I'm not often moved to write reviews, but given the near-universal praise that Essays in Love is receiving here, I felt obliged to warn people of how terrible it is.I've been unfortunate enough to read two of de Botton's books this year (the other being How to Think More About Sex, somehow even worse than this). I stumbled across Essays in Love over on Amazon, and read the first of these so-called 'essays'. I sensed a spark of recognition between de Botton's initial meeting with Chloe and with one of my own previous relationships and, noting the positive reviews, I hit order. The next day I happened to be in a bookshop and saw his book on sex, which I bought on an impulse. First, let me describe the style of these books. They are pitched somewhere between philosophy, self-help, and, in 'Essays in Love, a narrative of his relationship with a woman named Chloe. The chapters are typically short and de Botton seems to insist upon condescendingly breaking up his paragraphs and numbering them, as though he believes the reader would struggle to read or comprehend the work if it followed a more conventional essay structure. His writing style - although clear and easy to digest - is lifeless and devoid of creativity. It quickly becomes tiresome.I will admit that I was dubious about this book even before opening it. How to Think More About Sex was torturous, a mundane journey through flimsy arguments extolling the virtues of the missionary position and sex-for-reproductive purposes. In that book de Botton wrote about how we can only expect to have great sex "once or twice" in our lives, avoided speaking about almost all aspects of deviation and sexuality, extolled Freudian arguments about being attracted to people reminiscent of our parents, decried all pornography as basically immoral - not on any kind of ethical grounds, just through some vague and incoherent argument - and suggested that instead of watching pornography we would all be more satisfied sexually if we beat off to renaissance paintings of the virgin Mary and her child (seriously). Essentially it was a woeful attempt at writing a self-help / philosophy book by a man who appeared to despise sex and gain little-to-no pleasure from it. I feel it is important to list my grievances with that book here as they formed the foundation of what I expected from the author. I doubted his ability to shed much insight into the affairs of the heart... but still, although he may not enjoy a very fulfilling sex life, could it not be possible that he might write something meaningful about love? I decided to give it a shot.I do not wish to spend time debunking the arguments de Botton makes in each 'essay' here. Instead, I'll simply list some quotes from the book which highlight his attitude towards love:Was it not society, rather than any authentic urge, that was motivating me to... romantic love?'I love you' can only ever be taken to mean 'for now.'We argued not because we hated one another, but because we loved one another too much... The pleasures of depending on someone pale next to the paralysing fears that such dependence involves.Proust tells the story of Mohammed II who, sensing that he was falling in love with one of the wives in his harem, at once had her killed because he did not wish to live in spiritual bondage to another (de Botton seems pretty sympathetic towards Mohammed II's actions)Happiness is so terrifying and anxiety-inducing.Throughout the book de Botton devotes very little thought to the pleasures of love. He notes things in Chloe which he finds cute, or he tells us that he loves her, but he never shows it. We never once get the sense of a man in love. In fact, the opposite is true - he seeks to undermine every enjoyable aspect of the relationship. You might expect that a book adopting this narrative format to spend some time indulging the pleasures of the honeymoon period... Alas, it doesn't. He surrounds, for instance, the telling of the couple's first sexual liaison with self-esteem issues, biblical propaganda and frantic attempts to try to assess, understand and extract all pleasure from the situation. The two de Botton books that I have read present little more than self-congratulatory musings of an unhappy, unfulfilled author who is seeking validation for self-esteem issues and trying to endorse his failings. At some points he seems close to admitting it himself; "What curse did I labour under? Nothing other than an inability to enjoy happy relationships."His conclusions on love are predictably dour:"Preferable in almost every way... the mature love is... a form of friendship with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful ...most people who have known the wilder shores of desire would refuse it... the title of love."and then comes the Freudianism:"...the roots of the problem... lying in deficient parents, who had given these unfortunate romantics a warped understanding of the affective process. If they had never loved people who were nice to them, it was because their earliest emotional attachments had taught them that love should be unreciprocated and cruel. But by entering therapy and being able to work through their childhood, they might understand the roots of their masochism, and learn that their desire to change unsuitable partners was only the relic of a more infantile fantasy to convert their parents into proper care-givers."I am not trying to argue here that passionate love is without it's pitfalls. There are many, and they warrant discussion. There are elements of relationships that you will see and recognise from your own affairs in his journey with Chloe. However, the 'philosophy' aspect of Essays in Love is wholly inadequate. Any potentially interesting points that de Botton seems on the verge of raising are marred by navel-gazing. He will present an interesting quote on the subject of love as fact, and then either not build on the original author's hypothesis, or he will veer off into tangent, failing to tie the quote to his own thoughts and thus present a coherent statement. Of the quotes he presents to bolster, perhaps fifty percent of these are classical - Plato and the like - originating from societies radically different from the one which we inhabit and where we slowly move towards social equalities. Roughly 90% originate from figures born before the 20th century, and the rest squarely indebted to Freud. I looked back at some of the reviews here and many of the 'highlights' quoted are de Botton's retellings of other people's views on love. It is telling, because he offers barely any original thought on the topic himself.It is tempting to give de Botton something of a hall pass given that his view of love and relationships is shaped by failed ones. However, in writing this book and marketing it as self-help-cum-philosophy, he has necessitated criticism. I suspect that many people who come across this book will do so because they are trying to resuscitate a flagging relationship, because they are broken-hearted or because they seem unable to form close emotional bonds with people. Reading shitty self-congratulatory musings on love from a man who has apparently been unsuccessful in the field is not only pointless, it is potentially damaging.For de Botton love is something to endure. Essays in Love is essentially an argument against love, it is the antithesis of passion and pleasure and all that we can want and expect from our relationships. If you are looking for a nuanced take on love and it's surrounding issues then I implore you not to read this book. I beg you. Read Gabriel García Márquez, Javier Marías, Carver, Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, Woolf, Sebald, read poetry. In Essays in Love you will only find faux-intellectualism, and reflections on how to extract pleasure and passion from life. (Same goes for his book about sex!)
”Mahal mo ba ako dahil kailangan mo ako o kailangan mo ako dahil mahal mo ako?” (“Do you love me because you need me or do you need me because you love me?”) is what the character of Claudine Barretto asks the character of Piolo Pasqual in Olivia M. Lamasan’s 2004 movie Milan. This is my favorite Tagalog love story movie and this question is one of those that Alain de Botton (born 1969) tried to answer in his book On Love: A Novel (2006), also earlier published as Essays on Love in 1993.This thin red-colored book is a timely and appropriate Valentine’s read for everyone who wants to know more about the mechanics of falling in and out of love. It reminds me of Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving which was a required reading in my college days at the De La Salle University. However, since Erich Fromm (1900-1990) was a psychologist and a social philosopher, his approach in his book was more theoretical and profound. De Botton probably thought that a landmark book on love like Fromm’s could not be duplicated so he mixed theories and a fiction in this book On Love and oh dear he did it so beautifully. With my little knowledge on philosophy (from my reading of my Sophie’s World mainly), De Botton impressed me with what the modern and ancient philosophers, psychoanalysts and anthropologists (Plato, Freud, Kant, L. K. Hsu, Fisino, etc) and even Jesus say about love. His love story (he used first person narration) with a girl called Chloe is rather typical but he interspersed the plot with those long-held theories about love or rather what happens to us when we fall in and out of love. Twice I laughed out loud while reading this book. But primarily, it kept my interest high particularly during the falling out part. I am a sucker of sad books and people who used to love each other with the standard breakup lines you deserve someone better or it is me, not you are still, for me, among the saddest lines human being ever put up on this planet. In fact, when Chloe was breaking him, I remembered the many heartaches I had during my younger years. But I am not telling you those as they are still too painful (kidding) for me to recall.I had searched among my tbr what would be the appropriate Valentine’s read this year and before I picked this book, I was considering Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. I just did not find my copy. Maybe it is in the bottom of my tbr pile. Anyway, this morning, my brother gave me a newspaper cutout with the header: Bronte beats Shakespeare for romantic lines. Apparently, there was a survey on the most romantic lines and British voters chose this from Wuthering Heights: ”Whatever our souls are made of, his and mind are the same.” Maybe not many British voters have not read De Botton (a Swiss) but I guess there should be a line or two that should have been nominated from this book. However, the one that I find most interesting is this: "Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species." Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!
What do You think about On Love (2006)?
I completely identified with the slightly neurotic, philosophically minded main character, who is constantly analyzing his feelings, his girlfriend, and their relationship through literature and ideas. The occasional diagram or illustraton thrown into the middle of one of his musings was a nice touch; I understand the impulse to try and scientifically formulate something so totally nebulous as love, just to try and get a handle on it and maybe avoid being thrown. I was hoping for a different ending, but after subsequent readings of the book I think I'm finally able to accept it for what it is. It's probably a better book to read after a break-up than in the midst or beginning of a relationship, though. I also recommend it for single people.
—Megan
I really enjoy authors who play with prose and experiment with the traditional storytelling style. On Love, Alain de Botton's debut novel, is written in a numerical list format, each number it's own prose-poem in a way, each building on the one before. Alain be Botton mixes philosophy and theory into a very real and human tale of love and relationships. Prose is cut in with various diagrams and visual aids, which I loved. His story is told in a very detached way, which caused me to have mixed feelings about the protagonist, but nevertheless I was drawn into his story. He captures that human character is not just black and white - one is wholly good or wholly bad - but explores that grey area we all truly live in. Mix this in with an exploration on how that affects love and relationships. For me that's what pulls me in, I loved that this book didn't rely on a convenient, predictable formula. Favorite quote: "There is a tyranny about perfection, a certain tedium even, something that asserts itself with all the dogmatism of a scientific formula. The more tempting kind of beauty has only a few angles from which it may be glimpsed, and then not in all lights and at all times. It flirts dangerously with ugliness, it takes risks with itself, it does not side comfortably with mathematical rules of proportion, it draws its appeal from precisely those details that also lend themselves to ugliness. As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination." p 71
—Vanessa Cavallaro
I just finished this book an hour ago...and I needed this book. I picked it up at the library...it wasn't even in any order, it was just lying in the wrong section...rejected. I'm not saying I felt an empathetic tug towards (Frued, get out!), but it is brightly colored, so I blame my crow like behaviour and the recent "get back together happiness" I was then experiencing. Basically, it "studies" love through a boy meet girl story with the protagonist as the well educated boy. It's wonderful! Upon reading through this book, I wanted to thank the author. To me, a good author is defined by being able to capture your emotions (and the really tough, flity ones at that) and spit them back out to you as poetry. That's what this man did for me, making me feel a little less pathethic, or at least gave me the feeling of being one of many bits of pathetic-ness sprinkled about the love denied world. (The author would pick up on that last bit of melodrama, which he does repeatidly at the protagonist's dips into selfish, romantic despair). Another greatness in this novel is how this "study" is done using classical literature all while in story mode. It has the effect of a literature class with a lab class attached...you almost experience (because it's so easy to empathize with the protagonist and the subject) what those classical authors meant. All the symbols and metaphors apply so smoothly. Excellent find.
—Kelsey
