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Alain de BottonAlain de Botton
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Biography
Born in 1969, writer Alain de Botton moved to England with his family from Switzerland when he was eight years old. He was educated at Cambridge University, where he read History. He is a frequent contributor to numerous newspapers, journals and magazines, and is a member of the Arts Council of England's literature panel. He has published three novels: Essays in Love: A Novel (1993), a perceptive modern love story; The Romantic Movement: Sex, Shopping and the Novel (1994), a comic investigation into the problems of relationships; and Kiss and Tell (1995), a biography of an ordinary young woman by her lover.
He is also the author of works of non-fiction, including the best-selling How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), an intriguing and original view of the French novelist's life, work and influence that is at once an unlikely self-help guide and an introduction to one of the twentieth-century's greatest writers. The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), a guide to philosophy for the general reader, was published to coincide with a television series which he also presented. The Art of Travel (2002) investigates the issues that lie behind our desire to travel, and the themes of Status Anxiety (2004), are also examined in a Channel 4 television series.
Alain de Botton lives in London. His latest book is a further work of non-fiction, The Architecture of Happiness (2006), which discusses beauty and and ugliness in architecture. He has been involved in making a number of television documentaries, and helps to run a production company, Seneca Productions.
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Fiction, Non-fiction
Bibliography
Essays in Love: A Novel Macmillan, 1993
The Romantic Movement: Sex, Shopping and the Novel Macmillan, 1994
Kiss and Tell Macmillan, 1995
How Proust Can Change Your Life Picador, 1997
The Consolations of Philosophy Hamish Hamilton, 2000
The Art of Travel Hamish Hamilton, 2002
Status Anxiety Hamish Hamilton, 2004
The Architecture of Happiness Hamish Hamilton, 2006
Critical Perspective
Alain de Botton is a delightful, difficult-to-classify writer who sprang to prominence in 1997 with How Proust Can Change Your Life, a surprise bestseller that combined the 'Self Help' genre with an acute commentary on Marcel Proust's life and works. He's not entirely a kind of 'media academic' - though he is a research fellow in philosophy at London University - and his recent television series for Channel Four, The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), with an accompanying book, again brought him considerable attention. The latter draws in a popularising way upon the lives and works of Aristotle, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzche et al., along with examples from his own experiences - to offer insights into the perennial human problems of unpopularity and frustration, poverty or feelings of inadequacy, and 'a broken heart'. He had for some years been regularly writing highly entertaining journalism for diverse publications: The New Statesman (as television reviewer), The Daily Telegraph - and even for The Erotic Review. The Swiss-born de Botton can be seen as a European-style cultural commentator on modern romance, tourism, art and angst, as well as those activities suggested by the subtitle of his book The Romantic Movement: Sex, Shopping and the Novel (1994).
De Botton's affinities are indeed with the Continental, though equally with the Francophile Julian Barnes: as in Flaubert's Parrot, his fiction alternates with offbeat literary criticism, and they of course share a reverence for the consummate prose styles of Flaubert and Proust. (Thus de Botton gives us amusing fictional encounters between a mutually admiring Proust and James Joyce, in a Paris taxi going home from the 'Ritz' Hotel - and Emma Bovary's anguished consultation of a present day Californian psychotherapist). De Botton presents himself as a philosophe and a moralist, his essential subject being introduced at the opening of How Proust Can Change Your Life: 'There are a few things humans are more dedicated to that unhappiness'. The perversity of human behaviour is examined, and in diagnosis he weaves together philosophy, literature, art and aesthetics, psychoanalysis, history and even linguistics. Solutions, or at least consolations, are to be drawn from the great philosophers, artists and writers. De Botton is brilliant at examining motives, and turning intangible feelings into accessible language. He often addresses the reader, implicitly saying: don't you recognise this in yourself?
Essays in Love (1993), his first novel, is a playfully erudite mixing of fiction with philosophical questioning, attempting to 'index love to criteria' in following the vagaries of a love affair. With chapter titles from 'Romantic Fatalism' to 'Love Lessons', via 'The Subtext of Suduction' ('seduction is a form of acting'), there is much besides that students of l'amour can profit from. The milieu is well-to-do; the narrator is an architect and young Chloe a graphic designer. Their relationship, begun over airline food during a flight from Paris to London, is broken down into numbered paragraphs. These analyse the perversity of feelings, the minutiae of love, with assistance from philosophers - including (Groucho) Marx - and diagrams, illustrations, even mathematical formulas of the probability of them meeting. Their attraction, first love-making, arguments over jam and shoes, faked orgasms, and eventual parting; all is followed over the course of a year. Along the way there are tragic-comic incidents: a despairing suicide attempt, taking thirty vitamin C tablets, leaves him foaming at the mouth. The book inevitably ends with the architect rhapsodising about his new love interest, while ruefully admitting that, 'love taught the analytic mind a certain humility'.
In How Proust Can Change Your Life, while developing a Proustian sensitivity the reader learns a great deal of offbeat information about Marcel Proust himself: his peculiar relations with family and friends, his bedroom habits, sundry ailments, opinions, aesthetics, 'the privileged role' that food plays in his writings. Most of all, we learn about the characters that went into his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time. There's a particularly good look at the ways in which Proust flattered his women friends and then put them waspishly into his works. De Botton offers a smiling photograph of his then girlfriend, who is like 'Albertine' to him, while remarking that author's aunt reminds him of the 'Duchesse de Guermantes'. Proust thought there were a limited number of human types, and de Botton claims that 'the experiences of fictional characters afford us a hugely expanded picture of human behaviour'. The book becomes a kind of instruction manual, replete with Proustian maxims, on 'How to': love life, stop wasting time, read for oneself, etc. The continual moral is that suffering 'sensitises the mind', and 'it opens up possibilities for intelligent, imaginative enquiry'. A question-and-answer section in 'How to be Happy in Love' confirms Proust's unsuitability in this respect, convinced as he was of 'the inseparability of love and suffering'. Rather than pursuing ways to be properly and productively unhappy'. In the final chapter, 'How to Put Books Down', the dangers of reading Proust are slyly outlined in 'Marcel and Virginia (Woolf) - A short story'. De Botton visits Illiers-Combray to see how Proust's fiction has created a modern tourist industry, conceding that 'a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes'. And he teases: 'Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside'.
De Botton's book, The Art of Travel (2002), has been short-listed for the W. H. Smith Awards, indicating his continued popularity with readers. Away from the metaphorical, this time the point is in taking the reader on actual journeys, and considering the motivations, satisfactions and disappointments inherent in the urge to travel. The book consists of essays on a theme, divided into sections marked Departure, Motives, Landscape, Art and Return. Thoughtful excursions take place, whether in Madrid (where he collects guidebooks but wants to remain in his hotel room) or in exploring the streets around his own home in Hammersmith. As in previous books, de Botton assembles engaging 'guides'; writers such as Wordsworth, Ruskin and Baudelaire, while Van Gogh is the guide to Provence. The book considers travel, but equally looks at art. There are full or double page photographs of landscapes and paintings; even one of the author's own bedroom. De Botton discourses on travel as a metaphor for life, and about how people could travel more happily, maintaining that many things are 'easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality'. Indeed, as a guide himself, de Botton is wittily philosophical: 'We may be best be able to inhabit a place when we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there'.
Dr Jules Smith, 2003
Contact information
Related links
http:/ / www.alaindebotton.com
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