William Leith

Not so special

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton

issue 25 April 2009

Alain de Botton recently said that he’d been congratulated on his prescience for writing a book about the nature of work in these times of economic woe. But he wasn’t prescient, he said — just interested in the subject. He has been pondering it for several years now, in his specific, de Botton-esque style, which is calm and leisurely, and sometimes faux-naif; a killer combination when it works. Here it works; he has pretty much got to the bottom of the subject.

In his time, Alain has got to the bottom — or close to the bottom — of several subjects. Love, travel, Marcel Proust, and happiness, to name a few. As a writer, he can be attracted to the paradoxical and the counter-intuitive. His work has a mildly French feel; in his novel Essays in Love he wrote, ‘One of love’s greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.’

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