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On Love

By Alain de Botton

(81)

| Paperback | 9780802134097

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Book Description

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 Paris–London flight, and by the time they’ve reached the luggage carousel he knows he is in love. He loves her chestnutContinue

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 Paris–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. 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.

Critics

  • Marshmallowing

    On Love is a first novel by a young writer living in London who has had the bright idea of tracing the course of an “ordinary” love affair—initial conflagration, ecstasies, domesticities, break-up, suicide attempt, beginning of new cycle, with new lo ... (read full critics)

    nybooks published on Sat, 21 Aug 2010

3 Reviews

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  • 2 people find this helpful

    Amazingly well-written!

    Romantic love is such an impossibly complicated topic on which to write a good non-fiction book, but Alain de Botton manages to do the impossible - and does it in amazing style.

    Telling from the first-person perspective of a man falling in and out of love, de Botton tracks his actions, thoughts, ... (continue)

    Romantic love is such an impossibly complicated topic on which to write a good non-fiction book, but Alain de Botton manages to do the impossible - and does it in amazing style.

    Telling from the first-person perspective of a man falling in and out of love, de Botton tracks his actions, thoughts, feelings, elations and agonies throughout his journey of love. The real gem of the story lies in the introspections of the man, which contain de Botton's own philosophical insights and centuries-old wisdom.

    What the man goes through has also gone through in almost every one of us, but it takes a great author like de Botton to distill its essence and lay it out for us to absorb - all in about a lightweight 200 pages.

    If you're the type that likes to ruminate on matters of the heart in your mind, this book is definitely for you.

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    Holmes said on May 10, 2010 | Add your feedback

  • If there is a recent book that I enjoyed very much - this is it. Here there was a story of the teller unravelling what immediate attraction and then the love affair taken its usual up and down and eventually dissolved. The best thing of the story is the fact that the storyteller's good friend had ... (continue)

    If there is a recent book that I enjoyed very much - this is it. Here there was a story of the teller unravelling what immediate attraction and then the love affair taken its usual up and down and eventually dissolved. The best thing of the story is the fact that the storyteller's good friend had stolen the girl. Thats life and its littered with great little insights which brings one many a smile and acknowledging that all lovers in the world behave in exactly the same way.

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    Oz said on Apr 9, 2010 | Add your feedback

  • beautifully written, invaluable insights and useful thoughts, simply loveable itself!

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    Kappa said on Aug 9, 2008 | Add your feedback

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9780802134097 Paperback $11.00 -- The Book Depository
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