Marcel Proust - Hardcover

Mary Ann Caws is distinguished professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the City University of New York. She is the author of many books, including another title in the Overlook Illustrated Lives series, Virginia Woolf.

The genius of Marcel Proust strains the limits of a visually oriented capsule biography. But in the latest addition to Overlook's Illustrated Lives series, Caws manages to capture the greatest novelist of the twentieth century in just over 100 pages of revealing episodes and haunting photographs. With lucid economy, Caws situates Proust--"the little man with the great eyes"--in the complex social world that he transmuted into the luminous artistry of A la recherche du temps perdu. A few shrewdly detailed scenes serve to contrast the many selves that coalesced--simultaneously or successively-- in Proust's multifaceted personality: the elegant socialite who dwindled into invalidism; the bold duelist who curried favor with political foes; the homosexual sensualist who platonically entranced beautiful women; the wealthy aesthete who hoped to write for the masses. At the integrative center of this baffling life, Caws locates a powerful imagination obsessed with the capacity of memory to transcend and redeem time's losses. A little book sure to draw readers into much bigger ones: the fuller Proust studies listed in Caws' bibliography--and, of course, Proust's own masterpiece. Bryce Christensen
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