An erudite meditation on Marcel Proust's life

books:


	• How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel Alain De Botton Vintage, 1998 - 208 pages average customer review:based on 104 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

An erudite meditation on Marcel Proust's life - and its lessons

Are you tired of self-help manuals? Is that because the authors often seem to need help themselves? Or they all spout the same buzzwords and clichés? Or they are banal and boring? It sounds as if you are all self-help-manualed-out. Perhaps you need something different. Try Marcel Proust, revered master of exquisite expression and luminous prose. In Search of Lost Time, also called Remembrance of Things Past, Proust's one-and-a-quarter-million-word magnum opus, does not contain a trite sentence or conventional thought. You can learn much about living from such a profound genius, including how to spend your time, how to see and feel things, and why, sometimes, it is best just to stay in bed. Alain de Botton is your witty, often hilarious guide, providing valuable life lessons from Proust's writings and thoughts. getAbstract finds this ingenious, utterly original treatment thoroughly enjoyable. Wishing you the same.

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how ro be like me

If it weren't for his graceful writing, graceful thinking, graceful gracefulness, this book might, like De Botton tells us Proust was, be too ingratiating. But it isn't. The book is enjoyable to read. Makes you feel a little refined in your head. Makes you feel like being gracious to the whole world, except, possibly, those not so gracious as yourself....

Still, I'd recommend it, even relatively highly. There's information, a refined style, and more than a few points one could do worse than to take to heart.

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N'allez pas trop vite !

Yes, don't go so fast...stop, savor and enjoy the many extraordinary pleasures of the ordinary things which are strewn around your everyday life.

This gem of a book is filled with these kind of delightful bon-mots distilled from Proust's life and works. Alain De Botton's entertaining,educating and often illuminating book belongs to a unique genre. It is is part literary criticism, part exploration of Proust's life and work and a part self-help manual.

I gained a lot of perspectives from this book, on topics as varied as
"How to read for myself" to "How to be a better friend". This book also opened up two interesting authors for me ...Marcel Proust and am now itching to read his oeuvre as well as Alain De Botton's body of work (especially his treatise on architecture)

I am sure i will go back to this book from time to time for a dose of some witty and well articulated "life lessons".

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A well written and thoughtful book

Several friends and I decided to read this book to learn about life. It is thoughtfully written and an entertaining to read. The author has a style of writing that is clear, introspective and interesting. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn about themselves and about the world.

Go read it. It's fun!

Someone told me last night that they were averse to starting Proust because they had read a 110-page
life of Proust and his character was not the most admirable. I say, before consigning Proust to the dust
bin, you have to read this funny volume! I am not claiming to have read all of Proust, but some of it can
be a delight, like for example, the initial Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition). I can't tell you which is the best edition and/or translation, though last night we were saying the older Montcrieff was good. You can read Botton's book whether you are ever going to read Proust or not and it'll be a blast. For a pre-Proust read, definitely Alain de Botton(and not P's actual life).

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Alain de Botton combines two unlikely genres--literary biography and self-help manual--in the hilarious and unexpectedly practical How Proust Can Change Your Life.

Who would have thought that Marcel Proust, one of the most important writers of our century, could provide us with such a rich source of insight into how best to live life? Proust understood that the essence and value of life was the sum of its everyday parts. As relevant today as they were at the turn of the century, Proust's life and work are transformed here into a no-nonsense guide to, among other things, enjoying your vacation, reviving a relationship, achieving original and unclichéd articulation, being a good host, recognizing love, and understanding why you should never sleep with someone on a first date. It took de Botton to find the inspirational in Proust's essays, letters and fiction and, perhaps even more surprising, to draw out a vivid and clarifying portrait of the master from between the lines of his work.

Here is Proust as we have never seen or read him before: witty, intelligent, pragmatic. He might well change your life.

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