Proust can change your life and de Botton does a nice job getting you started. This book may serve as an introduction to Proust' life or to his great work "In Search of Lost Time". Publishing that must have been a real nightmare, since Proust's edits seem endless. The chapters in de Botton's book are named in a "On How to live life today, How to suffer successfully and on How to be a good friend" fashion and all very readworthy.
De Bottom even touches on topics like "A cure for loneliness" and "The Benefits of Reading"
and "Mistaking Writers for Oracles". It also includes details like how Proust met with Joyce at the Ritz and Virginia Woolf's reaction to Proust' writing (e.g. "well, what remains to be written after that"...).
Reading this book was a long overdue and it was a pleasure indeed. I should have written this review in a Proustian style, but that would be rather unworthy of the master himself, or even De Botton's work. I look forward to a reread, and to the masterwork itself.
...ContinuaThe 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.
...Continuathis 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!
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"
