Essays in Love - Brossura

De Botton, Alain

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0771026064 ISBN 13: 9780771026065

Casa editrice: McClelland & Stewart, 2008

Riassunto

The bestselling author of The Architecture of Happiness and How Proust Can Change Your Life revisits his utterly charming debut book, Essays in Love.

The narrator is smitten by Chloe on a Paris-to-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. What makes this book extraordinary is the depth with which the emotions involved in the relationship are analysed. Love comes under the philosophical microscope.

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, Essays in Love is filled with profound and witty observations on the pain and exhilaration of love. An entire chapter is devoted to the nuances and subtexts of an initial date, while another chapter mulls over the question of how and when to say “I love you.”

With allusions to Aristotle, Sartre, Wittgenstein, and Groucho Marx, de Botton has plotted an imaginative and microscopically detailed romance.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

“Imagine, of all impossible things, a young British Woody Allen with the benefit of a classical education and you have the nameless and exquisitely erudite narrator of Essays in Love.”
— Boston Sunday Globe

“The book’s success has much to do with its beautifully modeled sentences, its wry humor, its unwavering deadpan respect for its reader’s intelligence.” — Francine Prose in The New Republic

L'autore:

Alain de Botton has published five non-fiction books: The Architecture of Happiness, Status Anxiety, The Art of Travel, How Proust Can Change Your Life, and The Consolations of Philosophy, three of which were made into TV documentaries. He has also published three novels: Essays in Love, The Romantic Movement, and Kiss and Tell. In February 2003, de Botton was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres, one of France’s highest artistic honours. In November of the same year, he was awarded the Prix Européen de l’Essai Charles Veillon. In 2004, Status Anxiety was awarded the prize for the Economics Book of the Year by the Financial Times, Germany. Cambridge-educated, de Botton is a frequent contributor to numerous newspapers, journals, and magazines.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: McClelland & Stewart
• Data di pubblicazione: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0771026064
• ISBN 13: 9780771026065
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 224