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How Proust Can Change Your Life

By Alain de Botton

(40)

| Hardcover | 9780679442752

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Book Description

Alain de Botton combines two unlikely genres--literary biography and self-help manual--in the hilarious and unexpectedly practical How Proust Can Change Your Life.

Who would have thought that Marcel Proust, one of the most important writers of our century, could provide us with such a rich soContinue

Alain de Botton combines two unlikely genres--literary biography and self-help manual--in the hilarious and unexpectedly practical How Proust Can Change Your Life.

Who would have thought that Marcel Proust, one of the most important writers of our century, could provide us with such a rich source of insight into how best to live life? Proust understood that the essence and value of life was the sum of its everyday parts. As relevant today as they were at the turn of the century, Proust's life and work are transformed here into a no-nonsense guide to, among other things, enjoying your vacation, reviving a relationship, achieving original and unclichéd articulation, being a good host, recognizing love, and understanding why you should never sleep with someone on a first date. It took de Botton to find the inspirational in Proust's essays, letters and fiction and, perhaps even more surprising, to draw out a vivid and clarifying portrait of the master from between the lines of his work.

Here is Proust as we have never seen or read him before: witty, intelligent, pragmatic. He might well change your life.

The paperback edition of How Proust Can Change Your Life will be available in May 1998.

Critics

  • Marcel Proust was cooler than you are. A Review of How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton. Share

    Harry's got sort of a wonky cross, that's 'trials and suffering'. And that there could be the sun and thats 'happiness'. So you're gonna suffer but you'll be happy about it -- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Born on July 10, 1871, Valentin ... (read full critics)

    blogcritics published on Sun, 9 Jan 2005

3 Reviews

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  • 1 person find this helpful

    Philosophy meets sarcasm

    I was expecting a self-help book drawing lessons from Proust's literature. Instead I find that Proust was by all accounts a hypochondriac, and the self-help seems to be mainly of the nature of "don't be like Proust"

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    peripatetic said on Sep 23, 2008 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

  • Accessible and enjoyable

    The chapter headings act as good reminders for me and add the the general message I took from the book. To take time to enjoy things, to search for a true and authentic expression of one's thoughts and feelings. They might sound quite haughty ambitions, but the book made them very accessible and ach ... (continue)

    The chapter headings act as good reminders for me and add the the general message I took from the book. To take time to enjoy things, to search for a true and authentic expression of one's thoughts and feelings. They might sound quite haughty ambitions, but the book made them very accessible and achievable by introducing a Proustian philosophy.

    Made me want to go and read Proust too.

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    Mearso said on Feb 17, 2010 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

  • this one is not as gd as other later bks by Alain, but it tempts me into reading Proust's In Search of Time Lost...though its length definitely discourages me to even start reading!

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    Shermaine said on Oct 13, 2009 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

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