Volume 41, Number 1 & 2 · January 13, 1994
Marshmallowing
By P.N. Furbank
On Love
by Alain de Botton
Atlantic Monthly Press, 231 pp., $17.00
On Love is a first novel by a young writer living in London who has had the bright idea of tracing the course of an 'ordinary' love affair—initial conflagration, ecstasies, domesticities, break-up, suicide attempt, beginning of new cycle, with new lover—breaking it up into numbered paragraphs (as in Wittgenstein's Tractatus) and enclosing it in a dense network of cultural allusions. Dante, Flaubert, and Proust are at hand, but more pervasively the currently fashionable literary theorists and postmodernists: Saussure, Barthes, Bakhtin, Lacan, and Heidegger.
Review, 1656 words
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