Book: The Course of Love
Author: Alain de Botton
Renowned philosopher Alain de Botton, author of the best-selling novel How Proust Can Change Your Life, and the man behind the popular YouTube channel The School of Life, delivers a wonderful and enlightening story in The Course of Love.
(Image source: Pixabay.com)
All too often we read novels that tend to focus on a highly unrealistic notion of love, that constantly reiterates the ‘and they lived happily ever after’ theme. These novels purely focus on the question of ‘will they, won’t they?’. When the characters finally get together, all becomes well, and everything becomes joyful and easy. The Course of Love, on the other hand, takes a vastly different approach. Alain’s aim in this novel is to explore the way to preserve long-term relationships: The way couples mature over time, their inevitable disenchantments with one another, and the compromises made along the way.
The Course of Love tracks the lives of a couple, Rabih and Kristen. The couple meets in Edinburgh, go through the initial spark of infatuation full of first times and laughter. They fall in love. Get married. Have children. Throughout their relationship’s progression, however, they go through all sorts of issues that inevitably face long-term relationships. They mindlessly bicker over nothing, struggle with feelings of jealousy and exhaustion, they face financial strains, and so on. Yet somehow, they still manage to move on, maintaining their love despite the disappointments.
Through the lens of their story, Alain eloquently dismantles our romanticized notion of relationships, and yet still manages to replace it with a much more realistic and profound story, that is not only relatable but educational as well. Throughout his telling of the couple’s story, Alain takes pauses to dissect and analyze the events that take place, extracting lessons that the reader is able to implement in his/her everyday life.
The Course of Love is a truly unique gem that is capable of taking its reader on an emotional rollercoaster whilst still articulately delivering its countless lessons. Unlike most novels, it looks to examine the nature of long-term relationships unaffected by the romantic biases that older novels had given birth to.
This article was written by HC Waseda Guest Writer, Ahmed Juhany.