|
Marcel Proust
Valentin-Louis-Georges-Eugne-Marcel Proust (July 10, 1871 - November 18,
1922) was a French intellectual, novelist, essayist and critic, best known
as the author of la recherche du temps perdu (lit. "In Search of Lost
Time", though previously translated as "Remembrance of Things Past").
Biography
Proust was born in Paris, the son of a famous doctor. His mother was Jewish,
his father Roman Catholic; he was raised within a Catholic culture. His
father's family was from the Beauce region, around Chartres, and throughout
childhood he spent each summer in the village of Illiers. This would later
be fictionalized in la recherche as "Combray", and the village and the
surrounding countryside is described extensively in the first two volumes.
The village was renamed Illiers-Combray in honour of this on the occasion of
the Proust centenary celebrations.
At the age of 9 he suffered his first asthma attack, which nearly killed
him. He became very sickly, and sometimes hypersensitive to light and noise.
He spent most of his life in the bed of his Paris apartment because of his
asthma and extremely sensitive skin and stomach. His curative trips to
seaside resorts, most often Cabourg (Calvados), formed the basis of the
fictional town of Balbec.
His principal work is the lengthy la recherche du temps perdu. In "Jean
Santeuil", Proust describes his portrait by painter Antonio de La Gandara
whom he much admired.
Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" (A la recherche du temps perdu) is
indubitably one of the greatest achievements of Western imaginative
literature. This cycle of 7 novels, spawning ca. 3,200 pages and teeming
with more than 2,000 characters, has provoked Graham Greene to say that
Proust was the greatest novelist of the 20th century and Somerset Maugham to
call it the greatest fiction to date. Proust's multifaceted vision is
enthralling: he is both drastic satirist and the nanoscopic analyst of
introspective consciousness; explorer of nuances of human sexuality and
ethical wisdom writer; crucially, he is the creator of unforgettable major
(more than 40) characters who are growing and corroding in the river of
Time. But, above all: Proustian central message is the affirmation of life.
Contrary to the opinion voiced by his decadent aesthetic contemporaries and
critics galore, Proust's great work teaches that life's "purpose" is not to
be sought in artistic artefacts: life is not fulfilled when a painting or a
novel are left after the curtain had fallen down, but when it is transmuted,
in the very course of quotidian living, into something "artistic" or
spiritually mature and wise.
Proust died in 1922 and is buried in the Pre Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
Alexander Woollcott said, "Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else's
dirty water."
Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life was published in 1997.
|
