The Romantic Movement: Sex, Shopping and the Novel - Hardcover

Botton, Alain De

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312131593 ISBN 13: 9780312131593

Publisher: Picador USA, 1995

Synopsis

The author of On Love returns with the story of the ups and downs of an affair between Alice and Eric, complete with drawings and diagrams and a chorus of thinkers about love--from Descartes to Aretha Franklin.

About this title

About the Author:

Alain de Botton was born in Switzerland in 1969, educated at Cambridge, and lives in London. He is the author of The Romantic Movement (Picador) and How Proust Can Change Your Life. His first novel, On Love, was published in fifteen countries, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction.

From Publishers Weekly:

Affable but uneven, this second novel (after On Love) by the young, London-based de Botton, is predicated on the same gimmick as his first: the evolution of a relationship between two London yuppies is intercut with digressive, theoretical musings on the nature of art and love. Alice and Eric are a couple so conventional as to have sprung from the pages of a Cosmopolitan romance quiz. She is a charmingly flaky, 20-something advertising rep; he a somewhat older, magnetic, successful but literal-minded banker. They date for a year, then break up. Their affair is seen from various angles and is never very engrossing, for it's ultimately just a springboard for de Botton's flamboyant hermeneutics of dating, rife with visual aids, such as cartoons and charts, and allusions to Flaubert, Wittgenstein and Hegel (like quintessential romantic heroine Emma Bovary, Alice desires nothing more than "a union with a redemptive Other;" like "unfortunate Biblical anti-hero Job," she "respects and trusts the other more than herself"). De Botton occasionally strikes a wrong note and comes off sounding prissy or arch. His many clever observations about love will nevertheless strike a nerve with readers who've suffered similar romantic ups and downs.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador USA
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0312131593
• ISBN 13: 9780312131593
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 326