Living and Dying with Marcel Proust
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Editors’ Choice
A Publisher’s Weekly Most Anticipated Book of 2022
Living and Dying with Marcel Proust is the result of a lifetime’s reading of, reflection on, and love for Proust’s masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time.
One of the masterpieces of twentieth-century fiction, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time describes a unique journey, combining elements drawn from the timeless narratives of great expectations and lost illusions. In this lively and entertaining book, Christopher Prendergast traces that journey as it unfolds on an arc defined by the polarities in his title: living and dying.
At once a careful contemplation Proust’s masterwork and an exploration of the rich sensory and impressionistic tapestry of a lived world, Living and Dying with Marcel Proust addresses such disparate Proustian obsessions as insomnia, food, digestion, color, addiction, memory, breath and breathing, breasts, snobbism, music, and humor.
Entertaining and erudite, Prendergast’s book will surely become the companion for all readers either about to reembark on Proust’s three-million-word journey or setting out for the first time.
“Splendid... Reading [it] feels like, say, seeing all of Venice in a gondola, seated beside a patient, smiling, all-knowing art historian.”—Edmund White, The New York Times Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Prendergast (Counterfactuals), the general editor of Penguin's English reissues of Proust's work, sheds light on the novelist's rich sensory world in this bibliophile's treasure chest. Focusing on In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu in the original French), Prendergast lays out a Proustian feast in each chapter. "Pinks" examines color in Proust's writing (he called pink the "color of life"); "The Proust Effect" looks at the "strenuous work of forgetting and remembering" in Proust's sentences; and in "Death and Black Holes," Prendergast posits that "The world of the Recherche is accordingly death-haunted from start to finish." Prendergast comments on the structure of the work, too (it "remains loyal to the tradition" of a bildungsroman) , and gets into some linguistic nitty-gritty: the word life "recurs with even greater frequency" than the word time in Recherche. Well-chosen quotes enrich the text—Prendergast notes a particular description of a lunch as an example of Proust finding "the profound in things"—as does Prendergast's dry humor: he imagines Proust "choking on his croissant" over the thought of his novel functioning as a "how-to manual... about how to stop wasting one's life." This one's not to be missed.
