A review by annevoi
How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell

5.0

This book has everything: philosophy, biography, history, criticism, motion, fascination. Ostensibly the story of the original essayist Montaigne (1533–1592) himself, it is organized in such a way that Bakewell can take elegant detours without losing the reader. The "twenty attempts at an answer" to the very basic question of "how to live" all come from Montaigne's thoughts and writing, but she uses them to also explore sixteenth-century French history (and what a period it was, marked by religious warfare and the plague); the editorial history of his Essays themselves, from Montaigne's own obsessive rewrites straight into present-day scholarship; Montaigne's influences among Classical writers and philosophers, especially the Stoics, Skeptics, and Epicureans; his admirers and detractors through the centuries. In straight biography, the book covers his childhood and youth, his marriage and home life, his travels through Europe, his famous loving friendship with Étienne de La Boétie, his political career as both mayor of Bordeaux and advisor to kings, his death. But all that is woven into a more general exploration of, simply, how to live.

I loved this book.