Synopses & Reviews
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
Synopsis
The bestselling author of The Architecture of Happiness and How Proust Can Change Your Life revisits his utterly charming debut book, Essays in Love.
The narrator is smitten by Chloe on a Paris-to-London flight, and by the time they've reached the luggage carousel he knows he is in love. He loves her chestnut hair, watery green eyes, the gap that makes her teeth Kantian and not Platonic, and her views on Heidegger's Being and Time -- but he hates her taste in shoes. What makes this book extraordinary is the depth with which the emotions involved in the relationship are analysed. Love comes under the philosophical microscope.
Plotting the course of their affair from the initial delirium of infatuation to the depths of suicidal despair, 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 terrorist tactics employed when the beloved begins, inexplicably, to drift away, Essays in Love is filled with profound and witty observations on the pain and exhilaration of love. An entire chapter is devoted to the nuances and subtexts of an initial date, while another chapter mulls over the question of how and when to say I love you.
With allusions to Aristotle, Sartre, Wittgenstein, and Groucho Marx, de Botton has plotted an imaginative and microscopically detailed romance.