Summer Reading #2: Essays in Love
Also published as On Love: A Novel.
The back of this book categorizes its genre as “Philosophy/Novel”, and strange as it may sound, there’s really no other way of putting it. In Essays in Love, our unnamed protagonist examines the various aspects of being in love through tracking his relationship with a woman named Chloe.
Chapter titles range from “The subtext of seduction” through “Marxism” to “Intermittences of the Heart” and “Psycho-fatalism”. Each chapter is divided into point, each point being numbered and generally consisting of a paragraph. The whole affair has the air of philosophy, but at the same time we are still following what is essentially a standard love story. And this is Botton’s brilliance – using a simple man-and-woman-fall-in-love scenario to dig into how we think and feel about love, from the perspective of a philosopher (in the very traditional sense of the word).
Most people, assuming you’ve been in love, will find something that they can relate to here. This book had been making the rounds with most of my friends before it fell in my hands, and to be honest, it didn’t strike anywhere near as personal a chord with me as it had with them. But this is not a criticism; Essays in Love is not the kind of work that requires you to have experienced what it is talking about to enjoy it or find it enlightening. The last chapter is entitled “Love Lessons”, and really, the whole book could have been called that. Although Botton speaks of love in broad terms and often takes the protagonist’s experiences with Chloe to create generalizations, his discourse on love is still rooted in this one relationship. You can still learn a lot from it and sympathize with the emotions Botton explores, even if you’ve never experienced them yourself. This level of engagement is both a credit to Botton’s way of structuring the book and a result of his incredibly skillful and witty writing.
At one point towards the end of Essays in Love, we read an emotionally-loaded letter written by Chloe to the protagonist. This is a stark removal from the course of the novel, reminding us just how detached the reader has been kept from the dynamic of the novel’s key relationship. And yet the story remains compelling, not because we are necessarily have any investment in the characters, but rather because we are engaged in Botton’s philosophical inquest into love. There’s a certain magic to the wit, insight and humility with which he approaches the topic. He takes a down-to-earth approach in his analyses, freely and deftly using metaphors, diagrams, folk wisdom and a vast philosophical heritage alike to illustrate his points.
Arbitrarily Decided Grade: B+
