Marcel Proust

Rating:
Summary: Excellent brief biography of Proust
Review: Although there is no shortage of books on Proust in English, and no shortage of enormously long biographies, there is a surprising lack of short biographies. Luckily, this excellent little volume by Edmund White fills a major need. While we have major long biographies like those of Painter, Tadie, and Carter, these may not be appropriate for someone wanting a brief overview. The trick with any biography of Proust is striking a balance between writing about Proust's life and Proust's art, not an easy task given the degree with which Proust based his work on events in his own life. It is virtually impossible to disentangle the two.

This is a short book (around 150 pages), but in that brief span, White is able to touch on all the major events of Proust's life, the key relationships of his life, the major themes of his work as an author, and the ways in which Proust's life became the basis for his work. If one is unfamiliar with Proust before picking up this book, one will gain a first rate overview of him before setting it down. One thing that tremendously enhances the value of the book is an excellent annotated biography that gives a great overview of work on Proust both in English and French.

White, who is a well known gay author, does a superb job writing about the myriad of contradictions in Proust's own work as a lightly closeted gay author. Although Proust's being gay is the worst kept secret of the century, Proust fought many duels over accusations that he was homosexual (or, an invert, as Proust would have put it). Proust was the first writer to write extensively about homosexuality, both male and female, but maintained a façade of heterosexuality to those who did not know him well.

All in all, this is an excellent brief biography of the man many regard as the great novelist of the 20th century. I heartily recommend it to anyone wanting to know more about Proust.

Rating:
Summary: An Enjoyable and Readable Biography
Review: Edmund White, one of my favorite contemporary American Authors, manages to capture the life of Marcel Proust in a manner that grabs the reader's attention. The book is a short appraisal of Proust's life, with a refreshing focus on Proust's barely in-the-closet homosexuality. The illuminating look at Proust's psyche and private relationships provide a different way of interpreting his masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past. This easy-to-read biography comes highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: A good overview, but not very deep
Review: Hmm. I'm not sure what to make of this book. It's relatively brief (165 short pages), informative, well-written and easy to read. I'd read "Remembrance of Things Past" 15-20 years ago, but knew next-to-nothing of Proust himself. I was most interested in (1) his background, primarily his childhood; and (2) how it was possible that an unpublished author could get such a beast published. Edmund White addresses both issues to a degree (most satisfactorily on the second), but concentrates (not unreasonably, I guess) on people and events from Proust's life that make their way into the novel.

I found White's "Marcel Proust" to be enjoyable, but it mainly whetted my appetite for a more substantial biography. Perhaps that's part of the purpose of this series of books.

Rating:
Summary: Living to write and writing to live
Review: Someone at Penguin (James Atlas?) had a stroke of genius. The Penguin Lives series seems to takes its inspiration from seventeenth century writers like Izaak Walton and John Aubrey who churned out brief, engaging prose portraits of their contemporaries and other worthies. Readers know from the moment they pick up one of the Penguin Lives that they are not going to get a thorough-going, heavily annotated exploration of the person under scrutiny. They also know, when they check the page count, that they will not stall out midway and that they can easily finish it on a long weekend at the beach. The choice of "celebrity authors" to do the story-telling is also intriguing. Edmund White, for instance, may not have the final say on all things Proustian, but as a gay novelist and biographer of Jean Genet, we can be pretty confident that he will be forthright and honest when discussing Proust's sexuality and careful, appreciative, and insightful when discussing In Search of Lost Time. In fact, the balance White strikes in his discussion of the man and the novel is quite impressive. In contrast to many modern biographies that wallow in unflattering detail and leave the reader wondering how the subject ever managed to become a person worthy of being written about, White gives us a sense of what Proust was up against (personally and emotionally) without diminishing what he achieved. One piece of advice, if you do decide to buy this great little volume: Don't skip the bibliography. It's only nine pages long and White's descriptions of the books listed will point you toward some good reading (and away from some duds).

Rating:
Summary: SHORT BUT SWEET
Review: This is another in the series of Penguin Lives which attempts to give a biography of a famous figure in a short but well written book. This one on Proust is written by the well-known author of such books as Forgetting Elena and other acclaimed works of his own. In a lot of the Penguin Lives, the editors tried to commission another writer who had a lot in common with their subject. White is also a homosexual writer whose works have been vastly acclaimed and this gives him a "supposed" insight into Proust that other biographers have purposefully ignored.

The entire life of Proust is hit on very efficently from his earliest years to his death. I liked the shortness of the book. I mean, I was interested in his life but not THAT interested to read a 500 page book about it. This short work was just right for the average interested reader. It was also written very well and enlightened me about many things about his life. For example, I always knew that he had become a recluse at the end of his life but never knew it was because of asthma.

Something negative about the book was that time and again White seems to believe that there was no seperation from Proust's real life and that of his characters. He uses quotes from his novel to comment on his private life which in all authors never quite works. A novel is really not a true relation of a person's life. What really is? Everything is illusion or perception. Another thing that White does is try to put forth the proposition that Proust's homosexuality defined the whole inner cosm of his soul. I mean is Paul Auster or Chuck Pahlaniuk's soul simply filled with being heterosexual.
White seems to belittle Proust's life and his work by trying to accent his sexual preference at the expense of offering new insights into his personal character or novel. I feel that White had a secret agenda, or rather an UNsecret agenda alongside this book. Still, it is entertaining and worth a look if you just want a short look at the life of one of the greatest novelists of all time.

Rating:
Summary: Making the Enormous Manageable
Review: This is not a deep study on the great French writer's work, nor is it meant to be. However, it is a slim, fascinating and surprisingly penetrating insight into the life and writing of Proust. This tale is consciously told from White's perspective touching on issues and aspects about Proust's life he is interested in. This includes the way the world perceives Proust & interprets his work, how his homosexual status effected his work and public persona, the interaction between his writing & life and citing the most interesting work that has been done preceding Proust's life. It follows the basic time line of Proust's life and is related in a gossipy though highly intelligent fashion. The most interesting aspect of the book is the way it examines the way he is able to historically place the opinion of homosexuality at the time with other writers and the politics of the time and explain how it effected Proust's life. It relates how his life was really guided by a need for love and approval and how this was reflected in his relationships with his mother & lovers and filtered into his writing. The border between fictionalization and wishful thinking is finely tread in Proust's work because of this. White also gives an interesting insight into the way Proust worked as a craftsman playing with and mixing the genres of novel and the essay. Though this book touches on many interesting academic issues such as this, it is a very entertaining read and can be read easily by anyone who is a large fan of Proust's work or a complete novice. It is admirable White is able to touch on aspects of the writer's life that have not be ever deeply explored before.

Rating:
Summary: Totally partial
Review: This quick biography of Marcel Proust is certainly a great example of sensationalism. Proust was a good writer, but White made a horrible work, calling Proust gay all the time and leaving the facts to the underground. I really cant understand how this biography is rated almost five stars. This is not a biography but a collection of nice adjectives you can use in speech as a politician. The only thing that make this text good is that it's about Proust, except that the author is totally partial and glorifies Proust all the time, while Proust's life facts are related as "additions" to the true meaning of this book: a glorification, a prayer for Proust. Someone that had never heard about Proust cannot understand why White uses so many adjectives and calls Proust homosexual all the time, because White does not explains why Proust was that important - he just imposes he was.

Now the fact that White really emphasizes that Proust was homosexual is very uncomfortable. I'm not against homosexuals, but why White have to point that all the time? Why the need of evaluating Proust's attitude as he was a perverted? White even commits the absurd of suggesting that Proust had a sexual attraction to his mother just because he was unlikely kind to her - considering that Proust was effeminate, this should be normal and not be analyzed as a perversion! Probably Proust's attitude to his mother was as daughter to mother, but not what White suggested.

I expected a biography relating Proust life, but found this prayer to Proust soul instead.

Rating:
Summary: Remembrance of Marcel Proust
Review: Too many biographers try to explain the life of the author by the content of their works. If you have not read them all, you are lost. Mr. White, fortunately, takes the opposite route. He gives us a clear and thorough history of Proust's life and then connects it to his writings. He fashions a monument of Proust the human being and helps us to much better understand his books. It is a fascinating biography and can be enjoyed even if one never read "Remembrance of Things Past". But this biography will make you want to read it.

Rating:
Summary: Accomplishing the Impossible
Review: When the dust settled after the Millennium lists of Best Books of the 20th Century, there was Marcel Proust's magnum opus Recherche le temps perdu at the head of the line. Though many of us struggled through all the volumes as a college assignment, fewer of us returned to the masterpiece, much less explored the ambiguitites of the author's life and times that afforded such a work. Well, here in easily digestible prose is a succinct history of a phenomenal writer (written by an equally phenomenal writer) that opens the door to more ventursome readers to explore the "Best of the 20th Century" writing. Edmund White distills all the facets of Proust's persona and what results is a fastidiously correct picture of a fertile imagination and man. How better to understand the turn of the century in all its multifaceted changes than to simply read this fine biography? Another work of seeming staggering proportions reduced to a gentle and absorbing read by one of our better authers writing today. Hats off!

Rating:
Summary: Edmund White - finally a useful biography of Proust!
Review: Working my way through the Proust oeuvre and biographies, I was relieved beyond measure to find that White, alone among biographers, has dared to write that Proust was gay, and to redefine some of the 'close friendships' his other biographers refer to so coyly.
It is hard to quantify the influence Proust's sexuality had on his writing, mainly because it is so gracefully veiled. Yet on a second reading, particularly through the prism of White's biography, it screams from every line. How could past biographers not deal with the central fact of his life? While White does not mistake Proust's oeuvre for autobiography, he provides a short account of the missing piece of the puzzle that is as entertaining as it is revealing. As in all his writing, White is direct and uneuphemistic - qualities which starkly reveal the subtext of Proust's complex and imagistic novels.
White is accurate, as factual as one can be in such a brief book, and provides a bibliography which is invaluable for anyone setting out to discover Proust's life for themselves. I recommend this book to anyone planning to read Proust for the first time, or anyone who is moving beyond "In Search of Lost Time" to a search for the lost novelist himself.