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.
| 
