Upington is the wild west of SA where German car makers take their machines for high-speed road testing and Alitalia and Air Afrique send their fleets of jets to die. A poignant image that reminded me of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton (Hamish Hamilton, 2009) a review of which I wrote in May which never saw the light of day.

“Marry for money and work for love” always seemed like a good idea. Of course Alain de Botton didn’t need to do either as dad was fabulously wealthy financier Gilbert de Botton and the only person to be painted by both Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon.

Gilbert’s obituary in The Times in 2000 listed reading Stoic philosopher Seneca as a leisure activity. A hobby his son has turned into a lucrative career with a TV production company called Seneca and a series of books like this one, applying the sledgehammers of classical philosophy to the nuts of everyday life.

Writing in the Financial Times at the end of April, De Botton reminded gardeners anxiously scanning the pink pages for the first green shoots of financial recovery, of the sage words of French moralist Chamfort: “a man should swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead.”

For although this essay on work offers two outcomes: pleasure and sorrow, as befits a Stoic, it is the latter that wins out: “if we could witness the eventual fate of every one of our projects, we would have no choice but to succumb to immediate paralysis.” Work is summed up as a distraction, “a perfect bubble in which to invest our hopes for perfection”, good for our self-esteem, making us “respectably tired”, “put food on the table” and “kept us out of greater trouble.” Not much consolation for the millions of workers losing their jobs in the current worldwide depression.

It takes ten chapters for De Botton to arrive at this conclusion via investigations of the work of making a “nauseating variety of biscuit” called McVities Moments to the fate of obsolete jumbo jets in the Mojave desert. The violent and bloody line fishing of tuna in the Maldives (whose president is the spitting image of his dead dad and the fishermen are all widowers, at sea when the boxing day tsunami struck) is juxtaposed with the launch of a Japanese pay TV satellite from French Guiana capable of beaming Manga cartoons and soft porn to Japanese schoolgirls on rainy afternoons.

An English artist obsessively painting the same ancient oak for three years offsets an essay on the beauty of electrical pylons. Eskom basks in an unexpected moment of fame in the shape of “one pylon near Johannesburg which, with wide-open arms, no identifiable base and connectors fixed at a diagonal, matched none of my existing notions of how a transmission tower might be shaped.” No wonder the utility needs to increase rates by 45%.

A chapter on accountancy is predictably boring while one on inventors and their inventions is bizarrely kooky. Lunch at Pizza Hut with Iranian inventor Mohsen Bahmani to discuss shoes that allow the wearer to walk on water is cancelled after Bahmani is arrested at Heathrow “on suspicion of importing bomb-making equipment.”

The writing style is Louis Theroux in a London suburb: witty, loopy and the many black and white photographs save the text from dusty academia. Unresolved father issues form an interesting subtext. De Botton’s dad pops up again when he decides to understudy a career counselor called Bob Symons, “a tall and bearded man who looked as if he could wrestle a wolf to the ground… I harboured a confused wish for him to be my father.” Bob consulted from “an unassuming and cramped Victorian home in a run-down residential street in South London… the place smelt powerfully of freshly boiled cabbage or swede.”

While Bob counseled bored tax lawyers, De Botton evesdropped from “a tight cupboard… on the floor, a bag of Symons’s sports equipment, emitting the strong smell of recently used gym shoes.” Real Basil Fawlty stuff which must be the “deeper sympathetic hilarity” novelist Geoff Dyer was going on about on the back cover.

De Botton was to pay for these olfactory experiences by attempting to have Symons’ masterwork The Real Me: Career as an Act of Selfhood published. In spite of being a best-selling celebrity author himself, after a dozen literary agents, The Real Me remains unpublished.

As indeed does the real Mr. De Botton, this book notwithstanding. By choosing a willfully bizarre collection of occupations from which he comes across as nerdy and detached, the overall effect is more gossip than guru, but strangely engrossing, nevertheless.

Times Live