I loved the blending of genres in this book, it wears its fiction lightly while providing interesting essays on relationships. Or perhaps it's the other way around. Either way I finished it feeling a little bit vindicated in opinions I already hold, and a little bit wiser while considering new ones. And I wanted my husband to read it immediately. (He didn't)

Unfortunately, I have not been able to read and review this book.

After losing and replacing my broken Kindle and getting a new phone I was unable to download the title again for review as it was no longer available on Netgalley.

I’m really sorry about this and hope that it won’t affect you allowing me to read and review your titles in the future.

Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity.
Natalie.

Thank you for the opportunity to read this book. Unfortunately, it wasn't for me, but I'm sure others will love it.

Ok, so I don’t really know what I feel about The Course of Love by Alain de Botton. It is definitely one of the following. It is either a) a really genius story about the perils of romantic love and how companionship lasts but the thought of romantic love is a ludicrous notion or b) part novel/part psychoanalysis on modern day relationships.

Either way, The Course of Love was written really well but I just can’t decide if I actually liked it.

The Course of Love by Alain de Botton is available now.

For more information regarding Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton) please visit www.alaindebotton.com.

For more information regarding Penguin (@PenguinUKBooks) please visit www.penguin.co.uk.

I put off reading this for a long time.  Early impressions were of pretentious discussions on the meaning of love which did not inspire me with enthusiasm, but once I actually sat down to it, I was very pleasantly surprised.  Part novel, part case study, The Course of Love marks de Botton's first attempt at fiction in over twenty years.  Rabih and Kirsten meet, fall in love and marry, but de Botton points out that this is not the end of their story.  While Jane Austen was content to leave her ladies to assumed wedded bliss, De Botton takes an wide-angle view of love.  Charting sixteen years of a marriage, he describes love as more 'skill than enthusiasm' and considers the everyday vexations and frustrations that can cause couples to stumble on their way round the course.  Despite my misgivings, I found myself completely won over by this deliberately ordinary tale which celebrates the heroism of two people making it through marriage.

Rabih is an architect, Kirsten a surveyor working for Edinburgh Council - they meet at work.  He is Lebanese, she is Scottish.  He is a romantic, shy and insecure.  She is resolutely self-sufficient, defensive.  We know that they love each other, that is not disputed - but they do not truly know their own true selves, so how can they truly understand each other?  Weaving in and out of the history of Rabih and Kirsten's relationship are italicised paragraphs of de Botton's more general observations on relationships and love.  The couple serve to illustrate his points, but while these passages are elegant and stylishly constructed, there were times when they felt a little intrusive, particularly when de Botton was able to make more specific commentary on his characters in the main body of the text.

The novel begins before ever Rabih sets eyes on Kirsten, commencing with a chapter on 'Infatuations' which chronicles how the teenage boy's crushes can come to shape his expectations of relationships.  From there, there is 'Sacred Start', where de Botton contemplates how the 'How We Met' story is asked and recounted so often, but yet how little it can tell anyone about the current state of someone's relationship.  I have been struck by this before with friends, of how a couple's shared jokes and stories are suddenly lost when the relationship dissolves.  The one will snidely declare that they never really liked this or that after all, that the love once so prized was never what it seemed, and the other will simply disappear.  I wished that de Botton had explored more that idea of relationship mythology, of how people can define their relationship by what others think of it.

The idea of the 'sacred start' was another notion which gave me pause for thought.  On a personal note, I met my partner online.  This is an increasingly common experience and when I have been asked how I met him, people are more likely to ask which site than express surprise.  But yet, in meeting someone by arrangement for the purposes of dating, I felt that a lot of de Botton's 'sacred start' is skipped over.  In meeting Kirsten in her professional capacity, Rabih has to wonder whether he is imagining an attraction on her side.  The way towards each other requires both to make a leap and hope that the other responds.  Meeting online removes a lot of this uncertainty and replaces it with another, the hope that the other person will be what their preview implied them to be and that attraction is genuine and not merely a product of the situation.  Wondering whether your expectations and theirs will match.  Our approach to finding a mate is becoming increasingly algorithm based, yet human emotions remain illogical and unpredictable - I did feel a little disappointed that in all his musings, de Botton never ventured into how the internet has changed our route into the course of love.

However, despite these two points which left me wondering, de Botton still uses Rabih and Kirsten to make a plethora of other insights into human relationships.  The politics of laundry, the nonsensical 'blame game', the strains of childcare - all of these put pressure on the love which had begun in such a state of perfection.  As de Botton points out, one of the things that makes these mundane struggles so difficult is 'because they have so seldom seen their struggles sympathetically reflected in the art they know'.  Rows over which set of glasses from IKEA may seem petty, but de Botton unpicks the dispute back to its root, never condemning either side for being upset but also illustrating how hard it can be to articulate these deep down fears which make us act so irrationally in the first place.  We realise then what de Botton's intention really is - to explain, to justify and above all to put these daily disputes which are so absurd into a context that makes it them easier to resolve.  Last year, I read Anne Tyler's The Amateur Marriage, which Tyler wrote as an exploration of how incompatibility of character can be played out over a long marriage.  De Botton is wiser, he acknowledges that as two separate entities, Rabih and Kirsten are fundamentally incompatible but they love each other and under his direction, they are able to find a way through their stresses and strife and the marriage survives.

There were moments perhaps where de Botton's observations could feel hackneyed - for me, it is a cliché to assume that Kirsten is burdened by her father's abandonment of the family when she was a child and that this has made her a defensive and avoidant adult.  Perhaps simply because he too was male, it felt that de Botton gave more of a voice to Rabih so that the wife was less fully-realised.  My own allegiance was decided by the incident of infidelity - yes, one of the couple is unfaithful.  When asked by their lover about their spouse, the adulterous character responds awkwardly that they are nice and that the lover would like them.  This felt deeply distasteful and although de Botton does offer explanation and mitigation, to me it can only illustrate a crucial weakness of character.  Yet still, even in areas where I could not sympathise, I was transfixed by de Botton's empathy for his characters.  While he may seem to brush aside the power of love in the face of life's challenges, he seems to understand the dogged primal desire for it, for the comfort of someone who will not go away.

I caught myself thinking of those whose love stories are celebrated in our popular culture - how people hark back to the 'She Got Off The Plane' moment in the Friends series finale, as if a pair of people who have been on and off for ten years can actually be said to have a healthy relationship.  Or else there's the couples in Grey's Anatomy who make lengthy eloquent declarations to each other on a weekly basis and then break up for little reason or die.  If it isn't high-adrenaline, word-heavy and likely with a contemporary song playing in a background, how would we ever be able to tell that we are witnessing True Love?  But yet de Botton emphasises how often marriage can mean monotony, as in his fantastic description of parenthood, following the birth of the couple's daughter Esther.   'Neither Kirsten nor Rabih have ever known such a mixture of love and boredom. They are used to basing their friendships on shared temperaments and interests. But Esther is, confusingly, the most boring person they have ever met and the one they find themselves loving the most.'  There is a reason why television has always struggled to incorporate child characters into a narrative - it is not interesting to observe, it takes resolve to see through and keeping hold of a relationship through it all takes remarkable tenacity.

De Botton's book brings out into the light those moments within a relationship that otherwise would leave you wondering - is it just us?  Returning to Anne Tyler's The Amateur Marriage, the husband in that book ponders how he got married, he had not felt like he knew what he was doing but that now all these years later, other couples seem so assured and yet he feels no more assured.  The Course of Love may at first seem pessimistic in effectively saying this confidence is unachievable, but although Rabih may have to compromise on his romanticism, the novel closes with the sense that his relationship with his wife is that of a solid partnership.  De Botton may gently mock the idealism of hoping for 'a best friend, a lover, a co-parent, a co-chauffeur and a business partner' in one person, but yet despite their imperfections, Kirsten and Rabih finish the novel still together and united.  There has been give and take on both sides as well as forgiveness and they only seem bound the tighter.

If one were to ask Esther or her brother William about their parents, they would most likely dismiss them as dull.  To an outsider, their lives have contained little action.  An ordinary novel would have had to insert some kind of complicating external action to make their stories worthwhile.  But yet we see them as survivors, battle-scarred veterans of the most complicated and confusing part of the human experience; that Rabih and Kirsten's lives are commonplace and their experiences typical only serves to emphasise the point.  I will treasure The Course of Love - in attempting to tackle such an intangible subject, de Botton leaves himself open to easy criticism, but yet I could not but be amazed and awed by one of the most truly honest depictions of love that I can ever remember reading.

“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 soulmate.”

In The Course of Love, Alain de Botton attempts to tell the story of a long term marriage, of what happens after the getting together, after the sexual passion has deepened, and there are children and years between a couple. For, as Rabih, the husband, and his wife, Kirsten, observe: “Never have they publicly fielded the one question that truly preoccupies them: ‘What is it like to have been married for a while?’ The stories of relationships maintained over decades, without obvious calamity or bliss, remain – fascinatingly and worryingly – the exceptions among the narratives we dare to tell ourselves about love’s progress. … Our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving moments. We have allowed our love stories to end way too early. We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.”

This is a story of love, and de Botton succeeds in pulling apart the strands of love, that glue that keeps a couple together, and it is peppered with wisdom about that wonderful, yet sometimes mysterious state.

While noting that “there is no one more likely to destroy us than the person we marry”, the omniscient narrator also says, somewhat wryly: “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.”

And this narrator can see into the very heart of this relationship – where and why the two fail each other, exactly where the cracks appear, even as those within this web of love, Rabih and Kirsten, cannot. And that’s part of the pleasure and the charm of this read, part philosophy, billed as novel, the many truths about the bond that a couple enter into, and the love that fails them, changes them, warps them, sometimes destroys them, is described in mesmerising detail. There is therapy, there are psychological observations, about how each person will behave in a relationship. This is a book to savour, to ponder and to read again. Plot isn’t so much the point here as the exploration of two people who fall in love, and they could be any two people, anywhere in the world, of any sex, of the same sex even; and through the consequences of that action, then go on to discover each other and themselves.

“They have been married for sixteen years and yet only now, a little late, does Rabih feel ready for marriage. It’s not the paradox it seems. Given that marriage yields its important lessons only to those who have signed up for its curriculum, it’s normal that readiness should tend to follow rather than precede the ceremony itself – perhaps by a decade or two.”

Not for me, it try's too hard to be profound when in fact it's a rather dull analysis of love and life. If I wanted that for entertainment I'd analyse my own marriage. That all being said the author has talent when it comes to composition, beautiful prose, dreadful Scenario.

I've been reading lately about long term marriages, looking for fictional reflections on this phase of life. However, not to name names, the fictional characters have been either too hip or too morally lost for me to relate. Only The Course of Love has felt relevant and rounded.
The book itself is spare, recounting key passages from a decades long romantic relationship between a man and a woman. Within the storyline Alain de Botton interjects psychological analysis of the characters motives and decisions. This does not take away from the impact of the story - instead it feels very much like reading a case study written by a psychoanalyst, both immediate and rich.
I enjoyed this unusual book and would highly recommend to readers hoping to have thoughtful and satisfying long term relationships. While I did not agree with all of de Botton's insights and recommendations, the reader can evaluate the story and the analysis and take away whatever is personally useful.

Rahib and Kirsten meet in Edinburgh: they go on a few dates, sleep together, meet each other’s parents and enjoy the dizzying wonder of opening their soul to another human being. Rahib proposes; Kirsten accepts; they marry. And that’s where most fictions end: with wedding bells and the start of a new life together, implicitly full of happiness. But Alain De Botton’s thoughtful, wise novel asks a searching question. What if love is not the breathless romantic longing that brings about a marriage, but the hard graft that succeeds it? What if that story, of struggle, compromise, arguments, reconciliation, loneliness, determination and occasional fury was the one really worth reading?

This is not a romance novel; nor is it a story which grips you through unexpected twists and turns. It is, quite simply, a perceptive, sensitive, and intelligent chronicle of an ordinary married life. De Botton points out that we have so few models, whether in literature or in the newspapers, of an average, moderately successful marriage and that we consequently have unrealistic expectations when we sign up to such an institution. Through his two protagonists, he seeks to show that a married couple aren’t soldered into a single being through the saying of their vows. On the contrary, they remain individuals with the same needs, flaws and irritating habits that characterised them when they were single. And De Botton argues that true courage lies in the way that people learn not to expect miracles and to set out together, robustly and honestly, to build their own path through the mire.

If I ever take the plunge to get married, I can imagine it might be useful to reread this book, just to remind myself that wanting to throttle my husband now and then is perfectly normal. Rather than a sign of weakness or cruelty or failure, it might actually mean that everything is going exactly as it should – just as long as the urge isn’t put into practice. If reading this book gives us just an ounce more self-awareness or generosity towards our partner, our spouse, our close friends or ourselves, then it will have done some good. And it’s certainly reassured me that one can be uncertain, flawed, vulnerable, frightened and stubborn and still make a good hash of it.

For the full review, please visit my blog at the link given below:
https://theidlewoman.net/2017/01/16/the-course-of-love-alain-de-botton