How Proust Can Change Your Life

Botton, Alain De

3.76

17,477 ratings by Goodreads

9781486219421: How Proust Can Change Your Life

ISBN 10: 148621942X ISBN 13: 9781486219421

Publisher: Bolinda Audio, 2014

For anyone who ever wondered what Marcel Proust had in mind when he wrote the one-and-a-quarter-million words of In Search of Lost Time (while bedridden no less), Alain de Botton has the answer. For, in this stylish, erudite and frequently hilarious book, de Botton dips deeply into Proust's life and work - his fiction, letter, and conversations - and distils from them that rare self-help manual: one that is actually helpful. Here, tendered in prose almost as luminous as it's subject?s, is advice on cultivating friendships, suffering successfully, recognising love and understanding why you should never sleep with someone on the first date. And here, too, is a generously perceptive literary biography that suggests that the master is as relevant today as he was in fin de si?cle Paris.

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Review:

"This engaging book is one of the most entertaining pieces of literary criticism I have read in a long while." (The Sunday Telegraph)

"De Botton's little book is so charming, amusing and sensible that it may even itself change your life." (The Daily Telegraph)

"A self-help manual for the intelligent person . . . witty, funny, and tonic." (The New York Times Book Review)

"Delightfully original. . . . As well as being criticism, biography, literary history and a reader's guide to Proust's masterpiece, How Proust Can Change Your Life is a self-help book in the deepest sense of the term." (The New York Times)

"Curious, humorous, didactic and dazzling. . . . It contains more human interest and play of fancy than most fiction." (The New Yorker)

"This is a genius-level piece of writing that manages to blend literary biography with self-help and tongue-in-cheek with the profound. The quirky, early 1900s French author Marcel Proust acts as the vessel for surprisingly impressive nuggets of wisdom on down-to-earth topics such as why you should never sleep with someone on the first date, how to protect yourself against lower back pain, and how to cope with obnoxious neighbors. Here's proof that our ancestors had just as much insight as the gurus du jour and perhaps a lot more wit. De Botton simultaneously pokes fun at the self-help movement and makes a significant contribution to its archives." (Amazon)

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