Writing Shame and Desire: The Work of Annie Ernaux Book

The Publishers' Weekly described it as an 'impenetrable rhapsody to the apotheosis of French intellectualism... overflowing with fawning endearments.'

Well I couldnt get through it in the month Wellington public library let me keep it and I had to wait two more months to get it out again to finish it, so readers in Wellington at least evidently want a book about Sartre that isnt more interested in Simone de Beauvoir.

"The Beaver" is in fact a rare visitor to these pages, perhaps because Levy's book wants to locate Sartre in the sequence of thinkers whose investigations, it is contended, he brought to a satisfactory conclusion before heading off into the political error -Stalinism- that destroyed his credibility.

An error, we understand, which brought such disgrace on the enterprise of asking the really big questions that philosophy since S has cautiously reduced itself to a sort of cultural achaeology. These days we get technicians, not these reckless exponents of philosophy as the urge to write. This might explain why the best thing about Levy's book, his own extravagant language, has been the thing its critics have most resented.

OK, we have to tread carefully now that linguistics is the new intellectual black. We know that thought is only as accurate as the words available to the thinker, and words are slippery beasts.

But I for one welcome any efforts to rescue 'existentialism' from journalists who use it in such constructions as 'Israel is an existential threat to Palestine.'

Philosophy as the urge to write. Plato, Descartes, Berkley, Sartre, Camus. All wrong, probably, but what good reads they gave us. Add Levy to the list.