Reviews

Marcel Proust: A Life by William C. Carter

ladydewinter's review against another edition

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5.0

A fantastic biography. It’s the first about Proust that I‘ve read, so it’s difficult to judge in terms of the substance (though the fact that it comes very well reviewed speaks for itself, I think) but it’s incredibly well-written. You get a good sense of what Proust was like as a person, and Carter manages to give the context needed to get more out of Proust‘s writing.

franfernandezarce's review against another edition

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5.0

at last, it is done. it took me a little over a month but i did it. it is finished and i can proudly say i did not skip a single page. and it was amazing. unlike the [b:Leonardo da Vinci|34684622|Leonardo da Vinci|Walter Isaacson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1523543570s/34684622.jpg|55861438] biography i tried and failed to connect with at the start of the year, this biography was just the right type of a life's retelling i could have read. not only because it has helped me to understand proust's novels better, or at least from a more humane perspective, but also because it made feel for him.

i just couldn't help it. i laughed at his silly habits and stubborness at the beginning just as much as it saddened me to read about the same stubborness that drove him to his death years afterwards. and isn't that the greatest goal (or at least measuring point) for any good (or memorable) biography? to make your subject come alive not only as an interesting specimen, unique and worthy enough of one's time and curiosity, but as a human being? a human being that matters not because of whatever great achievement he might have done during his lifetime but because he lived just like you and me do every single day.

and now, as i've come to the end of this side of the story, i feel more than ready and excited to carry on with in search of lost time, to take one after the other volume until i can properly say that i know a bit more of proust-the-artist as i have known proust-the-person

p.s. also, i think it should be worthy to note that apparently EVERYONE was queer back in paris during the early twentieth century. honestly.

jdukuray's review

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5.0

This is a 5-star biography. Marcel Proust was the strangest man I have ever encountered--in life or in literature, and throughout the first quarter or third of the biography, I found him so exasperating that I wasn't sure I could continue. Both he and his Belle Epoque era seemed so fussy, artificial, self-absorbed that I wanted to smack him and it, but I was on a mission to read the biography in preparation for tackling the novel that was his life's work.

At about the point where all of France became obsessed with the Dreyfus Affair, my sense of Proust began to soften. He was among the Dreyfusards who supported Dreyfus against the wholly trumped up charges against him, when the lines between the anti-semites and militarists and those who stood against them and for justice began to emerge. There was a moral hook to hang one's hat on. It also became clearer that, ultimately, Proust's sympathies would not lie with the socialites and aristocrats who so enchanted him as a very young man. These factors opened a way for me to begin to understand Proust. He was rich but not an apologist for aristocracy. He was not a dogmatist and was not to write in support of a political or social ideal. He was, it turns out, a mirror and an author who sought, above all, to portray the truth of human souls as he uncovered those truths in his hyper-attentive experience of others. As his life continued he became only more of an eccentric, a piece of work, both challenging and adored by most who knew him. As he spent most of his later life sick and in bed--seeming like the most intransigent of hypochondriacs (and not just to me), he turned himself inside out, he poured himself out, he quite literally gave his life to his book.

Some of Proust's eccentricities were amusing. Here’s a quotation from the biography (p. 712), from around 1920, when Proust was awarded the Prix Goncourt. It made me laugh out loud:

"Jean Binet-Valmer, a conservative critic and militarist, praised elements of Proust’s work but thought it was “prewar”. He would have favored giving the Prix Goncourt to Swann’s Way in 1913 but blamed the Académie Goncourt for passing over Dorgelés’ patriotic novel for one whose morality appeared suspect. Proust wrote Binet-Valmer that he was eager to read Dorgelés’ novel once his sight improved: “Since I have not been well enough to go see an optometrist, I’m going to buy all kinds of glasses, and if I succeed in finding the right lenses, I will read ... Les Croix de Bois.”

He had indeed refused to get out of bed to see an eye doctor and directed his house-keeper to buy a lot of glasses from which he would try to find one that would provide the correction he needed. His response to Binet-Valmer also contains, between the lines, a jab at and dismissal of both the criticism and the other novel. For all his weird ways, Proust was strong: not the servant of himself (or others) but always and only of his great novel.

Carter has written a great, exhaustive (but not exhausting!) biography. He brought me around to find more sympathy for Proust. Proust's behavior was often exasperating and infuriating to those around him. And yet he was loved. It's harder to see that side of him. What was it? His courtesy, his brilliance, his kindness, eventually his manifest genius as his novel was published in stages? I don't know what it was, but the evidence is clear from the letters, the attention, and the behavior of his friends, family, and retainers. And so, the story of his death was achingly sweet and painful. Man Ray took a photo of him on his death bed and James Joyce apparently showed up at his funeral. And A La Recherche du Temps Perdu has made him immortal.