Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

For me this book was one great, sunny, smile.

And I say that as somebody who had no prior interest in the Existentialists or mid twentieth century philosophy. I was drawn to this book purely because I had thoroughly enjoyed Sarah Bakewell’s book about Montaigne How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer.

I feel that the joy of the book came from the fact that Bakewell makes a joyful return to a subject that she loved and which excited her as a youth and the reader is caught up in both her then youthful enthusiasm and the pleasures of rediscovery from a more critical perspective � most notable in her treatment of Heidegger who she still finds alluring but now is repelled by his Nazism and that in his post Nazi years that he neither apologised nor tried to explain himself (and perhaps certain things are impossible to communicate, or appear to be so difficult that one never makes the attempt).

The book is the biography of an intellectual movement and we see each person as a cog who perhaps only once comes into interlocking contact with another and then moves on, inspired, into a new direction. At the heart of the book are two cogs who remain interlinked � Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre dominates the book by means of his massive output � fuelled for years by medication and alcohol, he abandoned revision and correcting his own writing and churned out words almost with out limited � John Huston invited him to write a script for a bio-pic of Sigmund Freud, the script would have made a film eight hours long, Huston tried to work with Sartre to reduce the potential running time but at night Sartre would simply write more. Eventually Huston found a new script writer. On another occasion Sartre was invited to write the forward to a book, it grew so long that the publisher agreed to release it was a book in its own right. For Bakewell, Beauvoir is the heavyweight of the two, she sees The Second Sex as particularly important � but misrepresented in translation into English. Beauvoir herself was fatally flawed in Bakewell’s view by her desire to be second fiddle to a perceived greater man, first Merleau-Ponty, who was too mild mannered for her, and then the more extreme Sartre.

Bakewell draws attention both to the wave that Sartre and Beauvoir washed over popular culture - Existentialist themed films, Norman Mailer standing for election in New York as an Existentialist candidate, and the divergence that their thought made from the concerns of Heidegger and Husserl, but also the potential for later revitalisation - some of the Czech dissidents she holds were inspired by Husserl's Phenomenology, finding in Husserl's epoche a technique to put aside extraneous issues to concentrate purely on the existential ones.

For myself the most interesting characters were those on the periphery of Bakewell’s story, Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. This is one of those books which could open to door to a quarter of a lifetime of further reading. It is the engaging tale of friendships made and broken, late nights and early mornings, furious typing, bitter break ups, failed reconciliations, and a certain amount of smuggling manuscripts in diplomatic bags.