The Boxer & The Goal Keeper - Softcover

Martin writes with passion and brio, and no small amount of daring... the book brings alive the ethical debates between Sartre and Camus... with such wit, sympathy and style - Literary Review

Andy Martin's elegant study... is one of the most accessible and intelligent books on philosophy I have read this year, as alert to the human drama as the intellectual conflict, and unfailingly observant to the nuances and subtexts - Scotsman

The last 100 pages are by turns gripping and revealing. Satre and Camus whole relationship was 'more like a collision, a slow-motion car crash, than a collaboration'. The Boxer and the Goalkeeper suggests it could never have been any other way - The Sunday Business Post

Original and perceptive analyses of the literary and philosophical works that made Camus and Sartre famous...enjoyable and well accomplished - The Times Literary Supplement

Sartre, Camus and Wanda: an existential love triangle. Satre looks like an ogre; Camus was a movie star among philosophers. Their biographer Andy Martin recounts the love triangle that soured their friendship --Irish Independent

The last 100 pages are by turns gripping and revealing. Satre and Camus whole relationship was 'more like a collision, a slow-motion car crash, than a collaboration'. The Boxer and the Goalkeeper suggests it could never have been any other way --The Sunday Business Post

Satre, Camus and Wanda: an existential love triangle. Satre looks like an ogre; Camus was a movie star among philosophers. Their biographer Andy Martin recounts the love triangle that soured their friendship --Irish Independent

Jean-Paul Sartre is the author of possibly the most notorious one-liner of twentieth-century philosophy: 'Hell is other people'. Albert Camus was The Outsider. The two men first came together in Occupied Paris in the middle of the Second World War, and quickly became friends, comrades, and mutual admirers. But the intellectual honeymoon was short-lived. In 1943, with Nazis patrolling the streets, Sartre and Camus sat in a cafe on the boulevard Saint-Germain with Simone de Beauvoir and began a discussion about life and love and literature that would finally tear them apart. They ended up on opposite sides in a war of words over just about everything: women,philosophy, politics.Their friendship culminated in a bitter & very public feud that was described as 'the end of a love-affair' but which never really finished. Sartre was a boxer and a drug-addict; Camus was a goalkeeper who subscribed to a degree-zero approach to style and ecstasy. Sartre, obsessed with his own ugliness, took up the challenge of accumulating women; Camus, part-Bogart, part-Samurai, was also a self-confessed Don Juan who aspired to chastity. Sartre and Camus play out an epic struggle between the symbolic and the savage. But what if the friction between these two unique individuals is also the source of our own inevitable conflicts? Martin reconstructs the intense and antagonistic relationship that was (in Sartre's terms) 'doomed to failure'. Weaving together the lives and ideas and writings of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, he relives the existential drama that binds them together and remixes a philosophical dialogue that speaks to us now.