps

This is the best book I've read this year. Part biography, part history, part literary criticism, it explores Montaigne, his world, and his work.

Starting with Montaigne's Essays, and spiraling out to encompass his life, and the life of his work over the centuries since he died, Bakewell has written a book unlike anything else I have ever read.

Nelson Zagalo

Adoro Montaigne, mas soube-me a pouco o livro de Sarah Bakewell, "How to Live, or a life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer" (2010) de quem tinha adorado "At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails" (2016), talvez porque sabia muito menos sobre Sartre, Beauvoir e Heidegger. Já me tinha acontecido com o livro de Stefan Zweig, "Montaigne" (1942), sobre o qual disse "não se pode chamar a um texto que aglutina um conjunto solto de ideias sobre alguém uma biografia". E agora com Bakewell voltei a sentir um pouco disto mesmo. Contudo, refletindo, talvez o problema não esteja nos biógrafos, nem tão pouco no biografado, mas na obra principal deste. O brilho dos "Ensaios" (1580) está no modo como nos dá acesso ao modo de ver do próprio Montaigne. Lendo os Ensaios conseguimos em vários momentos calçar as suas botas e viajar pelo seu mundo. Uma viagem que segue pelo meio dos seus pensamentos, sem inícios nem fins, já que é de um modo associativo que cada ensaio se vai desenvolvendo e nos oferecendo acessos ao mundo interior e passado. Tentar transformar este mundo rizomaticamente livre num encadeado fixo de momentos temporais parece estar destinado a não funcionar.

ler com links e imagens no blog:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...

How to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love? How to live? This question obsessed Renaissance nobleman Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), who wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. Into these essays 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, events in the appalling civil wars raging around him. The Essays was an instant bestseller, and over four hundred years later, readers still come to him in search of companionship, wisdom and entertainment - and in search of themselves. This first full biography 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.

How to Live Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

Reviews