Essays in Love

To be honest, I checked out this book from library after I watched the film based on the book: My Last 5 Girlfriends. The film was interesting, but the book itself was much better!
Very readable book on love and the relationship among lovers. I enjoyed reading it and Mr. De Botton was truly a talented writer.

Oh, yes. Forget the bland boredom of behaviorist psychology when it comes to love and prepare to dive deep into philosopher Alain De Botton's exceptional, creative, brutally honest (and funny) trajectory of love. Boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl...but they don't live happily ever after when he is informed years into their relationship that Chloe is shagging his friend from work. Based on his own true story, from the plane trip where he is smitten, seated next to a woman we will only know as Chloe, all is covered- first conversation, phone call, first date, first kiss, first breakfast- to the daily life he and Chloe created despite disquieting rifts and arguments, all seemed well. But, on reflection, De Botton makes it clear all was not well- and captures perfectly the scary sensation of falling into the insane abyss of love- as well as the incredible highs and beauty it produces, even though it is often ephemeral.

The tale's apex is a final plane trip, an ironic bookend in the tale that began with a plane flight. The romance ends when Chloe, 10,000 feet up in the air, admits to sleeping with his colleague in an architectural firm and begins uncontrollably sobbing. De Botton is such a nice guy he consoles his girlfriend. Seriously. This leads to weeks of wallowing, crying, numbness, a spurned and bereft state punctuated by a poorly executed suicide attempt with effervescent Vitamin C (mercifully unsuccessful). No detail is spared in this at times poetic, prosaic, and ultimately life- and love- affirming book. You will be sympathetic to De Botton's loveless state, and cheer when he slowly resumes life sans Chloe, and celebrate his frisson of pleasure when he meets a new woman at a dinner party after swearing off love. Yes, love is mysterious, insane, desperate, and glorious...De Botton comprehensively examines why we humans couple (besides the obvious) and the morality of love (perhaps not so moral after all) through a Kantian perspective, with a little Hobbes, Bentham, and Mills thrown in for good measure. You will laugh out loud as he imaginatively has Madame Bovary psychoanalyzed by a pop psychologist of today and pause as he examines the concepts of partner idealization, forgiveness, and a little Marxism in relation to love.

De Botton is as detailed as creating a statistical table of the probability that he and Chloe would be seated next to each other on the plane where they met (1 in 989.727) and as fluid as describing the excitement of being pursuer, and the dread if your affection is returned. He, in short, describes the vagaries and inconstancy of human experience: "lovers cannot do anything save oscillate between the twin poles of yearning for someone and longing to be rid of them." You will, in the end, agree with De Botton that love, at times both brutal and beautiful, is a worthy goal of a life well-lived, despite the bruises and burns. As De Botton says- the true loser in love is the Stoic, who will never acquiesce to being needed, needing, loved, loving, or wanting anything outside of his own self. When you turn your back on the possibility, and the pain, you live a very lonely life indeed. This is the perfect book on love, but I do want a sequel "Essays On Love: 2.0: Will and Chloe." Let's just say I bet that didn't end well!

"The unexamined life is not worth living" - Socrates. If that rings true, then "Essays in Love" is a book with your name on it: part love story, part self-study, part philosophical examination of both. Alain De Botton is, as usual, witty, insightful, and thought-provoking, as he takes us on a tour of all the highs, lows, and paradoxes of falling in love. For example, why do we fall for and appreciate the flaws (we all have them) of the other, but then fight about minutia that we're happy to overlook in others? An honest, educational, and easily (sometimes scarily so) relatable book.

What a beautiful roller coaster of a book. He says the most obvious things, the things we know but ignore in such a way that I was left speechless. I guess we all want to know what THIS thing is, and he does a pretty damn good job at getting below the surface. A beautiful fast read for anyone wanting some insight and a bit of a slap in the face.

The beautiful and complex prose is enough alone to make you read it but then there's that incredible insight that you can only give when perceiving something from a subjective second person position. It will make you analyse not only the way you are affecting your beloved but the 'how come' and 'why' they affect you.

De Botton, Alaine. Essays in Love

In her introduction to de Botton’s book (Picador Classics) Sheila Heti begins, ‘Essays in Love has been classified as a novel, but it’s a very strange novel.’ It is, she says, ‘a guide through the landscape of contemporary romance.’ In the book de Botton makes a habit of reflecting on a previous paragraph telling the story of (presumably his) love affair with Chloe, a woman whom he meets by chance sitting next to him on a Paris-London flight. Thus the novel-memoir seems at times to be a mere jumping of point to a profound analysis of the trite business of falling in love - and of course inevitably the disillusion inherent in that commonplace but unique event.

I must confess that I am often puzzled by the memoir genre - how much is ‘true’ and how much falsified for the sake of art? In books about love affairs, which this absolutely is, how constant is the point of view? How can the reader believe in the ‘facts’ as retailed by the narrator? Well, de Botton (who wrote this book in his early twenties) does a masterly job of analysing the ebb and flow of desire, beginning with rapture over finding that the lovers have so much in common that some supernatural agency must have pre-determined their meeting. ‘I love chocolate, don’t you?’ asked Chloe. ‘I can’t understand people who don’t like chocolate.’ Well, the narrator, the ‘I’ in the story, de Botton or a version of him, hates chocolate: ‘I had been more or less allergic to chocolate all my life.’ So of course in the ‘story’ the narrator has to lie, or else run the risk of losing the ‘angel’ as Chloe is soon to become. This is the key to the novel, focusing on a mundane preference and lying about one’s true feelings. It’s what we all would do in the circumstances. It’s both true to life, and perfect for art. Now, whether the ‘real’ de Botton likes or hates chocolate is a moot point, one which the reader should not, according to convention at least, ask.

What I liked about the story (I almost said ‘loved’ but then recalled de Botton’s complex of analyses of the word) and about the philosophical commentary that accompanies it is its lucidity, its honesty about feeling and beliefs, those transient markers we cling to - and eventually are obliged to release from our grasp. But the book is not all Freudian or Marxian analysis (Marx is the term confusingly used in the book to refer to Marx the comedian) but a moving and totally convincing ‘love story,’ telling it like it is, a rare thing in fiction.

This book is classified as a work of fiction but it really is a non-fictional study in the mechanics of falling in love, being in love and being dumped by love through the use of a case study. The narrator articulates precisely the behaviour of both lovers in a blow by blow account that holds few surprises, yet still engages the reader for its recognisable truths. Human frailties, irrationality and idiosyncrasies are laid bare in a non-judgmental way but this book does not pretend to offer much in the way of insights from psychology. It is not by any means the sort of prose that makes you feel the emotions of the characters in the style of a great romance novel -- the approach is rather more clinical than poetic.Hence, it is difficult to care a lot about the protagonists but the clarity of the writing carries the day.

Personally I didn't like the style of how the spey was written, however in saying that, there were some beautifully put statements about certain aspects of love which I took note of for future use.
More than a few times, aspects hit home and I found myself nodding in agreement as I had experienced what was happening. Realistically a truth on love, and threw complications.

Good book

Book came in new and has that new smell of a book!