Sweetness of Life (Penguin Books)

This is the number one bestseller in France and Italy, from Francoise Heritier, The Sweetness of Life is a beautiful and poetic list of the everyday reasons that make life worth living. If you assume an average life expectancy of 85 years, and deduct the hours we spend daily on sleeping, shopping, eating, working, tending to our relationships and on everything else that is obligatory, then how much time is left for the average person to enjoy those activities that are the sweetness of life? For Francoise Heritier, it is those activities, those moments that make up pure sensuality, the actual experience of humanity. These are the moments we all cherish: wild laughter, coffee in the sun, the bliss of fresh autumn evenings, running in warm rain, long conversations at twilight, kisses on the back of the neck, the moment when all nature falls silent, those times when you know that someone likes you, is looking at you and listening to you, cooking a complicated dish, feeling agile and sprightly, getting back together with friends you haven't seen in ages, watching a craftsman at work, listening to other people."There's still so much else that I forget", says Heritier, and she goes on to list, with heart-warming and heart-breaking specificity, all that we so easily miss if we do not attend to the lightness and grace in the simple fact of existence, life's sweetness. What about you, what would you miss if all this had to disappear from your life forever? "A series of perceptions, sensations, eddies, and happiness of writing that gives a real intensity to the existence...a true wonder". (Laure Adler). Francoise Heritier, an anthropologist, is Emeritus Professor at the College de France and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. She is the author of such highly successful works as Masculin/feminin and De la violence, translated into more than ten languages. Le Sel de la Vie (translated into English as The Sweetness of Life) is a French bestseller.