L'Amour dure trois ans

Marc Marronnier — Parisian dandy, society columnist, and professional cynic — has built a whole philosophy around a single conviction: love lasts exactly three years. Passion, he insists, runs on a biochemical timer; the giddy first year gives way to tenderness, then to boredom, and by the third year the whole thing collapses on schedule. He should know. His own marriage has just ended, and he narrates its post-mortem with wit, bile, and a chic Parisian detachment.

The trouble is that Marc has fallen in love again — with Alice — and every day the relationship survives is an affront to the theory he has staked his identity on. Torn between his cherished cynicism and the terrifying possibility that this time might be different, he careens through the glittering, cocaine-dusted world of Parisian nightlife, dinner parties, and literary posturing.

The third book in Frédéric Beigbeder's semi-autobiographical Marc Marronnier trilogy, L'amour dure trois ans (Love Lasts Three Years) is a sharp, aphoristic, and self-lacerating comedy about modern romance. Beigbeder skewers his own generation's fear of commitment even as he lets his hero secretly, desperately hope to be proven wrong.