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How Proust Can Change Your Life | 
| Author: Alain De Botton
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  106 reviews
Sales Rank: 20647
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.6
ISBN: 0679779159
Dewey Decimal Number: 843.912
EAN: 9780679779155
ASIN: 0679779159
Publication Date: April 28, 1998
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Amazon.com Review
This is a genius-level piece of writing that manages to blend literary biography with self-help and tongue-in-cheek with the profound. The quirky, early 1900s French author Marcel Proust acts as the vessel for surprisingly impressive nuggets of wisdom on down-to-earth topics such as why you should never sleep with someone on the first date, how to protect yourself against lower back pain, and how to cope with obnoxious neighbors. Here's proof that our ancestors had just as much insight as the gurus du jour and perhaps a lot more wit. De Botton simultaneously pokes fun at the self-help movement and makes a significant contribution to its archives.
Product Description
Alain de Botton combines two unlikely genres--literary biography and self-help manual--in the hilarious and unexpectedly practical How Proust Can Change Your Life.
Who would have thought that Marcel Proust, one of the most important writers of our century, could provide us with such a rich source of insight into how best to live life? Proust understood that the essence and value of life was the sum of its everyday parts. As relevant today as they were at the turn of the century, Proust's life and work are transformed here into a no-nonsense guide to, among other things, enjoying your vacation, reviving a relationship, achieving original and uncliched articulation, being a good host, recognizing love, and understanding why you should never sleep with someone on a first date. It took de Botton to find the inspirational in Proust's essays, letters and fiction and, perhaps even more surprising, to draw out a vivid and clarifying portrait of the master from between the lines of his work.
Here is Proust as we have never seen or read him before: witty, intelligent, pragmatic. He might well change your life.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 101 more reviews...
 Read the Overture to Swann's Way Instead (You'll Learn Far More) September 9, 2008
This book starts out strong- antiquated images from Marcel's father Dr. Proust's guide to physical fitness, and long Proustian sentences spiraling and swirling in tiny text charm and capture the reader's attention. But somewhere in the middle, the book just lost me. It is too fluffy to maintain the interest of someone who already loves "In Search of Lost Time," and if you have not read the novels, De Botton's analysis is superficial and will not give you a true sense of their pleasure and power. There are far more illuminating critical texts on the subject, as well as more thorough biographies. Seriously, is the fact that Marcel enjoyed wearing tight underpants life-changing information? This book is an entertaining way to pass an afternoon- but at the end of the day you will be chafing for it to end.
Title a bit too optimistic? August 13, 2008
I bought this book as an introduction to Proust. The author synthesizes Proust's philosophical perspective quite effectively while providing interesting background on the incongruities with the French author's actual life. I still intend to tackle Proust's novel this fall, but as a Virginia Woolf devotee, I was surprised to learn how much she was influenced by Proust. Wouldn't it be fascinating if they could have had a conversation? I understand Woolf was not overly impressed with Joyce who actually did meet Proust. I think Woolf's insights would have been astounding. I do recommend the De Botton book.
 Interesting reading June 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I loved this book. It introduced me to Proust's life and works and so far, I have finished Volume I of In Search of Lost Time and have started on Volume II. The well crafted sentences and witty writing are a pleasureable introduction to Proust.
how ro be like me April 6, 2008
If it weren't for his graceful writing, graceful thinking, graceful gracefulness, this book might, like De Botton tells us Proust was, be too ingratiating. But it isn't. The book is enjoyable to read. Makes you feel a little refined in your head. Makes you feel like being gracious to the whole world, except, possibly, those not so gracious as yourself....
Still, I'd recommend it, even relatively highly. There's information, a refined style, and more than a few points one could do worse than to take to heart.
An erudite meditation on Marcel Proust's life - and its lessons January 28, 2008
Are you tired of self-help manuals? Is that because the authors often seem to need help themselves? Or they all spout the same buzzwords and cliches? Or they are banal and boring? It sounds as if you are all self-help-manualed-out. Perhaps you need something different. Try Marcel Proust, revered master of exquisite expression and luminous prose. In Search of Lost Time, also called Remembrance of Things Past, Proust's one-and-a-quarter-million-word magnum opus, does not contain a trite sentence or conventional thought. You can learn much about living from such a profound genius, including how to spend your time, how to see and feel things, and why, sometimes, it is best just to stay in bed. Alain de Botton is your witty, often hilarious guide, providing valuable life lessons from Proust's writings and thoughts. getAbstract finds this ingenious, utterly original treatment thoroughly enjoyable. Wishing you the same.
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