Word: proust
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...PROUST: THE LATER YEARS, by George D. Painter. British Museum Curator George D. Painter concludes his rich biography of Marcel Proust in a second volume. Remembrance of Things Past is virtually required prior reading, but once that hurdle is out of the way, the reader is treated to a detailed and near-reverent account of Proust's agonizing labors over Remembrance, his homosexuality, and his pathetic transformation from social climber to neurotic recluse...
Biographers can do worse than revere their subjects. Painter demands nothing less than total familiarity with Remembrance; no one who has not gone the distance with Proust should set foot here. But if the reader accepts Biographer Painter's somewhat heroic requirements, this book, together with its predecessor, surely qualifies as a permanent concordance to the enormous, agonized deposition that Marcel Proust gave to the world...
Painter's approach to Proust is Proustian. He has set himself the surgical task of opening the novelist's oeuvre to its core. Each character, every place name, is methodically traced to its source or sources in Proust's environment. To most biographers, Albertine, with whom the novel's narrator Marcel dallies on the Normandy coast and in Paris, is a collage of the young men in Proust's homosexual life. Painter restores Albertine's sex by suggesting that she also embodies at least three women...
Slightly Unfashionable. Proust's anguished genius gets the same policeman-like inquisition, but by a wholly sympathetic cop. The novelist's homosexuality, his experiments in degradation, weigh no more and no less than his unfailing kindness to inferiors, his fabulous powers of observation, his unequaled ability to transmute the stuff of his own aberrant life into a work of art that no thinking human can ignore...
...Proust is slightly out of fashion now. Biographer Painter's purpose is to insist that his unfashionableness is our fault, not Proust...