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Proust: The Search
"Taylor's endeavor is not to explain the life by the novel or the novel by the life but to show how different events, different emotional upheavals, fired Proust's imagination and, albeit sometimes completely transformed, appeared in his work. The result is a very subtle, thought-provoking book."--Anka Muhlstein, author of Balzac's Omelette and Monsieur Proust's Library
Marcel Proust came into his own as a novelist comparatively late in life, yet only Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky were his equals when it came to creating characters as memorably human. As biographer Benjamin Taylor suggests, Proust was a literary lightweight before writing his multivolume masterwork In Search of Lost Time, but following a series of momentous historical and personal events, he became--against all expectations--one of the greatest writers of his, and indeed any, era.
This insightful, beautifully written biography examines Proust's artistic struggles--the "search" of the subtitle--and stunning metamorphosis in the context of his times. Taylor provides an in-depth study of the author's life while exploring how Proust's personal correspondence and published works were greatly informed by his mother's Judaism, his homosexuality, and such dramatic events as the Dreyfus Affair and, above all, World War I. As Taylor writes in his prologue, "Proust's Search is the most encyclopedic of novels, encompassing the essentials of human nature. . . . His account, running from the early years of the Third Republic to the aftermath of World War I, becomes the inclusive story of all lives, a colossal mimesis. To read the entire Search is to find oneself transfigured and victorious at journey's end, at home in time and in eternity too."
Book Details
- Publisher: Yale University Press
- Publish Date: Nov 22nd, 2016
- Pages: 224
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.20in - 5.60in - 0.50in - 0.50lb
- EAN: 9780300224283
- Categories: • Literary Figures• Religious• Jewish
About the Author
More books by Benjamin Taylor
What people are saying
Scott Simon is a writer and broadcaster.
We speak with our friend @felixmehmel (Benjamin Taylor, The Search) on Proust, 100 years after his passing (Proust, that is; Ben, bless him, still with us): https://t.co/R4ck8FjDno
Biographies that illuminate the Jewish experience. A partnership of @YalePress and the Leon D. Black Foundation.
Proust's doctors considered him a hypochondriac. His attention to the detail of the everyday is part of his literary legacy. Learn more in “Proust: The Search” by Benjamin Taylor: https://t.co/TtCWR3rdH0 https://t.co/Ppb3WlnFI8
RTs are not endorsements, Likes mean my thumb slipped. https://t.co/Xybpa3r1kg @StevenStrauss at https://t.co/HWU76ee0h6 @StevenStrauss@mastodon.social
Proust's banker: "I am quite happy to allow you to plunge body and soul into the Absolute, but only when you have paid back all your overdrafts.”" (Benjamin Taylor, Proust)
Praise for this book
"This engaging book, invitingly elegant to handle with its beautiful deckle-edged pages, should encourage those who have quailed at the thought of Proust's colossus to have another go."--John Carey, Sunday Times
"Taylor's loose, multi-clausal sentences are as bendy as the master's, and there is the same shimmery quality to the prose, like sunlight glancing off a shallow Normandy sea."--Kathryn Hughes, Guardian
"An excellent brief biography of Proust."--Andrea Barrett, New York Times Book Review
"Taylor's slim and elegant biography will bring new readers to Proust, and remind us to see him as a true modern."--Ingrid Wassenaar, Times Literary Supplement
"An important contribution to the study of this complex individual. . . . A riveting summary of the rampant anti-Semitism found in late 19th-century France. . . . Excellent analysis of the Dreyfus affair and how it split French society. . . . A noteworthy biography of a great writer."--Library Journal
"A sensitive study of literature's favorite neurasthenic. . . . Readers of Proust will be fascinated to find clues as to who his characters were in real life, and they should be moved to appreciation by Taylor's assessment of Proust's accomplishment. . . . A densely packed and rewarding book."--Kirkus Reviews
"Taylor expertly deconstructs where the similarities between Proust's fictional self and real-life self begin and end. . . . A deep analysis of Proust's masterpiece and a biography of Proust the man, Taylor proves, are one and the same."--Shelf Awareness
"Those who found reading Proust too grand an undertaking over the years because of distractions and deficiencies of their own, might well rush to reconsider after confronting this dazzlingly elegant biography."--Philip Roth
"Taylor's endeavor is not to explain the life by the novel or the novel by the life but to show how different events, different emotional upheavals, fired Proust's imagination and, albeit sometimes completely transformed, appeared in his work. The result is a very subtle, thought-provoking book."--Anka Muhlstein, author of Balzac's Omelette and Monsieur Proust's Library
What people are saying
Scott Simon is a writer and broadcaster.
We speak with our friend @felixmehmel (Benjamin Taylor, The Search) on Proust, 100 years after his passing (Proust, that is; Ben, bless him, still with us): https://t.co/R4ck8FjDno
Biographies that illuminate the Jewish experience. A partnership of @YalePress and the Leon D. Black Foundation.
Proust's doctors considered him a hypochondriac. His attention to the detail of the everyday is part of his literary legacy. Learn more in “Proust: The Search” by Benjamin Taylor: https://t.co/TtCWR3rdH0 https://t.co/Ppb3WlnFI8