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How Proust Can Change Your Life (Paperback)
by Alain De Botton
| Category:
Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Fiction, Self help |
| Market price: ¥ 138.00
MSL price:
¥ 118.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
A genius-level piece of writing, this beautiful book is extremely erudite and entertaining. |
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Author: Alain De Botton
Publisher: Vintage
Pub. in: April, 1998
ISBN: 0679779159
Pages: 208
Measurements: 8 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA01442
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0679779155
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- Awards & Credential -
From the bestselling author of The Art of Travel. |
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- MSL Picks -
This book deserves all the praise it has received. It does something I've never been able to do when talking to friends: it articulates the value of reading and studying literature. You don't have to have read In Search ofF Lost Time to enjoy this book. In fact, de Botton could probably have subsituted Joyce, Faulkner, or Woolf for Proust and produced a similar study. The self-help format seems appropriate (even if sardonically intended). De Botton seems to be directly addressing (and at times challenging) the earnestness of people who turn to books to improve themselves (and who expect books to show them the best way to improve those around them). My favorite chapters were "How to Suffer Successfully" and "How to Be a Good Friend." The final chapter, "How to Put Down Books," should probably be photocopied and stapled to the door of every library and bookstore. I cautions us against bibliolatry.
One tiny gripe. De Botton does not always identify the works he is quoting from. We don't need to know specific page numbers, but it would be nice to know if a quotation is from one of the volumes of In Search ofF Lost Time, or from an essay or letter. In one case, I wasn't sure if the quote was Proust's or Ruskin's.
(From quoting Charles Houser, USA)
Target readers:
General readers.
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Alain de Botton was born in 1969. He is the author of the novels On Love, The Romantic Movement, and Kiss and Tell; his work has been translated into sixteen languages. He lives in Washington, D.C., and London.
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From Publisher
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, 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 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.
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Following is an excerpt from Chapter 8, "How to be Happy in Love":
Q: Did Proust have any relevant thoughts on dating? What should one talk about on a first date?
A: Advice is scant. A more fundamental doubt is whether one should accept dinner in the first place.
There is no doubt that a person's charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: "No, this evening I shan't be free."
If this response proves bewitching, it is because of the connection made... between appreciation and absence. Though a person may be filled with attributes, an incentive is nevertheless required to ensure that a seducer will focus wholeheartedly on these, an incentive which finds perfect form in
a dinner rebuff.
Q: Was he against sex before marriage?
A: No, just before love. And not for any starchy reasons, simply because he felt it wasn't a good idea to sleep together when encouraging someone to fall in love was a consideration.
Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones.
Q: Surely not?
A: Other women may of course be fascinating, the problem is that they risk not seeming so...
Q: Are there any secrets to long-lasting relationships?
A: Infidelity. Not the act itself, but the threat of it. For Proust, an injection of jealousy is the only thing capable of rescuing a relationship ruined by habit... The threat of losing their partner may lead them to realize that they have not appreciated this person adequately... If someone threatens the relationship, they get jealous, wake up for a moment, have another kiss with the horny tusk, and get bored once more. Condensed into a male heterosexual version, the situation runs like this:
Afraid of losing her, we forget all the others. Sure of keeping her, we compare her with the those others whom at once we prefer to her. |
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The New York Times, USA
<2008-07-16 00:00>
Delightfully original... As 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.
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The New Yorker, USA
<2008-07-16 00:00>
Curious, humorous, didactic and dazzling... It contains more human interest and play of fancy than most fiction. |
The New York Times Book Review, USA
<2008-07-16 00:00>
A self-help manual for the intelligent person... witty, funny, and tonic. |
Publishers Weekly, USA
<2008-07-16 00:00>
Generally writers fall into one of two camps: those who feel that one can't write without having a firm grasp on Proust, and those who, like Virginia Woolf, are crippled by his influence. De Botton, the author of On Love, The Romantic Movement and Kiss and Tell, obviously falls into the former category. But rather than an endless exegesis on memory, de Botton has chosen to weave Proust's life, work, friends and era into a gently irreverent, tongue-in-cheek self-help book. For example, in the chapter titled "How to Suffer Successfully," de Botton lists poor Proust's many difficulties (asthma, "awkward desires," sensitive skin, a Jewish mother, fear of mice), which is essentially a funny way of telling the reader quite a lot about the man's life. Next he moves on to Proust's little thesis that because we only really think when distressed, we shouldn't worry about striving for happiness so much as "pursuing ways to be properly and productively unhappy." De Botton then cheerily judges various characters of A la recherche against their author's maxims. At the beginning, when de Botton drags his own girlfriend into a tortuous and not terribly successful digression, readers may be skeptical, but they will be won over by his whimsical relation of Proust's lessons?essentially an exhortation to slow down, pay attention and learn from life. Is it profound? No. Does this add something new to Proust scholarship? Probably not. But it's a real pleasure to read someone who treats this sacrosanct subject as something that is still vital and vigorous. |
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