100 Books to Read Poster No 24

 

So on the blurb of the cover the top says 'The novel that thinks it's a history of philosophy' and the bottom says 'The history of philosophy that thinks it's a novel' and when I read that I thought there are three ways this can go. It can fail as a novel, it can fail as a history of philosophy or it can fail as both. In theory there's a fourth option in which the book is a rousing success as both, but that was never going to happen  because if books could be both successful novels and successful histories of philosophy this wouldn't be the first one and there would be lots of them. Never let it be said that publishers can't recognise the main chance. 

It certainly fails as a novel. It has a clumsy and repetitive framing device, which falls apart towards the end, the dialogue is abysmal, the characters are cardboard and it is pretentious, preachy and propagandist. I'm not qualified to decide whether it fails as a history of philosophy, although there are several people included there who I wouldn't think of as philosophers so much as scientists or economists And then there is Freud. Goodness only knows what he's doing there. Apart from taking up space that could have been better spent discussing the French Enlightenment which is given very short shrift. Don't get me wrong. Freud was a great and original thinker, but a philosopher? Not so much, or at least not  the way I see it. 

The one thing I am likely to retain from this not-quite-400 page tome is that there was more to Epicureanism than a justification for sensory gluttony. Which I won't deny is worth knowing, but that was on page 103. 

For the avoidance of doubt, I  really did not like this book. At.  All.