How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a NovelAlain 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, Proust's life and work are transformed here into a no-nonsense guide to, among other things, enjoying your vacation, reviving a relationship, achieving original and uncliched 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. The paperback edition of "How Proust Can Change Your Life will be available in May 1998. |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
Albertine André Gide Anna de Noailles appreciation aristocratic artistic asked Aunt Léonie Balbec beauty Blarenberghe bored bourgeois Champs-Élysées chance Chardin chocolate clichés Combray depicted desire dinner dress Duc de Clermont-Tonnerre Duchesse de Guermantes Elstir expressed eyes feel felt Fernand Gregh France Françoise French friendship Ganderax Gaston de Caillavet GEORGES DE LAURIS Guermantes habit happy human Illiers-Combray images imagine inspired interest invited Joyce kiss Le Havre less letter lives look lover Lucien Daudet Madame Straus Madame Verdurin madeleine Maman memory Monsieur mother narrator's never news-in-brief Odette once ourselves pain painter painting Paris perhaps person physical poum problem Proust's narrator Proust's novel Proustian readers reality Reynaldo Hahn Rouen-Rive-Droite Ruskin Search of Lost seaside seems sleep someone spirit suffering suggests Swann talk tell things thought tion turn understanding volume woman write wrote young