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A review by hoboken
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others by Sarah Bakewell
4.0
A wonderful book. Bakewell is a graceful, clear, and charming writer. Confirms the impression she made with her book on Montaigne. Prepare to find page-turning – yes – elaborations on Husserl and Heidegger and drool-inducing evocations of days spent in the cafes of Paris drinking cocktails and writing world-famous plays and novels. There's also a concise list near the beginning of the ideas existentialism actually consists of.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty whom I'd virtually never heard of, are the stars. I could have used even more on Camus whom I admire. But Paris in the 40's . . . there was no heat, not much food, and the Germans were everywhere. Sartre spent some time as a POW. But mon Dieu! Life was there to be lived. And “existentialism is always a philosophy of freedom in situation.”
Bakewell thinks de Beauvoir's place in the existentialist pantheon has been shortchanged. “The Second Sex” could have become established in the canon as one of the great cultural re-evaluations of modern times, a book to set alongside the works of . . . Darwin, . . . Marx, . . . and Freud.” Bakewell calls it “a confident experiment in . . . applied existentialism.” Beauvoir “resituated men in relation to women,” by using philosophy “to tackle two huge subjects: the history of humanity—which she reinterpreted as a history of patriarchy—and the history of an individual woman's whole life.”
“Growing up female made a bigger difference to a person than most people realised, including women themselves,” Bakewell says. Girls are expected to become weak princesses who stay at home and need to be supported and rescued. They learn to be modest and hesitant, dress impractically, and see themselves as occupying a position to be gazed at rather than shaping the space around them by their own actions as boys are taught to do.
The Second Sex has inspired countless women to alter their lives and changed the way most of the world now talks about how women live. “It can be considered the single most influential work ever to come out of the existentialist movement.”
With a man now in the White House who has ordered his female staff to “dress like women,” it doesn't appear that this nearly 70-year-old book has lost its timeliness.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty whom I'd virtually never heard of, are the stars. I could have used even more on Camus whom I admire. But Paris in the 40's . . . there was no heat, not much food, and the Germans were everywhere. Sartre spent some time as a POW. But mon Dieu! Life was there to be lived. And “existentialism is always a philosophy of freedom in situation.”
Bakewell thinks de Beauvoir's place in the existentialist pantheon has been shortchanged. “The Second Sex” could have become established in the canon as one of the great cultural re-evaluations of modern times, a book to set alongside the works of . . . Darwin, . . . Marx, . . . and Freud.” Bakewell calls it “a confident experiment in . . . applied existentialism.” Beauvoir “resituated men in relation to women,” by using philosophy “to tackle two huge subjects: the history of humanity—which she reinterpreted as a history of patriarchy—and the history of an individual woman's whole life.”
“Growing up female made a bigger difference to a person than most people realised, including women themselves,” Bakewell says. Girls are expected to become weak princesses who stay at home and need to be supported and rescued. They learn to be modest and hesitant, dress impractically, and see themselves as occupying a position to be gazed at rather than shaping the space around them by their own actions as boys are taught to do.
The Second Sex has inspired countless women to alter their lives and changed the way most of the world now talks about how women live. “It can be considered the single most influential work ever to come out of the existentialist movement.”
With a man now in the White House who has ordered his female staff to “dress like women,” it doesn't appear that this nearly 70-year-old book has lost its timeliness.