Product Description

Essays in Love will appeal to anyone who has ever been in a relationship or confused about love. The book charts the progress of a love affair from the first kiss to argument and reconciliation, from intimacy and tenderness to the onset of anxiety and heartbreak. The work’s genius lies in the way it minutely analyses emotions we’ve all felt before but have perhaps never understood so well: it includes a chapter on the anxieties of when and how to say ‘I love you’ and another on the challenges of disagreeing with someone else’s taste in shoes. While gripping the reader with the talent of a great novelist, de Botton brings a philosopher’s sensibility to his analyses of the emotions of love, resulting in a genre-breaking book that is at once touching and thought-provoking.

‘The book’s success has much to do with its beautifully modelled sentences, its wry humour and its unwavering deadpan respect for its reader’s intelligence . . . full of keen observation and flashes of genuine lyricism, acuity and depth.’ Francine Prose, New Republic

‘Witty, funny, sophisticated, neatly tied up, and full of wise and illuminating insights.’ P. J. Kavanagh, Spectator

‘De Botton is a national treasure.’ Susan Hill

‘I doubt if de Botton has written a dull sentence in his life.’ Jan Morris, New Statesman

‘Single-handedly, de Botton has taken philosophy back to its simplest and most important purpose: helping us to live our lives.’ Independent

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8762 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

About the Author

Alain De Botton was born in 1969. He is the author of The Romantic Movement, Kiss and Tell, How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Consolations of Philsophy, The Art of Travel and Status Anxiety . His work is translated into 20 languages. He lives in London. For more information, consult www.alaindebotton.com.

Customer Reviews

A read that strikes a chord.
This is a wonderful book. It charts the development of a relationship between the speaker and a woman he meets on a flight. Everyone will undoubtedly relate to the different stages of the relationship, from initial uncomfortable exchanges, charged with expectation, to the concern that you are more involved than your object of desire. It's a book that contains moments of high humour and accurately depicts the frustrations, confusions, joy and desolate despair that only romantic entanglement can bring. Neatly suffused with readable and thought provoking asides, this is a fantastic book - read it.

Novel approach to popular philosophy
Alain de Botton's first book is a mixture of novel and essay, charting the development and disintegration of a love affair. Whilst the book would probably fail as a novel - there is little plot, and the characters and the scenarios in which they are placed serve only to illustrate de Botton's philosophical musings on the many aspects of love, it succeeds as an easily accessible, thought-provoking, often amusing and original work. The author writes clearly, engagingly and with wit and intelligence. Recommended.

not uninteresting but limited
This is neat exploration of romantic love in the 21st century (though its modernity is coloured by rather conservative, conformist notion of interaction). AdB is a bright guy and he realises that the book asks more questions than it answers (it would wouldn't it?) and is intended as material for debate (internal? shared?). He is not trying to solve the problem nor write a self-help book, a seducer's manual or a `get over your man' Cosmo diatribe. There are drawbacks: stylistically, he's hardly Proust; the numbering of paragraphs is noisome - it's not as if he refers to, say, `$60 above' which would be more systematic; the (lightly borne) philosophy is not really the right one (Kierkgaard, Nietzsche, Plotinus would be superior helpmates to ones he cites); and the `novelistic' side of the lover's tale is sometimes cloying (a man who `doesn't notice' a strategically placed mirror in a bedroom!! They have such interesting friends, deary! he's `socially superior' to her, etc. etc.)... still there are observations here that are worth digging for, especially for an adolescent reader starting out, as it were, and thinking he has gone nuts. Others might try Adam Philips...or better Tolstoy and Proust.
The great limitation? Well, I think there are more differences with respect to romantic love between men and women than it is fashionable to advance today and de Botton almost totally ignores the woman's side of the story. You might say, well, of course it's by and about a man - but men are not totally precluded from seeing the feminine (ugh?) point of view and this AdB singularly fails to attempt. Is there a book out there that does, but not in the `he betrayed me, the cad' school of wimmin's writing that dominates the shelves...?