Marilyn Yalom

How the French Invented Love

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“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
“[An] 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)
How the French Invented Love is an entertaining and masterful history of love à la française by acclaimed scholar Marilyn Yalom. 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. 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.
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447 printed pages
Publication year
2012
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Quotes

  • Lenniehas quoted7 years ago
    I came to see Emma Bovary in the light of what Girard called “mimetic desire”—that is, she desired what she had learned to desire through a third party. The romantic novels she had read were, as she remembered, “all about love, lovers, sweethearts . . . gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed, and weeping like fountains.” Words like “passion” and “felicity,” “which had appeared so beautiful in books,” had given her a false notion of what love could be. Girard’s theory of mimetic desire made sense to me because I knew how books, movies, and movie magazines had affected my girlfriends and me in the formation of our romantic desires. (Of course, at Johns Hopkins, you were supposed to avoid movies, unless it was one of Ingmar Bergman’s.
  • Lenniehas quoted7 years ago
    Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy they are, who already possess it.”

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