On Love

On Love by Alain De Botton The longing for a destiny is
nowhere stronger than in our romantic life we are told at
the outset of Alain de Bottons On Love a hip charming and
devastatingly witty rumination on the thrills and pitfalls
of romantic love. The narrator is smitten by Chloe on a
Paris-London flight and by the time theyve reached the
luggage carousel he knows he is in love. He loves her
chestnut hair and pale nape and watery green eyes the way
she drives a car and eats Chinese food the gap that makes
her teeth Kantian and not Platonic her views on Heideggers
Being and Time – although he hates her taste in shoes. On
Love plots the course of their affair from the initial
delirium of infatuation to the depths of suicidal despair
through the (Groucho) Marxist stage of coming to terms
with being loved by the unattainable beloved 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 nausea induced and
terrorist tactics employed when the beloved begins
inexplicably to drift away. Alain de Botton is
simultaneously hilarious and intellectually astute
shifting with ease among such seminal romantic texts as
The Divine Comedy Madame Bovary and The Bleeding Heart a
self-help book for those who love too much. He is
schematically flawless funny funky and totally engaging.
Filled with profound observations and useful diagrams On
Love displays and examines for all of us the pain and
exhilaration of love asking Can we not be forgiven if we
believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or
woman of our dreams? Can we not be excused a certain
superstitious faith in a creature who will prove the
solution to our relentless yearnings?