How Proust Can Change Your Life ebook

by Alain De Botton

Alain De Botton History and Criticism English

The starting point of How Proust Can Change Your Life is that a great novel can be nothing less than . The book reveals Proust’s thoughts on how to revive a relationship, choose a good doctor, enjoy a holiday, make friends and respond to insult

The starting point of How Proust Can Change Your Life is that a great novel can be nothing less than life-transforming. The book reveals Proust’s thoughts on how to revive a relationship, choose a good doctor, enjoy a holiday, make friends and respond to insult. A self-help book like few others.

Alain de Botton combines two unlikely genres-literary biography and self-help manual-in the hilarious and unexpectedly . He also guides listeners to How Proust Can Change your Life as a good entry point into his work, what he believes in, and a book that he feels has held up since its release.

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. I took the nod, and I’m happy I did. De Botton writes with clarity, concision, and wit.

After reading de Botton’s book, one will savor Proust. A lively, original guide to living, an. n engaging introduction to the life and letters of one of the century’s most interesting fictional thinker. iterary criticism wearing its slyest disguise since Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot. Cleveland Plain Dealer. Ingeniou. harming, erudit. n amusing homage to a literary genius whose utter lack of talent for living becomes a tender inspiration.

s. How Proust Can Change Your Life. After reading de Botton’s book, one will savor Proust with fresh wonder and gratitude. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, In. New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Author: Alain Botton.

How Proust Can Change Your Life. Author: Alain Botton.

Start by marking How Proust Can Change Your Life as Want to Read .

Start by marking How Proust Can Change Your Life as Want to Read: Want to Read savin. ant to Read. Not only did Alain de Botten explore and celebrate Proust's foibles and philosophies as a writer - he also gave us a fascinating picture of the man. We warm to Proust, we At the risk of horrifying Proust aficionados I must admit that I did not read this book as a precursor to reading Proust, or even as a pleasurable supplement to his writings, but rather I read it instead of reading Proust. Quote from one of Proust’s books, In How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside.

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Curiously practical-this no-nonsense blend of literary biography and self-help unravels how interesting life can be if only you could resist the impulse to rush through the mundane rituals of modern life. Every morning, Marcel Proust sipped his two cups of strong coffee with milk, ate a croissant from one boulangerie, dunking it in his coffee as he slowly read the day's paper with great care-poring over each headline and section. Only Alain de Botton could have pulled so many useful insights from the oeuvre of one the world's greatest literary masters.

Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life? tries to find an inspiration and explore various themes out of Proust’s essays, letters, and his fictional work. It’s a clever book with an amusing and an evoking title

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 unclichéd 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.The paperback edition of How Proust Can Change Your Life will be available in May 1998.

Abywis

Absolutely delightful, thought-provoking, educational and full of good humor. A new angle on mindfulness.

Vinainl

How Proust Can Change Your Life is a pleasure to read and to ponder. Its observations, though hardly original, seem especially worthwhile at a time when tweets pass for conversation and Facebook postings are a way to stay in touch with friends. Proust and his disciple Alain de Botton advise us to slow down; to take time not only to smell the coffee but savor a croissant or two along with it each morning as you languorously pore over your daily newspaper. Rather than looking for Mr. Right, become him--and start by listening to others rather than nattering endlessly about yourself. Note the beauty in the every day, and acknowledge the irony that one is never more alive or aware of life as when one's own health is threatened by illness.

These are but a few of the bon mots found in Proust Can Change Your Life--a delightful literary "self-help" that really is helpful. If not ground-shakingly original, they are life-shakingly worthwhile. In addition to all of the above How Proust Can Change Your Life ponders how great literature can impact our lives and how real creativity is a way of seeing and feeling an experience more deeply and more profoundly than most. Very worthwhile--the sort of book I'm sure I will be returning to.

Coiron

Good enough to have read it 6 times and still not get all of it. I was taken by surprise at Proust's significance in history and myth -- beyond being a Monty Python joke. What is the name of the phenomenon wherein a person sees himself in an old painting? I will never look at a madelaine the same again. Thank you, Alain.

Mr_Mole

I have read several titles by this particular author and have NEVER been disappointed. I studied for a PhD in literature and psychology in my youth. This sort of analysis of Proust is a gem for modern life -- and a guide to appreciating Proust's world as well. Many of Proust's eccentric habits were doubtless "self-inflicted" but the reader will confront how complicated the requirements of his society were at the time. My first exposure was "On the Art of Travel." This is NOT a "Rick Steves" sort of volume with suggestions of places to visit and how to spend less money doing it. It is a first class analysis of what makes us WANT to travel and of what rewards our psyches achieve from it.

Whether you beg, borrow or buy, this author will be a consistently valuable addition to your lifetime reading list.

Whatever

I would consider Alain De Botton one of the great modern philosophers of our time. The word philosopher might make you cringe, and I get it, but go listen to his interview on the Tim Ferris podcast. It will help in understanding his perspective on how a philosopher should function in the modern day. He also guides listeners to How Proust Can Change your Life as a good entry point into his work, what he believes in, and a book that he feels has held up since its release. I took the nod, and I’m happy I did.

De Botton writes with clarity, concision, and wit. He turns the subject matter, Marcel Proust, and his book In Search of Lost Time, into a thoroughly enjoyable unconventional self-help manual. I say unconventional, but I can only hope the questions you ask yourself after reading this book become conventional in all sorts of ways.

I try to imagine selling someone this book. For me, De Botton had me at the chapter titles. Just to name a few: How To Love Life Today, How To Take Your Time, How To Suffer Successfully, How To Be A Good Freind. Compelling questions to think about, and you’ll be surprised to find how Marcel Proust and his masterpiece In Search Of Lost Time provide a point of view on each.

Paradoxically the book concludes with a chapter titled How To Put a Book Down. Simple advice but the message speaks to a much large theme that we all could benefit from. That Beneath every piece of art there is an author with a point of view on the world and the greatest homage we can pay to each is to see our world, for a short time, through their eyes. After that short time, it’s ok to admit that for all the beautiful qualities we might see in each genius work it might eventually prove to be silly, maniacal, false, or just wrong. And as you learn to embrace this indifference you’ll really start to see how Proust can change your life.

MeGa_NunC

To begin with, I haven't read a word of Proust. Whether Alain De Botton succeeds in rendering Proust faithfully is not something I can address with competence. But I can say that his book makes me want to read Proust; for if the nuggets of wisdom contained in this book are an inkling of what lies in store for the ones who tackle Proust's work, one can be sure of an experience that will deepen one's perception of the world and how we experience it. And, in the Proustian universe, it is this that is the goal of reading.
In a way, I found some of Proust's observations (distilled for us by De Botton) very familiar to those by Walker Percy, addressing the phenomenon of people coming to see the Grand Canyon for the first time: one's initial experience is so often conditioned by the images that we already hold of the thing as-yet-to-be experienced. Indeed, some disappointed reviewers of this book have indicated that it failed their expectations. Would that they could have left those at the door, and followed the advice Proust gives!

nailer

This book is a gem. Full of dry wit, the author imparts much wisdom with Proust's life as the backdrop. This book will be added to my shelf of favorites.