The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.57 (781 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1582430551 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 272 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-02-17 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
And even better, she recorded her dogged progress through all seven installments--and her own, shall we say, parallel life--in The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time. But the tone of what I wrote David, although it amused him, was not Proustian. Here, of course, the author is being hard on herself, articulating precisely the sort of complexity that she's supposed to be incapable of. For example, her attempt to tar a friend with the French novelist's paradoxical brush causes her some deep embarrassment: Paradox always leads you to a sort of truth, for it gets at truth's many-sidedness. At the same time, she delivers any number of big-picture truths, occasionally wrapping them in you-know-who's favorite sort of simile: "As at a big party, you approach people you haven't seen in a long time with benevole
Caraculiambro said you gotta be kidding. What is the justification for this book?Look, I appreciate the fact that Phyllis Rose may come from a context where people who have negotiated the whole of Proust are scarce as hens' teeth, but that doesn't mean the rest of us do. Among my friends, at least, this achievement isn't so rare: none of us would have been so self-absorbed as to consider the feat book-worthy!Was Rose so taken with herself that this alone was reason for writing an entire book? Sheesh. At least Jacobs' chronicle of his suppose. "When the Student is Ready." according to Christine Andersen. I didn't know this book existed. I was heading across thefloor of a real (not virtual) bookstore, on my way to the Proustsection. I had finally decided I should try and read Proust. Probably because I finally went to Paris for the first time a few months ago and because a friend lent me a book called "Le Divorce," which also reminded me I should read some Proust. On my way to Proust, I passed "The Oprah Table" (which I always check, because this bookstore puts both the book club selections and other t. "A candid, funny, down-to-earth, five star scholar" according to A Customer. To me, above and beyond all else, Phyllis Rose's sparkling memoir shows us how certain books come into our lives at certain times--almost as if the books find us, we don't find them. In her narrative, Proust is used as a conceit, allowing her to delve into memory while also telling us about her days, as ordinary, or at times, as extraordinary as they may be. It is not a full-scale memoir ("my birth to present, etc"), but an accounting of a year from her life (we learn that it is actually two years con
As she moves from daily experience to what she's read and back again, she illuminates how the close reading of her own life reveals truths for the rest of us and how such a subtle celebration of books can help us live.. You just need patience, candor, and a close-to-scientific passion for truth. As Rose learned, you don't have to live through an unhappy childhood or celebrity adulthood to write an autobiography. She begins to learn how to navigate the intricacies of Proust's novels, at the same time reflecting on the course of her own life.With striking honesty, Rose writes about marriage, friendship, childbirth, and her own mortality. A brilliant and original memoir of midlife-a writing life, a reading life, a woman's life-by the distinguished author of Parallel LivesPhyllis Rose, a biographer, essayist, and literary critic, fina