Detailed item info | Synopsis | Alain de Botton's first work of nonfiction is a tribute to Marcel Proust, in the guise of a somewhat unusual self-help book. Consisting of Proust's opinions on subjects ranging from vacations to sex, it is, in the end, an illuminating portrait of Proust by de Botton. Listed by Salon as one of the Ten Best Books of 1997.
| | Size | | Length: | 197 pages | | Height: | 8.0 in. | | Width: | 5.3 in. | | Thickness: | 0.8 in. | | Weight: | 7.2 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note | "A self-help manual for the intelligent person" ("The New York Times Book Review"), this stylish, erudite, and frequently hilarious book dips deeply into Marcel Proust's life and work to uncover a font of wonderful advice on such subjects as cultivating friendships, suffering successfully, and recognizing love.
Alain de Botton combines two unlikely genres--literary biography and self-help manual--in the hilarious and unexpectedly practical How Proust Can Change Your Life.Who would have thought that Marcel Proust, one of the most important writers of our century, could provide us with such a rich source of insight into how best to live life? Proust understood that the essence and value of life was the sum of its everyday parts. As relevant today as they were at the turn of the century, Prousts life and work are transformed here into a no-nonsense guide to, among other things, enjoying your vacation, reviving a relationship, achieving original and unclichéd articulation, being a good host, recognizing love, and understanding why you should never sleep with someone on a first date. It took de Botton to find the inspirational in Proust's essays, letters and fiction and, perhaps even more surprising, to draw out a vivid and clarifying portrait of the master from between the lines of his work.Here is Proust as we have never seen or read him before: witty, intelligent, pragmatic. He might well change your life.
| | Industry reviews | "De Botton navigates the dangers of his chosen form with great skill. This is largely because he has that old but quite rare gift of decorum; his lucid and unpretentious style is able to accommodate both precise literary points and conversational banter without any undue sense of strain....A measure of how well the book works is that it becomes more enjoyable as it goes on; de Botton has charm as well as wit."
Literary Review - Sebastian Faulks (04/19/1997)
"...De Botton manages to paint, through what are often no more than sketches, a very vivid picture of Proust the man. What appears to be the essence of this sick, neurotic, fur-coated, talkative, at times apologetic genius, is brilliantly conveyed."
Spectator - Teresa Waugh (04/19/1997)
"After reading de Botton's book, one will savor Proust with fresh wonder and gratitude."
Washington Post Book World - Benito Rakower (05/04/1997)
"His engaging new book--not quite self-help, not quite literary criticism--explores how a careful reading of Proust can help us to solve such problems as 'how to be a good friend,' 'how to be happy in love' and 'how to suffer successfully.' For no matter how miserable Proust made himself, he was always a keen and insightful observer of others....De Botton's book may not, literally, change anyone's life, but it may prompt a few of its readers to have another go at Proust."
Salon - David Futtrell (05/05/1997)
"[Alain de Botton's] curious, humorous, didactic, and dazzling book bears the subtitle 'Not a Novel'; it contains, however, more human interest and play of fancy than most fiction....De Botton, in emphasizing, with his amusing but straight-faced pedagogical foppishness, Proust's healing, advisory aspects, does us the service of rereading him on our behalf, providing of that vast sacred lake a sweet and lucid distillation."
New Yorker - John Updike (06/02/1997)
"For Americans mired in a culture in which 'self-help' is an adjective, a noun and too often an emetic, Mr. de Botton's book, a self-help manual for the intelligent person, is a welcome departure from the usual bellyaching....'How Proust Can Change Your Life' is witty, funny and tonic--and it provides ample justification for all the college courses that make Proust required reading. Mr. de Botton reminds us that 'A la Recherche du Temps Perdu', like all great literature, isn't' just a means of garnering academic credits..."
New York Times Book Review - Frank Gannon (06/15/1997)
"Ultimately, 'How Proust Can Change Your Life' suggests that the pleasure of Proust lies not so much in discovery as in recognition, and even that all these moral niceties are simply pretexts for those wonderful, serpentine sentences."
Times Literary Supplement - Graham Robb (04/25/1997)
"For the era of the self-help bestseller, novelist de Botton delivers a witty, entertaining literary appreciation of the author of 'Remembrance of Things Past'....This blend...is not as unserious as it appears....For a painless crib, de Botton's tongue-in-cheek tract beats out Harold Bloom on the Western canon and David Denby on Great Books..."
Oakes
"[A]s well as being criticism, biography, literary history and a reader's guide to Proust's masterpiece, 'How Proust Can Change Your Life' is a self-help book in the deepest sense of the term. My goodness; it may even change your life....By characterizing 'In Search of Lost Time' with amusing superficiality, he has succeeded in showing us some of the novel's greatest depths."
Lehmann-Haupt
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