Beth Bonini's Reviews > Amour: How the French Talk about Love--Photographs and Stories

I read this book in an afternoon, and then I asked my daughter to read it. The next morning I spent an hour discussing it with my hairdresser, which led to the most profound conversation I’ve ever had whilst having my hair done. I used to think of reading as a primarily solitary experience; but lately, it has become more of a social one. This is the sort of book that I had to talk about in order to fully resolve how I felt about it.

First of all, the title: deliberately misleading, I think, if one is expecting feel-good romance, but in the final analysis also appropriate. Love - ‘amour’ - is the author’s subject. In her Introduction, author Stefania Rousselle explains how her career as a video journalist meant that she covered the darkest, most violent spectrum of human experience. Hate, not love. The Bataclan concert massacre, followed by a period of closely monitoring France’s far-right party, the National Front, led to an emotional state that Roussell describes as ‘broken’ and heart-crushing. Her personal life was equally desperate, and she describes a relationship which constantly undermined her confidence and felt like ‘poison’. In a state close to despair, Roussell embarks on a project to see if she could find any evidence of love. What was it exactly? Did it exist? How many people actually experienced it?

The book that came into being is a series of interviews presented as direct monologues. Each interview is accompanied by photos, which are striking in their simplicity, directness and mundanity. An extremely diverse cross-section of people are part of this conversation about love, but not one of them is remotely imaginable as a social media ‘influencer’. The English have a colloquial expression that ‘there’s nowt so queer as folk’, and this book is a reminder of how just how varied and, well, weird is the spectrum of human experience. So many of us seem to be striving for perfection all the time; well, here is a place that shines a very strong light on ‘warts and all’ imperfection. I was stunned, at times, by the honesty of the accounts. Roussell writes: ‘It was brutal. People were pure. They were raw.’ Yes, all of those words - but over and over again, what struck me most was the rawness.

Simply, each person in the book talks a bit about their experiences with love. Some of the stories are in the romantic vein, but far more of them deal in the realm of disappointment and loss. I was struck mostly by two things: first, how profoundly lonely most people are; and second, how very few people, no matter how bitter their experience has been, ever totally lose their optimistic hope that love may still be possible for them. Roussell describes the subjects of her study as ‘brave’, and I wholeheartedly agree with that assessment as well.

One of the reasons I read is a deep desire to want to know (and hopefully understand, if only partially) about human experiences very different from my own. This book does an admirable job of getting at the ‘heart’ of what makes relationships so difficult, whilst at the same time underscoring that the need to love and be loved is at the very core of human experience. It’s painful to read, at times, but oddly uplifting, too.

Thanks to Viking Books UK for a copy of this book.