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Alain de Botton has crafted a delightfully ingenious novel in the
form of a biography of an unknown woman. Told by a former flame that
he lacks empathy, the engaging narrator of Kiss & Tell
decides to write a book about the next person he meets. This turns
out to be Isabel Rogers, a production assistant at a London
stationery company. The sincere effort of this would-be
Boswell to make this ordinary woman
fascinating cause him to fall in love with her, causing a shift in
his writing from an examination of Isabel's life to a
minutely-detailed account of his relationship with her. Alain de
Botton's earlier work,
The Romantic Movement, garnered praise from
John Updike and
Pico Iyer, who called him "a
Stendhal of the 90's dating
scene."--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable
edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
"Dental work on," "first kiss" and "new
hairstyle" can all be found under the index entries for
Isabel Rogers, the charming, unsuspecting subject of this diverting
fictional biography. De Botton plays a nimble game, through the eyes
and idiosyncrasies of his smart, pretentious narrator. Looking for
an opportunity to explore the nature of biography without being
overshadowed by his subject, the narrator attaches himself to a
woman he thinks will be mundane enough to be fully mastered. To play
off the appealing if thoroughly normal Isabel, de Botton (The
Romantic Movement) makes his narrator as fastidious as any of
Nicholson Baker's and as smarmily self-absorbed as one of Martin
Amis's. But the ordinary details of Isabel's ordinary life?she is
28, a production assistant in London?prove more than enough to
handle, and the narrator, who likes to quote Dr. Johnson and Richard
Ellman, finds that the high-brow rigors of formal biography have to
make concessions to the unruliness of lived life. Inevitably in this
comic relationship, the narrator digresses too often, experimenting
with handwriting analysis, palmistry and psychiatric questionnaires
before he realizes that he is missing a very different kind of
understanding of Isabel. Deftly, de Botton manages to flesh out the
character of Isabel within the parameters of what is?in every
sense?his narrator's pseudo-intellectual conceit. In the manner of
Carol Shield's The Stone Diaries, photos of "Isabel" and her family
add a droll touch.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers
to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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