4thace reviewed How Proust can change your life by Alain de Botton
Review of 'How Proust can change your life' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
The author has been criticized for some of his philosophical and metaphysical work (both video and written), but I think this book is not one of the more high-profile targets.
I was interested in reading it after some years ago reading all of In Search of Lost Time. He draws quite a bit from Proust's letters and essays separate from his novels, which I think helped me to understand why certain themes were so prominent. For me, the best chapter was the one entitled "How to Open Your Eyes" which makes sense of the painstaking descriptions of scene, his fascination with artists and art critics such as Ruskin, and his attraction to portrayals of the most mundane but telling details to illuminate an aspect of character. He describes the main characters in In Search of Lost Time in broad strokes and does a pretty good job of explaining what led …
The author has been criticized for some of his philosophical and metaphysical work (both video and written), but I think this book is not one of the more high-profile targets.
I was interested in reading it after some years ago reading all of In Search of Lost Time. He draws quite a bit from Proust's letters and essays separate from his novels, which I think helped me to understand why certain themes were so prominent. For me, the best chapter was the one entitled "How to Open Your Eyes" which makes sense of the painstaking descriptions of scene, his fascination with artists and art critics such as Ruskin, and his attraction to portrayals of the most mundane but telling details to illuminate an aspect of character. He describes the main characters in In Search of Lost Time in broad strokes and does a pretty good job of explaining what led the author to put them through their trials and triumphs by connecting their stories to the esthetic and moral obsessions he had. You begin to understand what made Proust such a fussy eccentric to some extent by following the arguments he makes through to their conclusions. If friendship and honesty are fundamentally conflicting ideals, how does a person function in society?
I enjoyed reading this and thinking about those books of Proust I read. I am not certain whether this would be a really good introduction to Proust for someone coming to them for the first time, though, because he doesn't really address the extreme bulkiness of the series of books and say whether it was necessary or desirable. I actually don't recall whether he says anything about incidents in the last few books so it would be hard to know for certain whether he's actually read past Swann's Way and The Guermantes Way himself. But clearly it would have been a less inspiring title to have this be called "How the First Two Books of Proust's Can Change Your Life."
