Monsieur Proust's Library

by MUHLSTEIN, ANKA

• ISBN13: 9781590515662
• ISBN10: 1590515668
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-11-06
• Publisher: Other Press

Summary

Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a fictional personage without a book in hand. Two hundred of his creatures inhabit his fictional world, and sixty writers hover over them. These writers--among them various classical authors of the seventeenth century such as Mme de Sévigné the letter-writer, Racine the playwright, Saint-Simon the memoirist, and novelists and poets of the nineteenth century, including Balzac, Baudelaire and Dostoevsky--are not there for show; their works play an active role in the construction of In Search of Lost Time. A life without books was inconceivable for Proust. Not surprisingly, he made literary taste and reading habits a primary means of defining his characters. Everybody in the novel reads: servants and masters, children, parents and grandparents, artists and physicians, and even generals. Conversations at dinner tables and among friends are mostly literary. The more sophisticated characters find it natural to speak in quotations, and quoting from memory is much appreciated in the narrator's family--his grandmother, grandfather, and mother all excel at this pastime. Literature is omnipresent in Proust's work but takes many different forms. It may be straightforward when it comes to the books read by the narrator and other characters; it may be a tool used to define the personality of a personage, a clue to hidden traits of character, or a comical ploy when quotations are taken out of context or when turns of speech are directly inspired by classical writers. In this wonderfully entertaining book, scholar and biographer Anka Muhlstein, the author of Balzac's Omelette, draws out these themes in Proust's work and life, thus providing an indispensable introduction to his long and intricate novel. More Praise for Balzac's Omelette: "Original, delectable, and entirely readable." -- Washington Post "Scholarly yet escapist . . . irresistible." -- Daily Beast " Balzac's Omelette. . . is a charming and modest little book." -- New York Review of Books

Author Biography

Anka Muhlstein was born in Paris in 1935. Muhlstein has published biographies of Queen Victoria, James de Rothschild, Cavelier de La Salle, and Astolphe de Custine; studies on Catherine de Médicis, Marie de Médicis, and Anne of Austria; a double biography, Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart; and most recently, Balzac’s Omelette (Other Press). She has won two prizes from the Académie française and the Goncourt Prize for Biography. She and her husband, Louis Begley, have written a book on Venice, Venice for Lovers. They live in New York City.

Excerpts

How did Proust read? As a child, like all of us: for the plot and characters. But even at a very young age he was outraged by the fact that grownups considered reading as something one did to amuse oneself. “My great-aunt,” he recalled inDays of Reading,“would say to me, ‘How can you go on amusing yourself with a book; it isn’t Sunday, you know!’ putting into the word ‘amusing’ an implication of childishness and waste of time.” For little Marcel, reading was not fun; it was traumatic. He cried at the end of every book and was unable to go to sleep, desolate at the idea of leaving the characters he had grown attached to: “These people for whom one has gasped or sobbed, one will know nothing more of them […] one would have so liked for the book to continue.”
   Proust read as a moralist, in the sense that reading could lead to greater self-knowledge, a salutary discipline sometimes necessary to shock a lazy mind into action. And he read as a novelist, an artisan of the written word, endlessly analyzing the style and technique of other authors, whether he liked their work or not. Finally, Proust read as a homosexual, extremely sensitive to all transgressions and ambiguities of gender.
   The scope of his reading was too vast to allow for a list of favorites. All the writers who are important to the characters in the novel are French, but Proust, although he did not read English with ease, had a special affinity for British and American literature and was greatly influenced by them. “It is curious that in all the different genres, from George Eliot to Hardy, from Stevenson to Emerson, there is no literature which has had as much hold on me as English or American literature. Germany, Italy, very often France leave me indifferent but two pages ofThe Mill on the Flossreduce me to tears,” he wrote.