A sly self-help manual for the bookworm distills from the life and work of Marcel Proust--particularly The Remembrance of Things Past--useful directions on such subjects as cultivating friendships and sexual relations.

Critical essays on the work of Marcel Proust, major twentieth-century French novelist.

Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a personage without a book in hand. Everybody in his work reads: servants and masters, children and parents, artists and physicians. The more sophisticated characters find it natural to speak in quotations. Proust made literary taste a means of defining personalities and gave literature an actual role to play in his novels.
   In this wonderfully...

"An award-winning historian revisits Marcel Proust's masterpiece in this essay on literature and memory, exploring the question of identity -- that of the novel's narrator and Proust's own. In this engaging reexamination of In Search of Lost Time, Saul Friedländer considers how the narrator defines himself, how this compares to what we know of Proust himself, and what the significance is of these various points of commonality and divergence. We know,...

"To understand a profound thought is to have, at the moment one understands it, a profound thought oneself; and this demands some effort, a genuine descent to the heart of oneself . . . Only desire and love give us the strength to make this effort. The only books that we truly absorb are those we read with real appetite, after having worked hard to get them, so great had been our need of them." Reading was, for Marcel Proust, more than the pursuit...

The first book to address everyone who relishes reading Proust and wants to know more about how his writing works. This is a matchless close reading of a literary masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, and a lesson in how to read the Great Books profitably and pleasurably. A book that recalls that Proust's novel is one of the great exercises in speculative imagining in the world's literature; and that its originality lies first in the quality of Proust's...