"The longing for a destiny is nowhere stronger than in our
romantic life" we are told at the outset of Alain de Botton''s On
Love, a hip, charming, and devastatingly witty rumination on the
thrills and pitfalls of romantic love. The narrator is smitten by
Chloe on a Paris-London flight, and by the time they''ve reached the
luggage carousel, he knows he is in love. He loves her chestnut
hair and pale nape and watery green eyes, the way she drives a car
and eats Chinese food, the gap that makes her teeth Kantian and not
Platonic, her views on Heidegger''s Being and Time - although he
hates her taste in shoes. On Love plots the course of their affair
from the initial delirium of infatuation to the depths of suicidal
despair, through the Groucho "Marxist" stage of coming to terms
with being loved by the unattainable beloved, through a fit of
anhedonia, defined in medical texts as a disease resulting from the
terror brought on by the threat of utter happiness, and finally
through the nausea induced and terrorist tactics employed when the
beloved begins, inexplicably, to drift away. Alain de Botton is
simultaneously hilarious and intellectually astute, shifting with
ease among such seminal romantic texts as The Divine Comedy, Madame
Bovary, and The Bleeding Heart, a self-help book for those who love
too much. He is schematically flawless, funny, funky, and totally
engaging. Filled with profound observations and useful diagrams, On
Love displays and examines for all of us the pain and exhilaration
of love, asking, "Can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves
fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams? Can
we not be excused a certain superstitious faith in a creature who
will prove the solution to our relentless yearnings?" In this
dazzlingly original first novel, Alain de Botton tells of a young
man smitten by a woman on a Paris-London flight. On Love plots the
course of their affair from the initial delirium of infatuation to
the depths of suicidal despair, as the beloved, inexplicably,
begins to drift away.
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