Proust's Way: A Field Guide to in Search of Lost Time Paperback - August 17, 2001

"Shattuck leaves us not only with a deepened appreciation of Proust's great work but of all great literature as well."—Richard Bernstein, New York Times For any reader who has been humbled by the language, the density, or the sheer weight of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Roger Shattuck is a godsend. Winner of the National Book Award for Marcel Proust, a sweeping examination of Proust's life and works, Shattuck now offers a useful and eminently readable guidebook to Proust's epic masterpiece, and a contemplation of memory and consciousness throughout great literature. Here, Shattuck laments Proust's defenselessness against zealous editors, praises some translations, and presents Proust as a novelist whose philosophical gifts were matched only by his irrepressible comic sense. Proust's Way, the culmination of a lifetime of scholarship, will serve as the next generation's guide to one of the world's finest writers of fiction. "Shattuck reveals that Proust must be read as carefully as a detective story, in which every detail becomes a clue to something else. At the same time, every page coruscates with a blend of passion and anxiety over the introduction of strange new elements. Shattuck writes on the ways in which Proust explores character, the false scent of social prestige, existential loss, humor, even memory itself. Finally, Shattuck laments Proust's defenselessness against zealous editors and translators, and distances his subject carefully from the tradition of aesthetic decadence blazed by Baudelaire and Wilde."--Jacket This guide to Proust mixes biographical vignettes with close textual analysis, and presents Proust as a novelist whose philosophical gifts were matched by his comic sense. It also makes a case against some of the more stereotypical images of the novelist as being totally detached from reality.