Two essays, one of them excellent.

The opening question is asked seriously and answered seriously, and I didn't expect that. Most philosophy that starts somewhere dramatic backs away within a chapter. This one stays on the question of whether life is worth continuing for something like forty pages before it will let itself move, and the discipline of that is most of the reason for the rating.

I counted the word "absurd" 60 times in those forty pages and then gave up counting, because past a certain density a term stops functioning as a term.

Structurally it's four movements: the reasoning, then the portraits, then creation, then the myth. The portraits are where it collapses for me. Three men are offered as models of living without appeal, the third of them a conqueror, and the writing there has the posture of a young man who has decided that seriousness looks like this. Eleven pink tabs across thirty pages. It is also, and I say this flatly rather than as a complaint about the era, a book containing no women who are not being looked at.

The appendix on Kafka holds the best-argued twelve pages in the volume. Tighter than the title essay, warmer, and it does the thing the title essay keeps announcing it will do. If someone asked me for a sample I'd hand them that and nothing else.

Where I disagree, and where I'm least confident: the charge of philosophical suicide is thrown at four thinkers at once, and I went off and read a proper summary of the least famous, marked green, and came back thinking the reading is unfair to the point of caricature. Am I equipped to be certain about that? No. I'm equipped to notice that not one page is given to the strongest version of the position being dismissed.

It took me six sittings across a fortnight, which is too fast for the first essay and about right for the rest. Twice I reached the foot of a page, realised I'd taken in nothing at all, and started the page again; both times were in the section on creation, where he argues about novels in the abstract without naming enough of them for me to follow him.

Practical notes. My copy is second hand, and the previous owner underlined in biro, heavily, always the most obvious sentence available. I spent two evenings lifting what I could with an eraser before I could concentrate. It cost me two pounds fifty from a shop in Hitchin that files philosophy under general interest, which tells you something about the shop and nothing about the book. The final section, four pages, would be worth the price on its own, and I'd send anyone straight there and then back to the beginning, in that order.