Oh, how the French love love! For hundreds of years, they have championed themselves as guides to the art de l’amour through their literature, paintings, songs, and cinema. A French man or woman without amorous desire is considered defective, like someone missing the sense of smell or taste. Now revered scholar Marilyn Yalom intimately examines the tenets of this culture’s enduring gospel of romance.
Basing her delightfully erudite findings on her extensive readings of French literature, as well as memories of her personal experiences in la belle France, Yalom explores the many nuances of love as it has evolved over the centuries, from the Middle Ages to the present. Following along, step-by-step, on her romance-tinged literary detective hunt, the reader discovers how the French invented love, how they have kept it vibrant for more than nine centuries, what is unique in the French love experience, and what is universal.
About Marilyn Yalom
Marilyn Yalom is a former professor of French and presently a senior scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. She is the author of widely acclaimed books such as A History of the Breast, A History of the Wife, and Birth of the Chess Queen, as well as The American Resting Place: Four Hundred Years of History Through our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds, which includes a portfolio of photographs by her son Reid S. Yalom. She lives in Palo Alto, California, with her husband, the psychiatrist and author Irvin D. Yalom.
Editorial Review
Tracing l’amour à la française “from the emergence of romance in the twelfth century until our own era,” the author employs an enjoyably downright style, blending in her own experiences in France over the course of 60 years as well as the personal stories of French friends. She begins with the troubadour poetry that established the idealized conventions of courtly love in medieval France, then moves on to the more cynical trope of gallant love, which emphasized physical passion. The distinction between a true emotional bond and mere lust runs through all of French literature, but they are not necessarily in conflict; Yalom notes the culture’s forthright acceptance of sexual pleasure, so much more problematic for puritanical Anglo-Saxons. The famous union of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who maintained an “essential” love while enjoying “contingent” loves with others, is a 20th-century example of the pragmatic French acknowledgment that marriage and passion don’t always go hand in hand. Yet Yalom finds many examples of French men and women (but mostly women) overwhelmed by all-consuming ardor, from Racine’s Phèdre to the “irresistible force that penetrates through the skin, regardless of its color,” in Marguerite Duras’ novel, The Lover. Yalom also covers homosexual love in the works of Proust, Gide and Colette, and she devotes a chapter to the “yearning for the mother” that fueled some decidedly sexual affairs between young men and older women in the novels of Stendhal, Balzac and others. – Kirkus Reviews
‘How the French Invented Love’
The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review – October 29, 2012 (Excerpt)
Americans are endlessly intrigued by the French: How do they stay so thin? Why do their children devour cassoulet and green beans without complaining? And how do they pull off all those adulterous affairs, menages a trois, same-sex liaisons and romantic reveries? What inspires them to love so passionately, anyway?
Marilyn Yalom’s “How the French Invented Love” addresses the last two questions by exploring France’s greatest literary hits from medieval troubadours to François Truffaut. As with her previous works on the history of the wife and the history of the breast, this book covers a vast chronology and range of sources.
But “How the French Invented Love” is also part memoir, as the Stanford scholar interweaves personal recollections that provide the American foil to French manners. Her anecdotes spotlight the romantic and emotional distinctions between our two cultures, yet she does not use these comparisons to assert the superiority of American patterns and beliefs. [Read the full article...]
THE SABRINA STRONG SERIES by LORELEI BELL
