Title: How Proust Can Change Your Life (Goodreads)
Author: Alain de Bottom
Published: Picador, 1997
Pages: 215
Genres: Non-Fiction
My Copy: Library Book
Buy: Amazon, Book Depository, Kindle (or visit your local Indie bookstore)
À la recherche du temps perdu or In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust is probably the one book all bookish people are afraid to tackle. It is only a few pretentious people that have actually read it, and I plan to be one of them. Alain de Bottom has put together a collection of essays on what Proust can offer to today’s readers.
In my reading slump, which I’m debating whether it was real or not, I only felt like reading non-fiction. I picked this book because I felt like this would be a quick read and I was interested to know more about Proust and the book In Search of Lost Time. This book doesn’t really offer any good insights to these two topics. I think this is a book designed to try and convince people into reading In Search of Lost Time but I feel that anyone reading this one would have or are planning to read it anyway.
There is a little about the life of Marcel Proust, but only enough to give you a small taste. This left me more intrigued by the man and wanting to read a biography. De Bottom left me confused about the life of Proust and I had too many questions left unanswered. This really didn’t help this book at all, especially since Proust is an enigma (to me) and the tiny parts he shared about his life didn’t explain anything.
When it came to talking about À la recherche du temps perdu I was left thinking about the Monty Python skit about the “Summarise Proust Competition” where each contestant is given 15 seconds to try and summarise In Search of Lost Time (all seven volumes). In fact this skit was mentioned in this book as well, but trying to condense 4,000+ pages in 200 pages is not effective. My understanding of In Search for Lost Time, is that it is incredibly complex, intricate and descriptive, not a book you can summarise.
I feel like this was almost pointless, it left me with too many unanswered thoughts and no real answers. I’m none the wiser about Proust or In Search of Lost Time. There were some antidotes that were interesting but all in all, I feel like I wasted my time. I want to work my way through the seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time but I’m not sure if I can manage it. I wonder if anyone has any tips; reading this book wasn’t the answer.
Now that November is coming to an end, I feel like I need to breathe a sigh of relief. I feel like I’ve been in a major reading slump during this month, but on reflecting it wasn’t as bad as I originally thought, there was a period of a few weeks where I struggled to finish anything but in the end I was able to manage nine books; not too bad.