On Love
The best-selling author of How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Art of Travel revisits his utterly charming debut novel, On Love. The narrator is smitten by Chloe on a ParisLondon flight, and by the time they’ve reached the luggage carousel he knows he is in love. He loves her chestnut hair,...
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The best-selling author of How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Art of Travel revisits his utterly charming debut novel, On Love. The narrator is smitten by Chloe on a ParisLondon 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. 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, On Love is filled with profound observations and useful diagrams, examining for all of us the pain and exhilaration of love.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780802142405 (0802142400)
ASIN: 802142400
Publish date: January 6th 2006
Publisher: Grove Press
Pages no: 194
Edition language: English
Category:
Novels,
Love,
Writing,
Essays,
Literature,
European Literature,
British Literature,
Romance,
Philosophy,
Contemporary,
Psychology,
Relationships
An awful lot of time is spent looking at the beginning of a relationship, but instead this book looks at the years thereafter. It considers the trials and tribulations of a married couple, Rabih and Kirsten, and how their relationship deals with hurdles throughout the years. The book’s written fro...
This is going to be a hard book to review. Not because it is bad, per se, but because I'm not sure what to review it as. See, on the one hand, these are philosophical essays, so obviously there's the question of what I thought and whether they provided interesting insights, and the answer to that ...
de Botton's writing is simply beautiful. This book read like poetry. I devoured it in 2 days, unable to put it down while the story of Alain's and Chloe's love blossomed, grew, and then wilted and died. Each emotion was carefully identified and analyzed in nuanced ways yet ways in which we can al...
Alain de Botton uses philosophy to help with with our daily lives (which is what it was originally supposed to do). His writing is captivating. This book can be read over and over again at every different phase of a relationship.
On Love charts a love affair between the narrator and Chloe, a woman he meets on a British Airways carrier from Paris to England. After “an exchange of biography,” the usual digression begins: romance, intimacy, heartbreak and rebirth (or progression, depending on which way you look at it).Sharp and...