Marcel Proust

by Ingrid Wassenaar

This title is an introduction to the life and works of Marcel Proust. It explores his ideas on topics such as memory and sexuality. Proust is portrayed as a writer who has influenced the way literature is approached and the way we think about ourselves.

1119 pages, Paperback

First published January 23, 2001

Reviews

[for-much-deliberation ...]

A thorough overview of Proust. This guide presents all the relevant essentials for comfortably proceeding with an exploration of his work...

[John]

Not sure why Goodreads files this under "unknown author." This 2000 entry in Hodder + Stoughton's Beginners Guides anticipated the post-millennial demand for simplification of complexity. But given nearly all of us, at least non-Francophones raised in less demanding educational settings, appraised of more "equitable" criteria to speed us from classroom into cubicle, and crazed by postmodern rants about the hegemony imposed by European white males, suffer diminished vim when left to flail in one of the longest fictional streams of consciousness bequeathed a century ago: want handy water wings?

Wassenaar's brisk, no-nonsense primer provides useful metaphors. Dehydrated food, H2O, WWW and hypertext, a folding fan, binoculars, and a handy p.47 napkin-like diagram of the course of Recherché embody her approach. And comparing, she stresses, underlies the entire project Proust engineered. He insisted on self-analysis, even if he never, she claims, read Freud. He teaches us how to parse truth and sift fantasy as we ponder involuntary recollections and willed memory. How to discern unreliable narratives we conjure up. How to hack through uncomfortable recrimination and crippling mourning.

I'm pairing this with two subsequent handbooks, Patrick Alexander and Steve Bachmann's. Purists or snobs sniff at training wheels, but with but wobbly French fluency, this lexical toddler shouldn't be pushed up onto unicycles. I'd counsel editorial excision of superfluous, silly cartoons (ditto Buchman); l'Affaire Dreyfuss, the Jewish Question, and arrivistes as class bounders post-1871 deserve expansion. Still, designed for the rapidly depleted ranks of conscripts into the literature ranks, this big-print, bullet-point, if too over-easy illustrated book(let, nearly) may prove a tonic to gin up callow troops.

Preparing to embark on my own Proustian quest, having ordered six paperbacks, I discovered how the famous opening vignette, the falling asleep at Combray, prefigures his entire investigation. That the conclusion and beginning were both penned together in 1910-11, enabling Proust to start stitching the intervening sections. What Wassenaar likens to a dressmaker's assemblage into a seamless flowing.

And given personal circumstances, the evocation of immersion into a psychologically intricate deep dive (given intellectual novels about historical, cultural, religious, and social movements tend to attract me; Ulysses is my favorite fictional experience; I've put off Proust far too long) as mental mapping might help me heal from loss. How many Great Books fizzle, prematurely being assigned?

In hard-won or bitterly lost life lessons, sage reflections of the intrepid who've preceded us a few decades (well, Proust died of pneumonia at 51; coddled in his cork-walled bedroom fifteen years, supposedly, couldn't have helped prospects) may ease our struggles as we rage against the dying of the light, fantastic, andphantasmic. And patience, cultivated by "Marcel," remains a vanishing virtue.

[Kajah]

While I already knew most of the information in this book, it does a good job of concisely putting Proust's life and his work into the greater literary and historical context, which is perfect for starting a research paper. Very helpful, though paradoxically, if you're a "beginner" I would actually not read this as it would spoil much of In Search of Lost Time for you.

[Peter Thompson]

Completely misses key elements of the text. I pity the beginner who begins with this text. Avoid.