Word: proust
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...PROUST: THE EARLY YEARS (435 pp.) -George D. Painfer-Atlantic-Little, Brown...
...some critics and biographers. Treating a book as a case to be solved, the literary sleuth scours the author's life for telltale clues. With the instincts of Scotland Yard's finest, George D. Painter, a curator of the British Museum, has now tackled the massive Proust case. His findings may strike some readers as anticlimactic. It appears that Marcel Proust based Remembrance of Things Past on his remembrance of things past...
...first of two projected volumes, Proust: The Early Years is an amazing performance, though few except cultists will regard it as readable. Author Painter has picked up every aristocratic name that the snobbish Proust dropped, and whole pages read like excerpts from the Almanack de Gotha. Relatively free of footnotes, the book is really one gigantic footnote to Proust's masterpiece. When he is not playing the elaborate chess game of fact v. fiction, Author Painter does communicate his passionate curiosity about Proust, and he draws a lively portrait of the sick, sick, sick French society that molded...
Bucolic Charm. Mama Proust called little Marcel "mon petit loup," but far from being wolflike, he was a Little Lord Fauntleroy who threw temper tantrums and suffered from asthma. Much of Proust's boyhood had bucolic charm. At Illiers (Combray in the novel), Dr. Proust's home town, the family romped along the hawthorn hedges of the Méréglise Way (later Swann's Way) or ambled along a winding river (later the Guermantes Way). On the lawns of the Champs Elysées, the 14-year-old played at prisoner's base...
Nothing could be more wackily multifocal than The Tents of Wickedness, a story told through a sequence of parodies of other writers, among them Marquand, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Proust, Joyce and Kafka. The reader may come to feel that he has been washed, rinsed and spun dry in a literary Laundromat...