Rating: 
Summary: A year of not reading Phyllis Rose
Review: Ms Rose is without a doubt a talented writer, but her work here is tediously self-indulgent and trite and sheds very little light on Proust, or indeed on his effect on her. Give it a miss and read the master! I don't think I'll be visiting Ms Rose's other work anytime soon...
Rating: 
Summary: This book is a Proustian reflection on life.
Review: Phyllis Rose introduces the reader to Proust. Because of this book I was inspired to start reading In Search Of Lost Time and possibly I will not stop for at least a year, if ever. Phyllis Rose encourages and inspires the reader to have their own personal and rewarding remembrance of things past and to recognise that the mighty and the modest share in what it is to be human. .
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Summary: A Proust Character Come to Life!
Review: There are characters in Proust that are so cartoonishly shallow, vain, parochial, and lacking in self-knowledge that one laughs in spite of thinking no such person could exist in real life.
Phyllis Rose proves that such people do exist.
Of course it is possible that her book is a satiric fiction disguised as autobiography. If so, it is not funny enough. (Learn from Proust!) If this really is an autobiography, it is surprising that an author would allow publication of something that makes her look so ridiculous.
Rating:
Summary: A candid, funny, down-to-earth, five star scholar...
Review: To me, above and beyond all else, Phyllis Rose's sparkling memoir shows us how certain books come into our lives at certain times--almost as if the books find us, we don't find them. In her narrative, Proust is used as a conceit, allowing her to delve into memory while also telling us about her days, as ordinary, or at times, as extraordinary as they may be. It is not a full-scale memoir ("my birth to present, etc"), but an accounting of a year from her life (we learn that it is actually two years condensed). Memories, we must remember, are always fragmented, uncertain, contradictory; Rose's narrative structure makes this point well. The book reads more like a narrativized version of diary entries, and indeed, at the end of the memoir, Rose comes to the realization that she is, when all is said and done, a diarist and woman of letters, as opposed to, say, a novelist. It is this very strength that makes her book so enjoyable. She is a five-star scholar who is not afraid to be candid in her remarks, or in the use of an almost street-wise colloquial tongue. Her tone and style are completely unpretentious, unapologetic (a revelation in our culture of complaint), and at times, laught-out-loud funny. She does not discuss or reminisce on her years as a teacher, and this one finds refreshing: an academic who readily admits that the life of the body is equally as important (perhaps more so) as the life of the mind; an intellectual who is equally as passionate about material culture, whether antiquities, sports cars, houses, travel, gossip and dinner parties, as the writing life; a feminist who can balance her own forms of activism with trips to her Madison Avenue hairdresser and Saks Fifth Avenue. Readers from the NYC metro area will particularily enjoy her memoir, as it is the landscape of her memory, and the cultural base for her sense of humor. A bibliophile at heart, Rose shows us how good readers make the fictions they read their own, and bring to bear on their own subjectivity lessons learned from the marvelous, difficult, and rewarding world of reading.
Rating:
Summary: She almost gets it - NOT!
Review: Too bad I couldn't rate this 0 stars because 1 star in one too many. This book is essentially and "hey, look at me and the people I know and the circles I have access to." She misses the whole meaning of Proust. She and everything she stands for is what he mocks. Not all is lost because this book (if one can call it that) gives me hope that I can get a book published one of these days
Rating:
Summary: She almost gets it - NOT!
Review: Too bad I couldn't rate this 0 stars because 1 star in one too many. This book is essentially and "hey, look at me and the people I know and the circles I have access to." She misses the whole meaning of Proust. She and everything she stands for is what he mocks. Not all is lost because this book (if one can call it that) gives me hope that I can get a book published one of these days
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