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

by Sarah Bakewell Narrated by Davina Porter

Overview

This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, perhaps the first recognizably modern individual. A nobleman, public official, and winegrower, he wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. He called them essays, meaning “attempts” or “tries.” He put whatever was in his head into them: 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 readers to him. They come in search of companionship, wisdom, and entertainment-and in search of themselves.

This audiobook, a spirited and singular biography, relates the story of Montaigne's life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored. It traces his bizarre upbringing, his 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?”

“Lively and fascinating...How to Live takes its place as the most enjoyable introduction to Montaigne in the English language.” -Times Literary Supplement

“Splendidly conceived and exquisitely written...enormously absorbing.” -Sunday Times

“[Bakewell reveals] one of literature's enduring figures as an idiosyncratic, humane, and surprisingly modern force.” -Publishers Weekly (starred)

“A bright, genial, and generous introduction to the master's methods.” -Kirkus Reviews

“It is ultimately [Montaigne's] life-loving vivacity that Bakewell succeeds in communicating to her readers.” -The Observer

“How to Live will delight and illuminate.” -The Independent

“This subtle and surprising book manages the trick of conversing in a frank and friendly manner with its centuries-old literary giant, as with a contemporary, while helpfully placing Montaigne in a historical context. The affection of the author for her subject is palpable and infectious.” -Phillip Lopate, author of The Art of the Personal Essay

“An intellectually lively treatment of a Renaissance giant and his world.” -Saturday Telegraph

“Like recent books on Proust, Joyce, and Austen, How to Live skillfully plucks a life-guide from the incessant flux of Montaigne's prose...Superb.” -The Guardian

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172552069
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	07/05/2011
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The riding accident, which so altered Montaigne’s perspective, lasted only a few moments in itself, but one can unfold it into three parts and spread it over several years. First, there is Montaigne lying on the ground, clawing at his stomach while experiencing euphoria. Then comes Montaigne in the weeks and months that followed, reflecting on the experience and trying to reconcile it with his philosophical reading. Finally, there is Montaigne a few years later, sitting down to write about it – and about a multitude of other things. The first scene could have happened to anyone; the second to any sensitive, educated young man of the Renaissance. The last makes Montaigne unique.
     The connection is not a simple one: he did not sit up in bed and immediately start writing about the accident. He began the Essays a couple of years later, around 1572, and, even then, he wrote other chapters before coming to the one about losing consciousness. When he did turn to it, however, the experience made him try a new kind of writing, barely attempted by other writers: that of re-creating a sequence of sensations as they felt from the inside, following them from instant to instant.

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