Product Description

This book is a magisterial account of the life and times of Marcel Proust, one of the greatest literary voices of the twentieth century. Based on a host of recently available letters, memoirs, and manuscripts, it sheds new light on Proust's character, his development as an artist, and his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time (long known in English as Remembrance of Things Past). The biography also sets Proust's life in the decadent artistic and social context of the French fin de sihcle and the years leading up to World War I. The glittering Parisian world of which Proust was a part was also home to such luminaries as Anatole France, Jean Cocteau, and Andri Gide. William Carter brings this vibrant social world to life while he explores the inner world of Proust's intellectual and artistic development, as well as his most intimate personal experience. Carter examines Proust's passionate attachment to his mother, his deep love for the scenes of his youth, his flirtation with Parisian high society, his complicated sexual desires, and his irrevocable commitment to literary truth and shows how all these played out in the making of his great novel. In the book's abundance of detail, its wealth of anecdotes, quoted letters, and recovered conversations many of them appearing in English for the first time Proust comes alive as never before.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #194829 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 960 pages

From Publishers Weekly
When the newly famous Marcel Proust (1871-1922) consented to an interview after winning the prestigious Prix Goncourt toward the end of his life, he modestly claimed he had spent the previous 15 years "entirely in bed." It was, of course, during this time that he began his quasi-autobiographic masterpiece, A la recherche du temps perdu. While Proust mythologized his life more than his writing, University of Alabama French professor Carter (The Proustian Quest), in the longest biography yet of the novelist, methodically takes account of both. Proust's voluminous social diary, his numerous friendships and his close relationship with his mother all inspired his great novel, as recounted here, but Carter also argues that Proust's earlier writings, often viewed as dilettantish, in fact led him progressively to write his masterpiece by virtue of the discipline they imposed. Carter comprehensively examines these early projects, from the abandoned novel, Jean Santeuil, and some pseudonymous society columns to Proust's idiosyncratic critique of the great 19th-century literary critic Sainte-Beuve. Excavating biographic details out of such material as untranslated memoirs and recently collected letters, Carter meticulously, often mundanely, accounts for the daily affairs of this social butterfly-turned-hypochondriac and shut-in. Proust's romances and infatuations, his political action during the Dreyfus affair, and his literary runs-ins with Anatole France and Andr? Gide, as well as larger issues such as his homosexuality, all receive lengthy treatment. Yet despite the impressive Proustian detail that Carter amasses, the biography still only skims the depths that flow from the author's life into his timeless novel. Illus. not seen by PW. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Carter braves the ascent of one of the highest peaks in world literature, retracing the lifetime of Marcel Proust, from the formative lessons he received as a child at his sensitive mother's knee to his lofty final achievement in publishing, The Search for Lost Time (generally known in the English-speaking world as Remembrance of Things Past). Newly available correspondence and memoirs provide revealing details of Proust's complicated Parisian social life, his intimacies with male lovers, his disputes with critics and other writers. These same sources also clarify the great difficulties (poor health, editorial skepticism) Proust surmounted in publishing his masterpiece. But it is in limning the erratic and surprisingly slow development of Proust's creative powers that Carter best demonstrates his own considerable gift. He deftly reveals how Proust's artistic talents--finally at full strength in his multivolume Remembranceenabled him to fathom the mysteries of memory, revealing not only how memory recalls the past but how in rare and luminous moments it transforms that past into living meaning. The serious readers attracted to Proust's brilliant novel will thank Carter for illuminating the life that produced it. Bryce Christensen

From Kirkus Reviews
A masterful life of the eccentric pioneer who mapped the modern mind in Remembrance of Things Past (more accurately translated here as In Search of Lost Time), by the noted Proust scholar (French/Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham; The Proustian Quest, not reviewed). In seeking to reveal how one of the centurys towering novelists (18711922) ``came to produce what is arguably the most brilliant, sustained prose narration in the history of literature, Carter has produced a long, loving annotation to the autobiographical In Search. He explores his subject with a scholar's care, a novelist's eye, and a generous tolerance for readers without French. His hero is invariably ill, most often with asthma, a condition he exacerbates with drugs, a nocturnal lifestyle, and an erratic diet (in his last days he consumes only ice cream and beer; his death follows his adamant refusal to accept medical treatment for pneumonia). Proust's legendary eccentricities are on full display: his cork-lined living quarters (to ensure the quiet he craves), his vampirish avoidance of daylight, his endless revisions of his texts (In Search requires ``one of the most demanding productions in the history of publishing''), and his prodigality (he recklessly spends nearly all of his enormous inheritance). Noting the fascination of Prousts lifestyle for contemporary readers, Carter labors to explain his complicated sexuality (he fights a duel with a reviewer who has suggested he is gay, but he also pursues young men, regarding waiters at the Ritz as a particular delicacy) and is determined to establish that Proust ``never attempted to deny his Jewish heritage.'' Not even Carter's considerable narrative gifts, however, can make Proust's bedridden later years, marked by a contentious, complicated correspondence with his publisher, as compelling as his early, more extroverted life. A prodigious work, rich and racy, informed by fact, animated by imagination, utterly worthy of its wondrous subject. (47 illus., not seen) -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.