One of the most remarkable and influential writers of the French Renaissance was a retired magistrate who, not finding anything of great consequence to write about, decided to write about a subject matter that he knew best: himself. That writer, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592), then proceeded to try to evaluate everything about himself in a collection of writings that over the years grew into a massive volume that he called “
Essais,” or literally “Attempts” in English. Thus did he popularize a literary genre that came to be known as the
essay, and his works—greatly admired for their masterful balance of intellectual knowledge and personal story-telling—were to become a major direct influence on both great and aspiring writers all over the world ever since.
In a new biography of Montaigne,
How to Live: a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (Chatto & Windus, £16.99), Sarah Bakewell adopts Montaigne’s own method to explain her subject and how he looks at the world, composing her portrait of Montaigne around the answers to the very questions that he himself had provided in “
Essais.” As University of London philosophy professor A.C. Grayling describes in his review of the biography in the June 21, 2010 issue of
Prospect Magazine, “The outcome is an instructive journey around Montaigne, exemplifying his charm and the universality of his appeal.”
Grayling says that Bakewell rightly treats Montaigne as a contemporary for all times, rather than “rooting him in the turbulent mixture of Renaissance and Reformation that made it possible for him to write as a pagan in the bitter midst of the 16th century’s wars of religion.” By doing so, he says, Bakewell is able to explain how it is that Montaigne “speaks with equal clarity to his contemporaries at the end of the 16th century, to Voltaire in the 18th, to William Hazlitt…in the 19th, and to his readers today.”
He observes that Bakewell obviously enjoyed her time with Montaigne: “She relishes his wry humour, his variety of interests, his puncturing way with pretension, and above all his humanity. Her enjoyment is sure to lead many readers to Montaigne’s text, if they do not already know it. And those who do are certain to appreciate Bakewell’s own empathy and eloquence.”
Read A.C. Grayling’s review of How to Live in Prospect Magazine now! Read another review of How to Live in The Observer now!ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Sarah Bakewell says she had a wandering childhood in Europe, Australia, and England. After studying at the University of Essex, she served as 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 and catalogues rare book collections for the National Trust.
