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The Course of Love: A Novel, by Alain de Botton
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“The Course of Love is a return to the form that made Mr. de Botton’s name in the mid-1990s….love is the subject best suited to his obsessive aphorizing, and in this novel he again shows off his ability to pin our hopes, methods and insecurities to the page.” —The New York Times
The long-awaited and beguiling second novel from Alain de Botton that tracks the beautifully complicated arc of a romantic partnership, from the internationally bestselling author of How Proust Can Change Your Life. De Botton’s essay “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person” (The New York Times, May 28, 2016), which draws from The Course of Love, was the #1 most emailed article for days.
We all know the headiness and excitement of the early days of love. But what comes after? In Edinburgh, a couple, Rabih and Kirsten, fall in love. They get married, they have children—but no long-term relationship is as simple as “happily ever after.” The Course of Love is a novel that explores what happens after the birth of love, what it takes to maintain love, and what happens to our original ideals under the pressures of an average existence. You experience, along with Rabih and Kirsten, the first flush of infatuation, the effortlessness of falling into romantic love, and the course of life thereafter. Interwoven with their story and its challenges is an overlay of philosophy—an annotation and a guide to what we are reading.
This is a Romantic novel in the true sense, one interested in exploring how love can survive and thrive in the long term. The result is a sensory experience—fictional, philosophical, psychological—that urges us to identify deeply with these characters and to reflect on his and her own experiences in love. Fresh, visceral, and utterly compelling, The Course of Love is a provocative and life-affirming novel for everyone who believes in love.
- Sales Rank: #7017 in Books
- Brand: Simon Schuster
- Published on: 2016-06-14
- Released on: 2016-06-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.37" h x .90" w x 5.63" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 240 pages
- Simon Schuster
Review
PRAISE FOR THE COURSE OF LOVE:
“The Course of Love is a return to the form that made Mr. de Botton’s name in the mid-1990s…. love is the subject best suited to his obsessive aphorizing, and in this novel he again shows off his ability to pin our hopes, methods and insecurities to the page.”
–The New York Times
“There's no writer alive like de Botton, and his latest ambitious undertaking is as enlightening and humanizing as his previous works.”
–Chicago Tribune
"For me, the publication of any book by Alain de Botton is as much a reason for celebration as it is for cerebration, and his novel The Course of Love is a satisfying look at relationships and the perils of romantic love. This public philosopher writes with verve."
–Wall Street Journal (WSJ.com)
"This book is like a self-help book for dating and relationships, disguised as a novel...We understand what each person is thinking and why, with de Botton’s insights sprinkled in. It made me rethink what it means to be happy in a relationship."
–The Cut (NYMag.com)
“[De Botton] analyzes Rabih's feelings, especially, with the finesse of a therapist—and in fact there is more than a whiff of the couch in this exemplary tale…Readers looking for insights and guidance will find plenty.”
–NPR
“An engrossing tale [that] provides plenty of food for thought.”
–People (Best New Books pick)
"Assured...The author deftly delivers both sides of the marriage, exploring the incompatible interplay of romantic love and practical love...Part literary novel, part self-help handbook, “The Course of Love” certainly illuminates the subtle and not-so-subtle fissures of one modern marriage and what it takes for two people to stay together through the years...this nontraditional novel is generous in its spirit and message."
–San Francisco Chronicle
"A cunning novel that tells of a couple from the spark of first love, maintenance through the demands of children and career, the challenges of boredom, and aging. What happens to our original ideals under the pressures of an average existence?"
–San Francisco Chronicle
"A living, volatile portrait of how two very different souls love, complement and aggravate each other. You may not agree with all of de Botton’s thoughts on marriage, but it’s wonderful how he makes such a big, sweeping subject out of routine existence...[De Botton's] uncanny access to Rabih’s and Kirsten’s contrasting feelings, aspirations, insecurities and resentments at every changing stage of their love lives makes the novel a marvel."
–Seattle Times
'“The always-intriguing de Botton, who returns to fiction after 20 years and numerous nonfiction books, aims to answer the question, What is it like to be married for awhile? The answers are often funny but also quite moving, thought provoking, forgiving, and drenched in truth.”
—Booklist
"An ambitious book; one that resolves, if it cannot change art, to widen our expectations of what we might go to a novel for. The lives of Kirsten and Rabih...help us in a solemn way to examine the illusions and pains that loving relationships are heir to. The Course of Love testifies that discontented families, if we cannot call them unhappy ones, are much alike after all."
—Flavorwire
“Well-observed and imbued with a tenderness that feels authentic and uncynical. It may even save some marriages. My bet is that if de Botton’s name were taken off this book it would be fêted by the sort of people who are in thrall to Milan Kundera and Adam Thirlwell. He wants us to feel less alone — and that’s not such a bad thing.”
—Evening Standard (UK)
“The course of true love may not run smooth, but the storytelling certainly does in this wise, humane and irresistibly readable history of an appealingly nuanced relationship. De Botton deftly moves us through time, weaving in philosophical interludes that showcase his essayistic gifts, so that before we know it we have lived a whole life with these two, and they are just getting started. De Botton directs his ferocious intelligence at the most complex puzzle of all, and it seems that no intellectual or emotional problem surpasses his ability to solve it.”
—Matthew Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves
“The Course of Love is a complete delight. Not surprisingly, I feel that Alain de Botton not only wrote it for me, but also that we must have been conversing on these subjects happily and deeply, privately or in my dreams.”
—Amy Bloom, New York Times bestselling author of Away and Lucky Us
Praise for On Love:
"The Romantic Movement sheds light on the nature of relationships...The method of telling much and showing little produces a good deal of wit, cogency, and humor."
—John Updike, The New Yorker
"A reader gets whiffs of Donald Barthelme, Julian Barnes, Woody Allen...De Botton borrows exuberantly, and well, from forebears [and] therein lies the buoyant charm of this approach."
—Lisa Zeidner, The New York Times Book Review
"Smart and ironic...The success of On Love has much to do with its beautifully modeled sentences, its wry humor, and its unwavering deadpan respect for the reader's intelligence."
—Francine Prose, The New Yorker
Praise for The Architecture of Happiness:
“De Botton has a marvelous knack for coming at weighty subjects from entertainingly eccentric angles.”
—The Seattle Times
"An elegant book. . . . Unusual . . . full of big ideas. . . . Seldom has there been a more sensitive marriage of words and images."
—The New York Sun
"With originality, verve, and wit, de Botton explains how we find reflections of our own values in the edifices we make. . . . Altogether satisfying."
—San Francisco Chronicle
"De Botton is high falutin' but user friendly. . . . He keeps architecture on a human level."
—Los Angeles Times
Praise for How Proust Can Change Your Life:
"Delightfully original.... As well as being criticism, biography, literary history, and a reader's guide to Proust's masterpiece, this is a self-help book in the deepest sense of the term."
—The New York Times
"One of my favorite books of the year.... Seriously cheeky, cheekily serious."
—Julian Barnes
"Curious, humorous, didactic, and dazzling.... It contains more human interest and play of fancy than most fiction."
—John Updike, The New Yorker
"A witty, elegant book that helps us learn what reading is for."
—Doris Lessing
"A wonderful meditation on aspects of Proust in the form of a self-help book. Very enjoyable."
—Sebastian Faulks
"Funny and very refreshing."
—San Francisco Chronicle
Praise for The Consolations of Philosophy:
“Wonderfully original, quirky.... De Botton finds inspiration where others might fail to look.”
—Newsday
"An enjoyable read... In clear, witty prose, de Botton...sets some of [the philosophers'] ideas to the mundane task of helping readers with their personal problems.... The quietly ironic style and eclectic approach will gratify many postmodern readers."
—Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Alain de Botton is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including On Love, How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Consolations of Philosophy, The Art of Travel, and The Course of Love. He lives in London where he founded The School of Life, an organization devoted to fostering emotional health and intelligence. More can be found at AlainDeBotton.com.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Course of Love Infatuations
The hotel is on a rocky outcrop, half an hour east of Málaga. It has been designed for families and inadvertently reveals, especially at mealtimes, the challenges of being part of one. Rabih Khan is fifteen and on holiday with his father and stepmother. The atmosphere among them is somber and the conversation halting. It has been three years since Rabih’s mother died. A buffet is laid out every day on a terrace overlooking the pool. Occasionally his stepmother remarks on the paella or the wind, which has been blowing intensely from the south. She is originally from Gloucestershire and likes to garden.
A marriage doesn’t begin with a proposal, or even an initial meeting. It begins far earlier, when the idea of love is born, and more specifically the dream of a soul mate.
Rabih first sees the girl by the water slide. She is about a year younger than him, with chestnut hair cut short like a boy’s, olive skin, and slender limbs. She is wearing a striped sailor top, blue shorts, and a pair of lemon-yellow flip-flops. There’s a thin leather band around her right wrist. She glances over at him, pulls what may be a halfhearted smile, and rearranges herself on her deck chair. For the next few hours she looks pensively out to sea, listening to her Walkman and, at intervals, biting her nails. Her parents are on either side of her, her mother paging through a copy of Elle and her father reading a Len Deighton novel in French. As Rabih will later find out from the guest book, she is from Clermont-Ferrand and is called Alice Saure.
He has never felt anything remotely like this before. The sensation overwhelms him from the first. It isn’t dependent on words, which they will never exchange. It is as if he has in some way always known her, as if she holds out an answer to his very existence and, especially, to a zone of confused pain inside him. Over the coming days, he observes her from a distance around the hotel: at breakfast in a white dress with a floral hem, fetching a yogurt and a peach from the buffet; at the tennis court, apologizing to the coach for her backhand with touching politeness in heavily accented English; and on an (apparently) solitary walk around the perimeter of the golf course, stopping to look at cacti and hibiscus.
It may come very fast, this certainty that another human being is a soul mate. We needn’t have spoken with them; we may not even know their name. Objective knowledge doesn’t come into it. What matters instead is intuition, a spontaneous feeling that seems all the more accurate and worthy of respect because it bypasses the normal processes of reason.
The infatuation crystallizes around a range of elements: a flip-flop hanging nonchalantly off a foot; a paperback of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha lying on a towel next to the sun cream; well-defined eyebrows; a distracted manner when answering her parents and a way of resting her cheek in her palm while taking small mouthfuls of chocolate mousse at the evening buffet.
Instinctively he teases out an entire personality from the details. Looking up at the revolving wooden blades of the ceiling fan in his room, in his mind Rabih writes the story of his life with her. She will be melancholy and street-smart. She will confide in him and laugh at the hypocrisy of others. She will sometimes be anxious about parties and around other girls at school, symptoms of a sensitive and profound personality. She’ll have been lonely and will never until now have taken anyone else into her full confidence. They’ll sit on her bed playfully enlacing their fingers. She, too, won’t ever have imagined that such a bond could be possible between two people.
Then one morning, without warning, she is gone and a Dutch couple with two small boys are sitting at her table. She and her parents left the hotel at dawn to catch the Air France flight home, the manager explains.
The whole incident is negligible. They are never to meet again. He tells no one. She is wholly untouched by his ruminations. Yet, if the story begins here, it is because—although so much about Rabih will alter and mature over the years—his understanding of love will for decades retain precisely the structure it first assumed at the Hotel Casa Al Sur in the summer of his sixteenth year. He will continue to trust in the possibility of rapid, wholehearted understanding and empathy between two human beings and in the chance of a definitive end to loneliness.
He will experience similarly bittersweet longings for other lost soul mates spotted on buses, in the aisles of grocery stores, and in the reading rooms of libraries. He will have precisely the same feeling at the age of twenty, during a semester of study in Manhattan, about a woman seated to his left on the northbound C train; and at twenty-five in the architectural office in Berlin where he is doing work experience; and at twenty-nine on a flight between Paris and London after a brief conversation over the English Channel with a woman named Chloe: the feeling of having happened upon a long-lost missing part of his own self.
For the Romantic, it is only the briefest of steps from a glimpse of a stranger to the formulation of a majestic and substantial conclusion: that he or she may constitute a comprehensive answer to the unspoken questions of existence.
The intensity may seem trivial—humorous, even—yet this reverence for instinct is not a minor planet within the cosmology of relationships. It is the underlying central sun around which contemporary ideals of love revolve.
The Romantic faith must always have existed, but only in the past few centuries has it been judged anything more than an illness; only recently has the search for a soul mate been allowed to take on the status of something close to the purpose of life. An idealism previously directed at gods and spirits has been rerouted towards human subjects—an ostensibly generous gesture nevertheless freighted with forbidding and brittle consequences, for it is no simple thing for any human being to honor over a lifetime the perfections he or she might have hinted at to an imaginative observer in the street, the office, or the adjoining airplane seat.
It will take Rabih many years and frequent essays in love to reach a few different conclusions, to recognize that the very things he once considered romantic—wordless intuitions, instantaneous longings, a trust in soul mates—are what stand in the way of learning how to be with someone. He will surmise that love can endure only when one is unfaithful to its beguiling opening ambitions, and that, for his relationships to work, he will need to give up on the feelings that got him into them in the first place. He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.
Most helpful customer reviews
92 of 92 people found the following review helpful.
Sagacious and sophisticated
By Bookreporter
Alain de Botton's May 29, 2016 op-ed piece in the New York Times, entitled "Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person," inspired a blizzard of reader comments --- 531 in all by the time the response period closed. Not surprisingly, his view that "Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for" struck many readers as cynical in the extreme.
Those same readers might want to reconsider that reaction after reading his sagacious, sophisticated new novel, THE COURSE OF LOVE, which wraps insights like that one around a sensitive portrait of a marriage to make any thoughtful reader question, with de Botton, the psychological and social damage inflicted by our modern notion of romantic love.
He patiently marshals the evidence to support his case through the characters of Rabih Khan and Kirsten McLelland. Rabih is an architect with an Edinburgh urban design firm that specializes in public works projects, while Kirsten is a local civil servant with a degree in law and accountancy. They meet on a construction site, and within two hours Rabih magically "feels certain that he has discovered someone endowed with the most extraordinary combination of inner and outer qualities," the person "with whom he wants to spend the rest of his life." The couple's brief, intense courtship is proof positive of de Botton's arch definition of marriage:
"Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate."
Though their backgrounds couldn't be more different, they share the experience of early loss. Rabih, an atheist of Muslim ancestry, grows up in Beirut amid the sectarian violence of the Lebanese civil war. Shortly after fleeing the city for Barcelona by way of Athens, the 12-year-old boy loses his mother, a German flight attendant, to cancer. Raised a Catholic in Inverness, in the Scottish Highlands, Kirsten watches her father inexplicably walk out of his family's life when she's seven, never to return.
As the couple discovers only after much pain and mutual misunderstanding, these early traumas have shaped each one's response to marital conflict in ways that threaten repeatedly to undermine their bond. "We too often act from scripts generated by the crises of long ago that we've all but consciously forgotten," de Botton writes. "We behave according to an archaic logic which now escapes us, following a meaning we can't properly lay bare to those we depend on most."
That corrosive process plays out as de Botton follows this attractive young couple through the first 14 years of marriage. We experience along with them how the first flush of romantic love and its attendant sexual excitement are gradually scraped away by the friction of life's demands and disappointments that include the birth of two children and a casual act of adultery.
Far from being the embodiment of perfection and mutual fulfillment each initially sees in the other, Kirsten instead endures the frequent flaring of Rabih's irritability and anger as his career stalls and he's weighed down by the burdens of fatherhood, while her response to his tirades is to withdraw into isolation, a reaction that only fuels this destructive cycle. When each embarks on the process of improving the other, the tension rises.
The aphoristic style of de Botton's New York Times essay emerges here in frequent authorial asides that make his novel a cross between a work of fiction and an astute self-help manual. Ranging from droll to at times a bit frightening, those observations offer substantial grist for reflection to readers who have been married for any length of time.
de Botton argues (and displays movingly through the story of Rabih and Kirsten) for what he calls "enlightened romantic pessimism," an attitude that "simply assumes that one person can't be everything to another." Instead of holding each other up to an idealized (and impossible) standard of perfection, he suggests, "We should look for ways to accommodate ourselves as gently and as kindly as we can to the awkward realities of living alongside another fallen creature. There can only ever be a 'good enough' marriage."
By the novel's close, de Botton has gently helped us understand how even the most seemingly unremarkable marriage may deserve to be regarded as a work of quiet heroism. "Love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm," he concludes, an attitude most couples might do well to adopt to carry them through the inevitable rough patches and leave their unions intact.
Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg
72 of 77 people found the following review helpful.
A must-read for anyone in the beginning phases of a long-term romantic relationship
By Jessica Weil
Contemporary philosopher Alain de Botton's long awaited second novel follows the relationship between Rabih and Kirsten. De Botton's thesis is essentially this: While most love stories tell us everything we need to know about how love begins, there isn't enough focus in our society on how it continues.
Combining Rabih and Kirsten's fictional story with his own insights and commentary on their relationship, De Botton proposes that "enlightened romantic pessimism" is a healthier and more realistic alternative to Romanticism, the latter of which gives us unrealistic expectations of relationships and sets us up for inevitable failure.
There's no "right person," suggests De Botton, and in each and every longterm relationship we are doomed to encounter a variety of suffering and unfulfillment; therefore, committing to another person is akin to saying, "I've surveyed the different options for unhappiness, and it is to you I am choosing to bind myself." Whether readers find this depressing or comforting will likely vary. (For me, it was the latter.)
Much like De Botton's first novel, many of the insights he provides in The Course of Love are accurate to the point of discomfort. It's not easy to identify with his propositions, yet there is universal truth to them, and there's something distinctly comforting in that. It's always special to read a book -- particularly a work of fiction -- and feel as if the writer is communicating truths about yourself that you've never been able to adequately acknowledge, let alone convey.
As a fan of both philosophy and fiction, I find great satisfaction in De Botton's ability to translate profound ideas and insights into accessible and entertaining prose. The Course of Love is a captivating read, but seems as if it would be especially meaningful for individuals in the beginning phases of longterm commitment.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Falling in love vs. maintaining love
By Jill I. Shtulman
Once, early on in my marriage, my husband and I had a particularly intense fight over a ridiculously trivial matter. I barely remember the topic – something about where to hang some artwork – but I vividly recall that frightening feeling that I had made a ghastly mistake in joining our futures together.
Enter Alain De Botton. I wish I could advise my younger self to have read his book. De Botton employs an everyman and everywoman – in this case, Rahib, a non-religious budding architect from Beirut and Kirsten, a woman who had been abandoned early on in life by her father. Sparks fly and we follow the two of them through the course of love – infatuation, wedding, children, disillusionment, adultery, and finally, maturity.
Rahib and Kirsten are just foils for the author’s theme: falling in love is easy but maintaining that love is the real challenge. No one, after all, is perfect. “Rather than split up,” the author writes, “We may need to tell ourselves more accurate stories – stories that don’t dwell so much on the beginning, that don’t promise us complete understanding, that strive to normalize our troubles and show us a melancholy yet hopeful path through the course of love.” Each step of Rahib and Kirsten’s relationship is met with an evaluation – even an analysis – of what, precisely, is going on in their heads. The primal needs of this everyman and everywoman still demand attention as they reach adulthood and parenthood and much of their disillusionment stems from a desire to have the partner magically understand what those needs are…without appearing too vulnerable.
There is a problem with presenting the course of love through the eyes of surrogates. This reading experience is bound to be intensely personal, and when it deviates too much from the reader’s own experience, there is a waning interest. My husband, and I, for example, never had kids together, and I found myself not all that interested in Rahib and Kirsten’s parenthood experiences.
Yet the conclusions – that Romantic ideas of love are a recipe for disaster and that one can only be in love when one has given up on perfection – is compelling. “Rather than notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate dissimilarity that is the true marker of the “right” person.” My husband and I are still going strong after reaching that conclusion. To my mind, this book should be de rigueur reading for every couple contemplating marriage and every couple who wonders why their own marriage isn’t 100% perfect all the time (which is the vast majority of us!)
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