The Complete Works (Everyman's Library)

i'll leave the other reviews to describe the substance of montaigne's book and his unique place in literature -- a favorite read of shakespeare and emerson -- and focus instead on the merits of this edition. this is the single best volume to own if you want to encounter the skeptical and humanist montaigne in english.

i am a fluent reader in the middle french of montaigne's text and own the "old" bibliothèque de la pléiade edition of his complete works. i'll say categorically that donald frame's translation is superior both to the older version by charles cotton and william hazlitt (pleasing for its antiquarian savor, but a hard slog for the average reader) and the recent versions by j.m. cohen and m.a. screech (both in paperback from penguin books). frame is much more accurate than all the others at reproducing montaigne's virile, brusque and improvisatory sentence structures, and best captures his lively and pregnant contrasts in the choice of vulgar, colloquial, informal, formal and ironically fussy expressions.

all translations (and, in fact, almost all french editions) modernize the text in various ways. translations break up montaigne's longer paragraphs, and use periods to separate the sentences strung together with semicolons, but frame is the least drastic with these and other "modernizing" changes, and best conveys the subtle changes in tempo that are characteristic of montaigne's style.

every edition of a "classical" text depends in part on a critical apparatus to clarify the historical period and the author's references to other works. the everyman editions are exemplary in choosing a noted authority to write the general introduction (here, the philosopher stuart hampshire) and in providing a synoptic chronology of the author's life with parallel columns for the literary context and historical events. the translator (frame) has penned a brief introduction explaining the history of the text, which evolved through additions and deletions across three major versions. these changes are indicated by superscript letters (A, B or C) which are essential in any edition of montaigne, as the later changes often take the train of thought into unexpected tangents, personal disclosures, or reconsidered opinions. (these comments apply to the "bordeaux" edition accepted as the definitive french text when frame made his translation, although frame also includes material from the posthumous de gournay edition, an advanced critical decision at the time.)

finally, this edition is handsomely yet inexpensively produced with a sewn binding under hard covers in slate blue cloth (a ribbon placeholder is part of the binding), and is printed on creamy, firm paper in an accessibly large type face. you will very likely want montaigne to accompany you across your life and this is an edition that will withstand both time, frequent reading, and your own mark ups and annotations.

unfortunately, there is in this edition no index to proper names or topics (unlike the original frame edition published by stanford university press). and this is not truly a *complete* edition of montaigne, as it omits the notations he made to the "ephemerides" of beuther, and the 57 latin and greek quotations that montaigne had engraved on the ceiling beams of his tower library. these classical aphorisms are something like an outline of his personal philosophy -- the single greek word "epekho" or "i suspend my judgment" perhaps summarizes them all. and this edition lacks citations to the original latin, greek and french works quoted inline by montaigne: it is annoying to stumble upon a remarkable quotation from juvenal, seneca, cicero, or plutarch, and not be able to locate the original version. these quibbles aside, this is a beautifully translated and handsomely produced edition of a remarkable and truly stimulating landmark in the genre of biographically informed philosophical essay.

i strongly encourage readers who enjoy montaigne to look into sarah bakewell's superb recent biography, "How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer", which is available at amazon and uses the pagination of this everyman edition to reference quotations from montaigne's essays, journal and letters.

This book exceeded my expectations. The size and quality are excellent for the price. The sewn-in ribbon bookmark adds a touch of old world elegance. The paper used is very thin, but feels nice between your fingers. I read another reviewer who complained about the binding, but my copy seems well made and strong. This is a book I will read gently at home, not throw in a bag or take to the beach, so I expect it to outlast me with no trouble. If you love Montaigne, this is the edition to get. Hope my photos help you decide.

I was suddenly taken with the idea of reading Montaigne. I had purchased Sarah Bakewell's biography of Montaigne and decided to read the man himself. I already owned a copy of the Essays in my venerable old set of the Great Books of the Western World and set about to reading. Very tough going. Then I did some research on the translation I had and found that it was done by and Englishman named Cotton in the late 17th century and the revised in the early 19th century by the famous essayist William Hazlitt. Add to the fact that Montaigne wrote in middle French (16th century) and had a style of writing in which he employed very long sentences. Cotton attempted to do justice to this, but produced a convoluted and difficult to follow translation. I once read Montaigne in the original while taking a French literature class. Even if you are fluent in modern French, middle French is very difficult with archaic verb tenses and vocabulary.

I bring all this up because it sent me on a quest for a more modern translation. This one, by Frame, was done in the 1950's, but it is much more readable. There are other modern translations, but this one has gotten the best reviews. There are some academic criticisms of it which I won't go into because they are of academic interest only.

Why read Montaigne? He has a surprisingly modern voice. He could have written some of the essays yesterday instead of nearly 500 years ago. He has much to tell us about how to live. He also pretty much invented the essay as a literary form. The essays are refreshing, sometimes humorous, other times very serious, but never boring. They are short. You can read most in a few minutes.

Turn of the TV, get off the net and read a book by someone who really has something to say that will, just possibly, change your life.

The late Donald Frame's translation is, as Harold Bloom credits, superb. Add to it the quality and aesthetics of the Everyman's series and this is an unbeatable edition of Montaigne's works. I plan to buy several copies of this edition as gifts.

Montaigne was one of those paradoxical characters who was both utterly lazy and completely devoted. His essays are like he is. Lazy, glad (but not too glad), and content to let the blasted world roll by with all of its absurdities and madnesses. Yet he is also taut and tense, intellectually stimulated and willing to stimulate.
Montaigne was wise because he was one of those rare characters who accepted his own humanity without the need to curse at it, exalt it, make it seem ordinary, and make it seem simple. I almost wrote that he made complexity look simple; he almost made it look easy. He did that by have interests that were as broad as that most capacious of faces - the face of the universe. But add to that Montaigne's central conviction that in the sight of God all things are small and you begin to get at the unobtrsively strange and humane part of his art. He combines (in his interests) things that are profoundly trivial and things that are profoundly - ah - profound.
Montainge has been described as a cheerful sceptic and no few harsh and ecstatic souls have been outraged by such a combination. But his cheer was based on the fact that he was both a sceptic and a man of faith - a man of faith before this dreadful age (the age we live in) settled in with its grand bifurcation between the assertive intellect born in the Renaissance was left to battle the pseudo-faith of the fundamentalist Christians. Montaigne would have been politely bewildered to have to speak to either Karl Marx or Jerry Falwell. They would have seemed both absurd and absurdly deranged to him. He was too balanced.
He was and remains a great corrective to our mystical tendencies. He does not cancel them out but he does smack them in the teethe and put them into order. He despised that perennial human desire to destroy humanity in the name of a state higher than humanity.

Firstly Frames Tranlation is the one to buy. This book includes the travel journals and the essay in complete form by a great transaltor who is also thee great scholar on M. Montaigne.

What a wonderful book, It is by far in all the books I have read the best by far without measure. I held Shakespeare as the gold standard until I read the Essays. Then I found a richness of ideas and a elegance of language that is beyond comparison.

The Essays are intersting because of the topics but also because Montaigne is talking directly to you. He is a man who would rather speak to you and converse than write to you. Luckly this man did write for us. The essays often are relevant to this day. They give a great deal of history of philosphy and history of France and the world. But mostly they give us an intimate history of one man.

This is the one book for the desert island. It is over a thousand pages but will be read many times by myself. The Essays vary from a page and half to about 200 pages. They cover so many topics and are so full of digressions I recommend that you just dive in. As Montaigne aged his essays grew in complexty and length.

He is a friend that I will never lay eyes on. I usally hate onsided conversations but with Montaigne I am glad I got to hear him speak from the page.

This is an excellent translation and I recommend it to anyone wishing to have the complete essays. I also recommend that Montaigne is best understood by reading all of his essays. What makes Montaigne interesting, for me, is the full breadth of his thinking: his good and charming reflections as well as his cracked and contradictory opinions. He then comes to us as an authentic person. I fault this edition because the binding is not sturdy enough to hold so many pages without breaking down during daily use. I would prefer a two-volume set because of this; and I would have paid more for a stronger binding or a larger format that reduced the number of pages.

I had heard so much about this book and I was really looking forward to reading it. Well, I'll be reading it for a long while, because like a wonderful meal, this book is not to be gulped down in wolf bites, it is to be savored. It is like sending your mind for a stroll on the beach in parts, but sometimes it feels like a challenging literary hike. Montaigne speaks to us as equals and uses history and literature, politics and draws on the full range of his experiences and education, all the time engaging us as if we were his closest confidants. This book makes you think, at times deeply. Sometimes he says something so unexpected that it stops you in your tracks and you have to read it again to make sure you read it right. Sometimes it is laugh out loud funny. If Mark Twain would have written without caring whether anyone read his writing or not; If he had written just to express himself to himself, he might very well have written essays like these. Twain made his living by making people laugh. Michel De Montaigne does not care whether you laugh or not, he does not even care if you read his essays. Writing them was what gave him pleasure. Reading his Complete Works is a pleasure I'll be enjoying for a long time.

"Reader, I am myself the matter of my book," he says; and characteristically adds, "There is no reason for you to spend your leisure on a subject so frivolous and vain." The Essais were created out of unpromising circumstances. The death of Etienne La Boetie, the one great friendship and affection of his life, drove him to retire, at the age of thirty-eight, from civil and political life to the library in his tower, to evade his grief and to write. His marriage, we sense, was unhappy, and only one of his six daughters survived infancy. As he began to write the Essais, the St. Bartholomew massacre took place, and a mixture of religious and civil war became daily circumstance for the rest of Montaigne's creative life. The war dragged him back to public service, a succession of battles, unsafe voyages, sieges and treaties, and during a term as mayor of Bordeaux, the city was struck by plague. Montaigne himself already suffered from gall stones, a condition inoperable at the time, and he spent a year traveling through France, Switzerland and Italy in vain hopes of a cure. The image of Montaigne as a man serenely sequestered in his tower is contradicted by his biography and by his writings. What is so wonderfully expressed in the Essais is an intense, abiding curiosity about life, which Montaigne above all wanted to take time to consider. In sixteenth century France knowledge was in flux, emerging from the theocentrism of Medieval thought; the Renaissance was by definition a rebirth not just of classical learning but of man's interest in the world around him. It's why the Essais are such a marvelous jumble: pieces on liars, prayer, cannibals, moderation, the Parthian army, Heraclitus, solitude, sleep, donothingness, Caesar's war strategies, sumptuary laws, stinginess, fear, friendship, paternal love, imagination--to pick a few at random. In the Essais, this particular fact may be true, but this opposite fact may be equally true; Montaigne was, by Fitzgerald's definition, the first-rate mind par excellence. The considering tone, a kind of ruminative nobility, makes the Essais utterly uncoercive--an antithesis of the aphoristic tradition that followed them. I cannot imagine anyone reading Montaigne and afterward going out and doing anything uncivilized--a special recommendation, perhaps, in these belligerent days.
Get a good copy of Montaigne--pay what you have to--as Montaigne will be a lifetime companion. In French, see if you can find the original printing of the Pleiade edition of the Essais, edited by Alred Thibaudet, which gives translations and sources of the Greek and Latin quotes in footnotes; the later Pleiade edition of the Oeuvres Completes includes the letters and the travel journals, but with backnotes, which is less convenient. There are innumerable paperback editions and selections; the Garnier Flammarion pocket book modernizes Montaigne's spelling; the Folio edition does not. In English, Everyman's Library has reprinted Donald Frame's translation of the Works--still by a distance the best in English--in an affordable editon.
The problem with books about Montaigne is usually that it's more fun to read Montaigne himself than to read about Montaigne; one pleasurable exception to the rule is Sarah Bakewell's HOW TO LIVE: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (London, Vintage, 2011), which tells us much and tells it well, and has a free-wheeling spirit of its own.

Glenn Shea, from Glenn's Book Notes at www.bookbarnniantic.com

Before I read the Essays, I wondered why reviewers would say that they liked to reread the book and would return to it again and again. Now I know because (after 1045 pages) I too miss reading it. At first the numerous classical references are a little daunting but they are inserted with a deftness and humility that leads to acceptance and appreciation. His own thoughts are worth hearing today even though our world (in particular the class system and the place of women) is very different. I came away with at least one idea that profoundly changed the way I think about my life. What more can you ask?