Oh no. I’m going to have to reread In Search of Lost Time, aren’t I?
How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton is an interesting nonfiction project, bordering between biography, self-help, and literary criticism. Some of its key topics are creativity, perception, suffering, and wellness, and I have to say, if not entirely practicable, it’s an entertaining read.
Part of what makes the book so entertaining is Botton’s tone. While his work is informative, the selection and presentation of details is outright funny. For instance, Botton explains how Proust took a job at a library and eventually got fired after five years, since he ultimately only worked about one day a year. The way Botton presents the detail is just a fun pithy approach. Similarly, I couldn’t help but laugh when reading about reviews of Proust’s work. When he started writing In Search of Lost Time, he sent it to friends and publishers and Botton quotes peoples’ indifference and rage comically. One publisher was incensed by a sentence that went on for forty-four lines of text. At least a few complained that after four hundred pages, they had no idea where the book was going (and it’s implied that Proust didn’t either.) One of Proust’s friends sent a letter praising the book for its excellence, and how she continually re-read the passage about his first communion—a part that didn’t exist. Botton also notes the cultural legacy of Proust via a contest that Monty Python hosted where people needed to summarize In Search of Lost Time in fifteen seconds while wearing a bathing suit. I like embracing the absurdity of Proust’s project like that.
It’s not all laughs, of course. Proust dealt with some pretty significant health issues (of which many were skeptical), for instance. Botton outlines Proust’s diet, sleep habits, and digestive problems, and about how his severe allergies limited his life. In a rare moment where Proust is critical of his mother, he says she likes to be his nurse and hates when he is well. Later, Botton outlines the factors leading up to Proust’s death, his refusal to take doctors’ orders, and implies that he essentially brought about his own death. It’s pretty dark.
Aside from the literary biography aspect of the work, the book is branded—even in its title—as a kind of self-help book. I wouldn’t say that the book entirely delivers on that promise. Early in the book, Botton provides an excellent breakdown for reasons for reading in general, using passages from Proust’s books and letters to support the benefits. That catalogue of reasons for reading is beautifully developed and Botton offers some personal commentary that I found touching as a literary work in its own right. He discusses how part of why we read is that we find parallels in our own lives. He talks about how In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, the second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator falls in love with Albertine and the narration draws parallels to other figures that he knew. Botton describes the various figures in his own life with whom he sees parallels in Proust’s characters. It’s refreshing to see someone’s personal connections on the page like that; it felt relatable in that respect.
Another section that really stood out to me is the commentary on Proust reading the news. At the time, there were news briefs that offered a quick account of an event. Proust came across one involving a murder and wrote a piece that linked it into a literary tradition, offering sympathy to its characters, and so on. He expanded on the sparse details and really paid close attention to its emotional core. The same principle existed in his letters; his mom pushed him to write more, annoyed that she received only the most cursory details of what time he slept, and so on. There’s an ethos of paying attention and of trying to find non-standard phrases to describe experience. In fact, Proust had a great disdain for bourgeois stock phrases that signalled culture. Instead, he was devoted to the particular and unique. Every rainstorm is different, for example. And all of this from expanding on newspaper details!
If the book delivers on its promise of How Proust Can Change Your Life, it is in this notion of paying attention to the particular. It comes to form a ethical stance towards life, to give nuance to every sensation. Botton returns to a similar idea in the final chapter of the book. He documents the number of people who try to visit key locales in In Search of Lost Time, like Combray or the shop that makes the madeleine that inspired Proust’s reminiscences. Heck, I went to Paris to finish reading In Search of Lost Time. To return to the point, Botton sees this practice as a peril: it is us trying to insert ourselves into books. We are trying to live out the experience of someone else, rather than let ourselves have experiences worth communicating. Botton notes that Proust inspires an ethics of attention where it is the “quality of vision” and not “the object of view.” It isn’t what we’re looking at that matters, it’s how we look at it.
Essentially, the book is a compelling case to be original, caring, perceptive, and responsive to others. I admit that it touched a place in my heart and pulled Proust back to the surface. There is so much humour and tenderness in Proust’s work, his biography, and Botton’s account narration that it makes a compelling case to return to Proust’s oeuvre and really give it the time it deserves.
Happy reading; happy living!
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