Items related to Dormant: Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust was arguably the greatest writer of the 20th century. This biography by the acknowledged world authority on Proust redefines the way we look at both the artist and the man. Jean-Yves Tadie has restricted himself to the biographical and historical record: he has avoided speculation, and has drawn a scrupulous line between the life and the work. Previous biographers have conflated the man with the masterpiece, and called upon the "narrator" of the novel to fill the lacunae in the life of his creator. Tadie has brought Proust alive by releasing him from his creation. In many respects the figure who moves through the pages of this new life is unfamiliar: Proust the classicist and admirer of Racine, the anti-decadent, the moralist. Above all, Proust the creator of the autonomous universe of "A la recherche" is revealed as a figure minutely affected by his upbringing and environment, a man in time rather than a solipsist in a cork-lined room. The author's approach is multi-faceted, and his narrative is a sequence of short essays and sections, each complete in itself. So that although this biography is nearly 1,000 pages long, its synoptic penetration, formal elegance and wit make it an exemplar of that essential Proustian resource: brevity.
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Review:
How to write the biography of a writer whose life's work was his life story? In the case of Marcel Proust, the task is complicated by the subject's own hostility to the genre; in his essay "Contre Sainte-Beuve," Proust argued that writers should be judged by their books and not by the facts of their life. Indeed, when it comes to Proust, one might well confuse the two. For the first half of his life, he traded witticisms in the salons of the belle époque; for the second he sat at home and wrote about it, going so far as to line the walls of his living room with cork in order to keep the outside world where it belonged. Eventually, all that exquisite isolation produced what is arguably the defining work of the 20th century, the loosely autobiographical, imposingly multivolumed Remembrance of Things Past. As a biographer, one can conflate the novel with the life, as Proust's first biographer, George Painter, did; or one can go the road of several recent studies, including that of William C. Carter, and emphasize instead Proust's psychology, including his "repressed" homosexuality and his complicated relationship with his Jewish ancestry. Alternately, one can address Proust as a creature of his time and his place, the product of fin-de-siècle France with all its prejudices and conventions and embroidered antimacassars.
About the Author:
In Marcel Proust: A Life, French critic Jean-Yves Tadie surveys these approaches from the lofty perspective of 40 years of Proust scholarship, and he chooses all--or perhaps none. For Tadie is concerned not with Proust the man but with Proust the novelist. "The true biography of a writer or an artist is that of his work," he proclaims, and goes on to present the development of Proust's life and his novel side by side, considering real-life people and events alongside the fictional representations they inspired. Thankfully, though impressively learned, Tadie is not what we would call an "academic" biographer: his prose is far too elegant and even witty for that, and he actually seems to be enjoying himself. (In cataloging the items sold by Proust's uncle's firm, for example, Tadie exclaims with contagious glee, "Is it not like reading a novel by Balzac, or the wedding announcement chapter in Albertine disparue?") Weighing in at a very Proustian 986 pages--it would make almost as good a murder weapon as Remembrance of Things Past--Tadie's work is a biography of mind-boggling thoroughness, and yet every detail strikes the reader as necessary. Suitably, this definitive work ends with a touching account of Proust's death, as the great writer dictates his masterwork until he is no longer capable of speech. Who could ask more of a biographer than Tadie's gentle and affectionate epitaph? "And we too address our respects to a man who suffered so much in order that his work should shine like the sun, now that it causes him no more harm." --Mary Park
Jean-Yves Tadie, the world's foremost expert on Proust, is Professor of French Literature at the Sorbonne. Editor of the Pleiade edition of Proust's masterpiece, A la recherche du temps perdu, Tadie's books include Proust et le roman, Lectures de Proust and Proust.
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- PublisherPenguin
- Publication date2015
- ISBN 10 0140267247
- ISBN 13 9780140267242
- BindingPaperback
- Edition number1
- Number of pages960
- Rating
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