Readers will want to run to the library and stay there for a year, reading everything she deconstructs. At the heart of this delicious book is Yalom the reader, whose fascination with the French way of love and pleasure in sharing her enthusiasms is highly contagious.
Her passion for French literature is palpable, and the analytical connections that she draws to the love lives of its writers (gay, straight, or just plain neurotic) are edifying and great fun to read.
For example, Les liaisons dangereuses (the most wickedly erotic book ever written, in Yalom's opinion) is still on the list of required reading in French high schools. Yalom (A History of the Wife) argues that it's not only gender-specific traits and roles that are socially constructed, but love, too.
Former professor of French, current senior scholar at Stanford's Clayman Institute for Gender Research, avowed feminist, confessed Proustian, admitted Simone de Beauvoir groupie, the erudite and charming Yalom is the perfect companion. In this enchanting tour of French literature from Ab lard and H lo se in the 12th century to Marguerite Duras in the 20th and Philippe Sollers in the 21st Yalom attempts to unravel the mystery of how the French manage their romances, marriages, affairs, and obsession with love and sex. A thoroughly engaging homage to French culture and literature interlaced with the author’s delicious personal anecdotes, How the French Invented Love is ideal for fans of Alain de Botton, Adam Gopnik, and Simon Schama. Spanning the Middle Ages to the present, Yalom explores a love-obsessed culture through its great works of literature-from Moliere’s comic love to the tragic love of Racine, from the existential love of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre to the romanticism of George Sand and Alfred de Musset. How the French Invented Love is an entertaining and masterful history of love à la française by acclaimed scholar Marilyn Yalom. “ enchanting tour of French literature-from Abelard and Heloise in the 12th century to Marguerite Duras in the 20th and Philippe Sollers in the 21st.” -Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Absolutely marvelous…lively and learned….Marilyn Yalom’s book is a distinguished contribution to our experience of a great literature, as well as an endearing memoir.” -Diane Johnson, author of Lulu in Marrakech and Le Divorce
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