SOURCE: Prose, Francine. “Habits of the Heart.” New Republic 209, no. 26 (27 December 1993): 38-9.

In the following review, Prose finds parallels between de Botton's On Love and Stendhal's On Love, and judges de Botton's work as sharp, funny, and well written.

In the preface to his treatise On Love, Stendhal breezily takes off running past those indolent earlier writers who dropped out of the game after cataloging only “400 or 500 of the successive emotions, so difficult to recognize, which go to make up this passion.” Stendhal way overshot the 500 mark in his own effort to categorize and to analyze, to qualify and to refine, to collect every anecdote and trenchant word ever uttered about l'amour.

Now, in a smart and ironic first novel, also entitled On Love, Alain de Botton picks up the torch, so to speak, more or less where Stendhal left off. De Botton's On Love reads as if...