Anka Muhlstein
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 SÃ©vignÃ© 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
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Monsieur Proust's Library