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kunalsen 's review for:
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
by Sarah Bakewell
As we all know, Existentialism is a hard thing to define, as there are as many variations and interpretations as there are existentialists out there. Bakewell does an excellent job of filtering out the most essential aspects of this school of thought and explore all its major variants. But instead of creating a heavy book on phenomenology and existentialism, she humanizes them my mixing in the characters and anecdotes that made it happen. It starts with the trio of characters in Paris of early 1930s – Sartre, Beauvoir, and Aron. Eventually it covers in depth all the thinkers that contributed to the development of these ideas – Camus, Heidegger, Marleau-Ponty, Mardoch, and many others. This is a not an easy bunch to discuss as each of them had truly colorful lives, full of contradictions, conflicts, and complex ideas. The author makes you feel as if you are part of the gathering. It is a great way to understand one of the greatest intellectual journeys of the past century.