Book Description
An avid critic and translator, Marcel Proust is best remembered as author of the semiautobiographical long novel of French expressionism, The Remembrance of Things Past.

This title, Marcel Proust, part of Chelsea House Publishers' Modern Critical Views series, examines the major works of Marcel Proust through full-length critical essays by expert literary critics. In addition, this title features a short biography on Marcel Proust, a chronology of the author's life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University. ... Read more

Book Description
The Gardens of Desire is at once a model of literary interpretation and a groundbreaking psychocritical reading of a literary masterpiece, Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). Shedding new light on the origins of the creative impulse in general, and on the psychological origins of the Recherche in particular, the book illuminates the hidden associations between matricidal, suicidal, sadistic, masochistic, homoerotic, and creative impulses as manifested in Proust's work. The book moves beyond traditional Freudian readings of Proust to consider the theories of Otto Rank, Jacques Derrida, and others, and provides provocative readings of the "privileged moments" that comprise many of the work's "critical cruxes," as well as a thought-provoking rereading of the novel's ending. Both elegant and accessible, this book boldly explores the violence of desire as it relates not only to Proust's narrator, but also to Proustian criticism itself, with its own violent desire to appropriate the essence of Proust's masterpiece. ... Read more

Book Description
In 1904, while still working on his translations of Ruskin, Marcel Proust wrote to Maurice Barres "I still have two Ruskin's to do, and after that I shall try to translate my own poor soul, if it doesn't die in the meantime."Within a few years Proust would begin this translation of his "own
poor soul"--the monumental Remembrance of Things Past, one of the great literary works of the 20th century.
In this volume of Proust's collected letters--translated by Terence Kilmartin, acclaimed for his work on the Moncrieff translation of Proust's works--the reader is carried inside this pivotal moment in a great writer's life. In a letter to Louis d'Albufera he lists the projects he has in hand:
"a study on the nobility, a Parisian novel, an essay on Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert, an essay on Women, an essay on Pederasty (not easy to publish), a study on stained-glass windows, a study on tombstones, a study on the novel"--all subjects that eventually found their way into Remembrance of Things
Past.The final letter in the volume talks of alterations to his flat "which are essential for my peace and quiet"--an allusion no doubt to the cork-lined room in which he would spend so many years continuing to pursue his quest for "Lost Time."
The letters are intriguing for what they say about the work, but they also offer an intimate portrait of the man--the sometime invlaid recluse, sometime socialite. Although Proust spent a great deal of time insulated at home, when he does go out it is clear that the talent for malicious
observation so evident in Guermantes Way was already quite sharp.He refers to a group of dowagers he'd seen at a concert as "portraits of monsters from the time when people didn't know how to draw."And his letters to his devoted friend the composer Reynaldo Hahn are full of wit, scurrilous
gossip and a great deal of teasing.He also carries on lively exchanges with two very different women--Marie Nordlinger, a serious, dedicated artist, and Louisa de Mornand, a frivolous, mercenary actress.His letters to Marie are affectionate, but his letters to Louisa are amorous--sometimes even
salacious, (possibly because she served as a surrogate for his real interst, her lover Albufera.)Proust's celebrated devotion to his mother is also evident in this collection.Theirs is an intimate and loving correspondence, and her death in 1905 is clearly a tremendous blow ("My life has now
forever lost its only purpose, its only sweetness, its only consolation.")
This long-awaited volume will be welcomed by scholars and general readers alike.The letters offer a special insight into the man and his art during a crucial period, and they are as delightful to read--as beautifully crafted, witty and poignant--as his fiction. ... Read more

Amazon.com
How to write the biography of a writer whose life's work was his life story? In the case of Marcel Proust, the task is complicated by the subject's own hostility to the genre; in his essay "Contre Sainte-Beuve," Proust argued that writers should be judged by their books and not by the facts of their life. Indeed, when it comes to Proust, one might well confuse the two. For the first half of his life, he traded witticisms in the salons of the belle époque; for the second he sat at home and wrote about it, going so far as to line the walls of his living room with cork in order to keep the outside world where it belonged. Eventually, all that exquisite isolation produced what is arguably the defining work of the 20th century, the loosely autobiographical, imposingly multivolumed Remembrance of Things Past. As a biographer, one can conflate the novel with the life, as Proust's first biographer, George Painter, did; or one can go the road of several recent studies, including that of William C. Carter, and emphasize instead Proust's psychology, including his "repressed" homosexuality and his complicated relationship with his Jewish ancestry. Alternately, one can address Proust as a creature of his time and his place, the product of fin-de-siècle France with all its prejudices and conventions and embroidered antimacassars.

In Marcel Proust: A Life, French critic Jean-Yves Tadie surveys these approaches from the lofty perspective of 40 years of Proust scholarship, and he chooses all--or perhaps none. For Tadie is concerned not with Proust the man but with Proust the novelist. "The true biography of a writer or an artist is that of his work," he proclaims, and goes on to present the development of Proust's life and his novel side by side, considering real-life people and events alongside the fictional representations they inspired. Thankfully, though impressively learned, Tadie is not what we would call an "academic" biographer: his prose is far too elegant and even witty for that, and he actually seems to be enjoying himself. (In cataloging the items sold by Proust's uncle's firm, for example, Tadie exclaims with contagious glee, "Is it not like reading a novel by Balzac, or the wedding announcement chapter in Albertine disparue?") Weighing in at a very Proustian 986 pages--it would make almost as good a murder weapon as Remembrance of Things Past--Tadie's work is a biography of mind-boggling thoroughness, and yet every detail strikes the reader as necessary. Suitably, this definitive work ends with a touching account of Proust's death, as the great writer dictates his masterwork until he is no longer capable of speech. Who could ask more of a biographer than Tadie's gentle and affectionate epitaph? "And we too address our respects to a man who suffered so much in order that his work should shine like the sun, now that it causes him no more harm." --Mary Park Book Description
One of the twentieth century's towering literary figures comes to life in this definitive biography by the world's premier authority on Proust.

A bestseller in France, where it was originally published to great critical acclaim, Jean-Yves Tadie's monumental life of Proust is the first to make use of a wealth of primary material only recently made available. With profound intelligence, analytical perspicuity, and wit, Tadie gives us a masterful portrait of a great artist in his time. Marcel Proust: A Life provides a scrupulously researched and engaging picture of the intellectual and social universe that fed Proust's art, along with an indispensable critical reading of the work itself. The result is authoritative, magisterial, and a beautiful example of the art of biography.

Advance praise for Marcel Proust:

"The best biography ever written on Proust...This masterpiece is as thorough about the events of Proust's life as it is perceptive and comprehensive about his intellectual influences." --Edmund White ... Read more

Customer Reviews (11)

Tadie's mistake or his transcriber's?
The excerpt Amazon carries of this work reads: "Excerpt - page 124: "... writer's guide around the city's literary milieux, where he met jean Lorrain, Pierre Lout's, Leon Daudet, Jules Renard, Remy de Goncourt,..."

There is a confounding of pairs. And Pierres. I assume that by "Pierre Lout's" the author intends either Louys or Loti? An the by the amalgam "Remy de Goncourt" either the critic "Remy de Gourmont" or brothers de Goncourt - who, though they often journaled as one, were issued separately at birth: Jues and Edmund (Reminds me of Don DeLillo's cultural relativity hybrid "Tennessee Ernie Williams").

Masterpiece
What is the nature of biography? Is it the work of the subject? Is it separatable? What is fair? What is accurate? Does a biography of one such as Proust, the 20th century's most famous, best author, have to be a recitation of the work itself melded with events in his life? Or can the work come simply from being an artist: the culmination of the mind that is under study?

Tadie takes Proust as the person: and what he becomes is in essence what the judgment of the biographer says he becomes using his best judgment. And there appears to be no person alive with more knowledge of Proust and his work than Tadie. It is big. It is full. Almost too much. But then we are not dealing with a minor novelist, are we? This book is a classic and a model for all biography in terms of its approach and philosophy: Proust is never to be forgotten from this rendering, which is art in and of itself. For Proust, and Tadie's treatment here, is that of the nature of art itself.

Tadie disparu
I fell in love with Proust's work as a senior in college during a winter study break where we read 100s of pages a day.Later on, I satisfied part of the foreign language requirements for my Ph. D. (in English literature) by spending one day a week for an entire semester in a three person Proust seminar where we read Proust in French, but thankfully, got to hold our discussions in English.I also read Painter's 2 volume biography of Proust back then. In fact, somewhere in my garage, I have a first edition of Shattuck's "Proust's Binoculars."And, over the years, I've happily read and re-read Proust in the Moncrieff, Kilmartin/Enright, and now the new Penguin transations.

But, having read 318 pages into Tadie, I have decided to give up.Tadie is packed full of information, but he doesn't seem to have any real story to tell.It is just one potentially fascinating fact after another. But the reader has to supply all the fascination.Tadie just piles one sentence after another in an exhausting display of joyless erudition.

a panorama almost as vast as Proust's!
I concur with the reviewer who suggested that the newbie proceed as follows:

1) Read Edmund White's little Penguin biography so as to orient yourself. This will lessen the culture shock when you are first confronted with Swann's Way (or The Way by Swann's, as the English prefer).

2) Read Proust. This is actually my third perambulation, so I'm a bit unsure how much of the novel to recommend. Whatever you do, get a good start on it, sufficient that you know you will persevere.

3) Read Tadie. Much of what has mystified you in In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past, whatever) will suddenly become clear. For example, how is it that young Marcel (most writers call him the Narrator) with his wheezing and his mother complex and his odd ideas about sexuality is welcomed in the highest reaches of Paris society? Well, why not, since Proust was! People loved him, men and women, rich and poor, nobility and servants. Knowing about Proust's life makes Marcel/Narrator a lot more credible. The same is true of other characters, such as Charles Swann. (Some of Proust's characters, including the Baron Charlus and the awful Madame Verdurin, are so good that their real-life equivalents are but pale imitations. They need no biography to limn them.)

Tadie is a vast undertaking--as of course is In Search of Lost Time. I became so interested in the biography that I have put aside the final volume, Finding Time Again, so as to concentrate on the biography.

A suggestion: skip the footnotes. I began doing so at about the halfway point of the biography, and I'm enjoying it more and following it better. Those constant interruptions (it's not unusual for the footnotes to occupy a quarter or a third of the page) made it difficult for me to follow the text. Maybe Tadie has to be read three times, like the novel itself!

It's a splendid work. I've read three Proust biographies, the third one (apart from Tadie's and White's) being Marcel Proust: A Biography, by Roger Hayman (out of print). It's a better read, but it pales as a biography and as an introduction to the novel.

-- Dan Ford at readingproust dot com

What would Proust have thought?
I picked up a copy of this book when I saw it marked down in price. I did not have to read very far before I discovered why the bookstore was unable to unload the large stock they still have on hand. The writing is simply atrocious.

On every page there are non-sequiturs or convoluted sentence that are impossible to understand, even after reading them two or three times. The fault is not in the translation, which seems to be faithful to the original, but in the publisher who clearly made no attempt to edit the text properly.

How ironic that a work about one of the greatest writers of modern literature should be presented in such a careless, clumsy way. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Painting Proust
I feel obliged to preface any comments on Painter's biography with a cautionary word. Reading this book without having read Proust's masterpiece A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, is like reading a history of Jazz, without having heard any.

That said, and disregarding Painter's introductory thesis that "Proust's novel cannot be fully undersood without a knowledge of his life", the life and times of Proust is a fascinating subject in itself. His genius for conversation, and the legacy it created for him, gives his biographer plenty to work with and Painter's skill as a writer comes to the fore as he recreates the events that shaped Proust's life.

The biography is written sequentially, beginning with a brief overview of late 19th century Paris, and culminating in Proust's death while still revising his masterpiece, in November 1922.

Footnotes a plenty, Painter avoids mythologising Proust and instead, sticks to the facts with an academic's eye for detail. He occasionally offers revealing insights into Proust's work and writes in a curious style which draws on Proust's own language and favourite metaphors. In the end though, Painter's raison d'etre is to identify the people and places that shaped Proust's writing. To this end, we meet the Barons, Dukes and Duchesses who populated the upper stratosphere of Parisian society in the early nineteen hundreds, and visit the small gardens of Illiers and Auteuil, which would eventually become the Combray of his famous novel.

Not interested? Well this book is not for you. For those of you who are interested in knowing from where Proust's inspiration sprang, there is no better book.

One for the fans.

Painting Proust
I feel obliged to preface any comments on Painter's biography with a cautionary word. Reading this book without having read Proust's masterpiece A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, is like reading a history of Jazz, without having heard any.

That said, and disregarding Painter's introductory thesis that "Proust's novel cannot be fully undersood without a knowledge of his life", the life and times of Proust is a fascinating subject in itself. His genius for conversation, and the legacy it created for him, gives his biographer plenty to work with and Painter's skill as a writer comes to the fore as he recreates the events that shaped Proust's life.

The biography is written sequentially, beginning with a brief overview of late 17th centuary Paris, and culminating in Proust's death while still revising his masterpiece, in November 1922.

Footnotes a plenty, Painter avoids mythologising Proust and instead, sticks to the facts with an academic's eye for detail. He occasionally offers incisive insights into Proust's work and writes in a curious style which draws on Proust's own language and favourite metaphors. In the end though, Painter's raison d'etre is to identify the people and places that shaped Proust's writing. To this end, we meet the Barons, Dukes and Duchesses who populated the upper stratosphere of Parisian society in the early nineteen hundreds, and visit the small gardens of Illiers and Auteuil, which would eventually become the Combray of his famous novel, and marvel at the chuch spires he visited while reading Ruskin.

Not inerested? Well this book is not for you. For those of you who are interested in knowing from where Proust's inspiration sprang, there is no better book.

One for the fans. ... Read more

Book Description
This volume gathers together all of Marcel Proust's short fiction and six tales never before translated into English. ... Read more

Book Description
The Overlook Illustrated Lives series offers visual literary biographies, incisively and informatively written by leading experts, accompanied by photographs and illustrations that bring to life the author's world. Coinciding with the publication of the first all-new English translation of Proust's great work in more than seventy years, Marcel Proust vividly captures Proust's solitary genius and life of passionate observation, from his daily routines to the elite social circle that fascinated his youth.

The more than one hundred photos and illustrations, some previously unpublished, enable readers to share the celebrated author's sight-and how others saw him: Proust's favorite paintings, portraits of the people he was close to, sources for his fictional characterizations, copious illustrations of the theatrical events and exhibitions Proust attended with such enthusiasm, scores of the music he loved, his manuscripts, sketches, and the places dear to him and central to the great novel that was his life's work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Not a bio, but an introduction to Proust's world
This is a very nice little book, but anyone turning to it for a brief biography of Proust will be more than a little disappointed.In fact, unless one already knows a fair amount about Proust, I think this book will be more than a little baffling.To be honest, I bought this primarily because with Proust, I am a bit of a completist:I own a substantial number of the books published about Proust in English.I was expecting a short biography perhaps along the lines of Edmund White's excellent short bio in the Penguin Brief Lives series.Instead, this really would function as a nice adjunct to that book.

Caws really writes about Proust's world, rather than about Proust.Much essential biographical material is left out entirely, and many characters in his great novel are mentioned, references that will be unintelligible to anyone who hasn't already read Proust.Working in this manner, Caws is able to get in a surprising amount of detail in this relatively brief book.

Like the other volumes in the Overlook Illustrated Lives series, this is a gorgeous book.The print is a bit on the tiny side, but the photographs, while small, are superbly reproduced, and for the most part, they do a great job of illustrating the world Proust inhabited.If I have a complaint with the book, it is that in a book of only 117 pages (two completely blank pages are inexplicably numbered 118 and 119), they devote too much space to individuals only peripherally connected to Proust.Why, for instance, an entire page for a photograph of Colette, who was utterly inessential in a book about Proust?I also found some of the paintings to be a bit too peripheral, such as Gustave Moreau's "The Apparition."It would be appropriate for a book on Huysmans, but why Proust?Actually, I do have one additional complaint:I find the book to be a bit too slender for its $19.95 list price.

But there is a great deal of value in the book for any lover of Proust.There are a number of photographs that I don't have in any other book on Proust.For instance, while the book collects several of the more famous photographs of Count Robert de Montesquiou, there were a couple I hadn't seen before.In fact, the book functions very well as a photographic supplement to a biography of Proust.The content of the text seems to rely very heavily upon William C. Carter's massive English language biography on Proust, but contains a wealth of images not found in that book.The collection of Paul Nadar photographs, THE WORLD OF PROUST, surpasses this slender volume in its coverage of the personalities of the time, but does not contain images not taken by Nadar himself.

For anyone wanting to study Proust's life to any degree, I would strongly recommend reading one of the larger biographies, preferably Tadie or Carter, or the Edmund White short biography, and supplement that with this small volume and the Nadar volume for the illustrations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A book review
A good book for someone just reading about Proust for the first time.It's a quick read, I think it took me two sittings yet it still gives insight into "Remembrance".Great for the casual fan of Proust looking for help in beginning to tackle some of the meaning of the novel.

Probably the finest introduction to Proust in English
Anyone interested in Marcel Proust does indeed enjoy an embarrassment of riches.We are blessed in English with several superb full-length critical biographies, beginning with George Painter's pioneering work, and more recently by the spectacular biography by the dean of Proust studies, Jean-Yves Tadie, and the almost equally as superb (and perhaps more readable) biography by William C. Carter.We are also blessed with a plethora of first-rate advanced studies, either written originally in English, or translated from the French or German.

Despite this, we have a shortage of introductory works on Proust.Samuel Beckett wrote a very short and one of the earliest studies of Proust, but despite its excellence, it is not really appropriate as an introduction.The prose is excruciatingly thick at times, and the argument sometimes completely obscure (Beckett is said years later to have found it impenetrable in many places), not qualities one seeks in an introductory work.

Luckily, this clearly conceived and transparently written by Howard Moss, long poetry editor at the NEW YORKER, makes a perfect introduction.Unluckily, it is currently out of print.Hopefully, some publisher will rectify this situation by making it available to the reading public.

THE MAGIC LANTERN OF MARCEL PROUST is a very short book, and obviously in such a work there can be no attempt at a comprehensive discussion of all the minutiae in the film.Instead, Moss discusses certain motifs that reveal Proust's overarching concerns in the RECHERCHE.For instance, "The Gardens," the second chapter, focuses on the landscapes and physical locations there, and what they reveal about the structure of his work."The Parties" focuses on Proust's analysis of society and class."The Way" discusses the ideas that provide the central structuring for the work as a whole.

What I love most about Moss, in addition to his magnificently clear and unelliptical prose, is his integrity as a reader.Too many writers about Proust graft onto their discussion their own principal interests.Moss takes the reader of Proust--whether actual or potential--into the heart of the text itself.One gains the sense of what is central to Proust, and not merely to the critic writing about Proust. ... Read more

Book Description
Michael Finn examines the vogue for nervous afflictions in France in the late nineteenth century, and compares Proust's anxieties about writing In Search of Lost Time to the concerns of earlier writers suffering from nervous conditions, including Flaubert, Baudelaire, Nerval and the Goncourt brothers. Once Proust cast off his fear of being a nervous weakling, he was able to make fun of the supposed purity of the novel form. The author shows how hysteria becomes a key to Proustian narrative, and discusses how together with Proust's use of pastiche, narrative pranks and games, it unlocks a writing technique that undermines conventional fiction.Download Description
This study examines the connections between Proust's fin-de-siËcle 'nervousness' and his apprehensions regarding literary form. Michael Finn shows that Proust's anxieties both about bodily weakness and about novel-writing were fed by a set of intriguing psychological and medical texts, and were mirrored in the nerve-based afflictions of earlier writers including Flaubert, Baudelaire, Nerval and the Goncourt brothers. Finn argues that once Proust cast off his concerns about being a nervous weakling he was freed to poke fun both at the supposed purity of the novel form. Hysteria - as a figure and as a theme - becomes a key to the Proustian narrative, and a certain kind of wordless, bodily copying of gesture and event is revealed to be at the heart of a writing technique which undermines many of the conventions of fiction. ... Read more