A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy
A Novel
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Susannah’s official boyfriend, Jason, is the perfect foil for her student lifestyle. He is ten years older, an antiques dealer, and owns a stylish apartment that prevents her from having to live in the seedy digs on campus. This way, she can take her philosophy major very seriously and dabble in the social and sexual freedom of 1970s university life. But circumstances become more complicated than Susannah would like when she begins to have an affair with her tutorial partner, Rob. Soon she is dating two men, missing her lectures, exploring independence and feminism with her girlfriends, and finding herself in a particularly impossible dilemma: she becomes pregnant. Forced to look beyond her friends and lovers for support, she finds help and inspiration from the lessons of Kierkegaard and other European philosophers.
A Girl’s Guide to Modern European Philosophy is a delightfully insightful, bittersweet coming-of-age romp, in which love is far from platonic and the mind—body predicament a pressing reality. It even succeeds where many introductions to philosophy have failed, by effortlessly bringing to life the central tenets of the most important European philosophers of modern times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her first novel, singer-songwriter and music journalist Greig examines the case of second-year philosophy student Susanna, who frequently wakes up, screaming, from disconcerting dreams. It's not so much the demands of her course load at the University of Sussex Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Freud and friends as it is Susanna's own experience with Nietzsche's "great separation," or the sudden realization that "everything... means nothing to you." Her boyfriend, Jason, an antiques dealer 10 years her senior, is stingy with affection. Which helps explain why Susanna falls for Rob, a brooding yet innocent-seeming classmate who frequents the dingy campus bars, digs a good protest and lives in dilapidated communal housing. Torn, Susanna opts to date both it's the swinging '70s, after all but the back-and-forth leaves her dizzy, and when she discovers she's pregnant and realizes the father could be either man, neither her tutor nor her girlfriends can assuage her. Fumbling through the smoky corridors and lofty ideals of academia, Susanna is, like so many student philosophers, equal parts endearing and insufferable, and even if her dilemma isn't the most original, Greig makes it uniquely hers.
