Proust

Proust (1999) – Edmund White
Weidenfeld & Nicolson | ISBN: 9780297842422
Condition: Good | Sold by Crappy Old Books

Marcel Proust. French novelist, social observer, chronic invalid and a man who demonstrated that an apparently insignificant biscuit-related experience could eventually develop into several thousand pages of literary genius. While ordinary people remember their childhoods through photographs, embarrassing family anecdotes and the occasional unfortunate school report, Proust turned the entire business of remembering things into one of the greatest achievements of modern literature.

Welcome to Proust, Edmund White’s elegant, insightful and wonderfully readable biography of the man behind In Search of Lost Time, a monumental literary undertaking whose length has intimidated generations of otherwise enthusiastic readers.

Born in 1871 into a prosperous Parisian family, Proust enjoyed the privileges of wealth, education and access to fashionable society. Unfortunately, he also suffered from chronic ill health, emotional anxieties and an extraordinary capacity for becoming absorbed in the smallest details of human behaviour.

He was fascinated by aristocrats, social climbers, lovers, intellectuals and the elaborate rituals of Parisian high society, where reputations could be destroyed by an unfortunate remark and an invitation to the right dinner party might represent the pinnacle of human achievement.

Proust observed this world with affectionate fascination and merciless precision, eventually transforming its personalities, pretensions and romantic disasters into the extraordinary fictional universe of his masterpiece.

Edmund White, himself a distinguished novelist and biographer, approaches his subject with a novelist’s appreciation of personality, sexuality, ambition and the complexities of artistic creation.

He explores Proust’s relationships, his homosexuality, his attachment to his mother and the remarkable transformation of a fashionable young socialite into an intensely dedicated literary artist.

Proust’s working habits were famously eccentric. Increasingly withdrawn from ordinary social life, he spent much of his later existence writing in a cork-lined bedroom, apparently deciding that the outside world was considerably more manageable when experienced through memory rather than direct participation.

It was an extraordinary arrangement, although one suspects the neighbours appreciated the soundproofing.

White also examines the relationship between Proust’s personal experiences and his fiction, revealing how real encounters, emotional disappointments and observations of society helped inspire his elaborate literary constructions.

The resulting portrait is affectionate without being uncritical, presenting a brilliant, vulnerable and sometimes exasperating individual whose genius was inseparable from his obsessions.

Published in 1999 as part of the acclaimed Penguin Lives biographical series, this compact volume offers an accessible introduction to a writer whose own books are rather less compact.

This 1999 Weidenfeld & Nicolson edition, offered in Good condition by Crappy Old Books, is an excellent acquisition for admirers of French literature, literary biography and anyone who has ever contemplated reading Proust but wondered whether they possessed sufficient years remaining.

A witty, perceptive and illuminating portrait of a man who transformed memory, jealousy, desire and social observation into literary immortality.

Because most people occasionally remember something from their childhood and spend a few pleasant moments feeling nostalgic.

Proust remembered eating a madeleine.

And proceeded to write one of the longest novels in literary history.

Which rather puts the average person’s holiday memoir into perspective.

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