| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Marcel Proust: A Life (Penguin Lives Biographies) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
White's elegant and incisive prose evident here in his evocation of Proust's characteristically neurotic obsessions allows us that rare opportunity of perceiving how one distinguished novelist writes about another. This is White's Proust, and so the conception is of value to literature. White succeeds in getting under Proust's skin, and by virtue of uncanny empathy reads his subject with the familiarity of one profoundly psychological writer resonating with another. White understands that 'Every autobiographical novel inevitably mixes harsh truths about its first-person hero with a bit of wish fulfilment.'
If Proust's forté was to apprehend the psychological building blocks out of which the twentieth-century was to be constructed, then he achieved this through what he called 'involuntary memory', or the unconscious. White is good on this crucial aspect of Proust, for it was the writer's facility to establish an interface between buried associations and their reappearance in the light of memory which was to prove the basis on which A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu was created.
That Proust delayed entry to his work, and assumed initially a secretive and avocational approach to writing, Jean Santeuil being the blueprint for the open-ended masterpiece to follow, was due in part to his fear that once he showed commitment to his work, his life would irretrievably change. White apprehends the problem with intuitive insightfulness, discerning that 'Like the man who supersititously refuses to write a will out of an acknowledged fear that by doing so he will soon be signing his death warrent, in the same way Proust fancied that so long as he failed to begin his life's work, his life would go on.'
White is fascinating on Proust's series of clandestine male lovers. If Marcel was adept at gender-bending for the sake of propriety in his novel - White points out that most of Marcel's female characters are 'boys in drag' - then his private life was equally complex. Proust conducted an intense affair with the musician Reynaldo Hahn in the years between 1894-96, and was to make Hahn the lifelong recipient of his gay confidences. White quotes Proust as writing to Hahn after the death of his secretary Alfred Agostinelli, to confide: 'I truly loved Alfred. It's not enough to say I loved him. I adored him.' And when Proust was to fall in love with a young man named Albert Nahmias, he was to go so far as to write: 'If I could only change my sex, face and age and take on the looks of a young and pretty woman so that I could kiss you with all of my heart.'
Proust was a neurotic obsessive who lived largely with the expectation of an early death. Even before Proust began work on Rememberance of Things Past, he was as White draws to our attention spending about £ 12,000 a year for medicines. By 1909 he had withdrawn from society in order to devote himself entirely to work and for the next thirteen years he immersed himself in the solitary labour of reinventing his life through supremely imaginative fiction.
White's streamlined life of Proust is a blueprint for good biography. Serious, vivacious, racy, its publication is a literary event.
JEREMY REED
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
