How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton
Humans are dedicated to suffering.
Various reasons to be inconsolable abound: the frailty of our bodies, the feebleness of our souls, the fickleness of love, the insincerities of social life, the compromises of relationships, the deadening effects of habits. In the face of such perpetual ills, one might see that no event would be awaited with greater anticipation than the moment of our own death.
The questions is… how to suffer successfully?
Marcel Proust, yes…the sickly, depressed, reclusive, mustachioed novelist who had spent fourteen years lying in a narrow bed under a pile of thinly woven woolen blankets writing an unusually long novel without an adequate bedside lamp had all the answers for us.
Yet, whatever the merits of Proust’s work, even the most fervent admirer would be hard pressed to deny one of its awkward features— Length.
That is why Proust is high on millions of readers’ “Someday” lists. I must admit that I did not even dare put In Search of Lost Time on my someday list, as I know that day is not coming. Modern readers barely have time to read their e-mail, let alone tackle a million-word masterpiece… thus, the French author sits, dipping his madeleine in tea, filling space on dusty shelves.
If only someone could distill Proust and serve his wisdom as an aperitif… and here comes How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel, a book that puts Proust into a delightful package.
Written in a tongue in cheek fashion, this book is an amusing stab at Proust’s miserable life and triumphant work. In less than 200 pages, the author, Alain de Botton gives readers the essence of Proust’s philosophy while offering his own quirky views on the perils of living.
Is it a literary biography or a self-help manual? It is both.
The book sums up Proust’s philosophy in nine elegant chapters. Some of them includes “How to Take your time”, “How to Love Life Today”, “How to Open Your Eyes,” et cetera. Each chapter is constituted of anecdotes and passages from Proust. Did this book change my life? Not really. But did it give me a good laugh? It certainly did!
