The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time

By Phyllis Rose

Book Overview

A brilliant and original memoir of midlife-a writing life, a reading life, a woman's life-by the distinguished author of Parallel Lives Phyllis Rose, a biographer, essayist, and literary critic, finally got around to reading Proust in middle age. As Rose learned, you don't have to live through an unhappy childhood or celebrity adulthood to write an autobiography. You just need patience, candor, and a close-to-scientific passion for truth. She begins to learn how to navigate the intricacies of Proust's novels, at the same time reflecting on the course of her own life. With striking honesty, Rose writes about marriage, friendship, childbirth, and her own mortality. As she moves from daily experience to what she's read and back again, she illuminates how the close reading of her own life reveals truths for the rest of us and how such a subtle celebration of books can help us live.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1582430551
• ISBN13: 9781582430553
• Release Date: December 1999
• Publisher: Catapult
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

What we learn from reading books

An essayist's way of writing a book is to pile up one chapter after another. The opening section of SWANN'S WAY seems, slow, static to Rose. The author read Proust for more than a year. At the time of the writing of this book she had not yet read the sixth volume, IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME. Every reader of Proust has to find his own reason for moving ahead. Reading Proust is what Rose did when she first got up in the morning...

A Wonderful Honest Lively Memoir

If you have read Proust, or attempted to, or mean to someday... Ms. Rose will not let you down. I love how she sees Proust...and how others feel he "doesn't apply" and miss the point. How many times have we been told that some great writer is "passe" or "impossible" or just not trendy enough? (those who sneer may just feel unequal to the task of reading a particular author) Rose takes it slowly, she weaves Proust into...

When the Student is Ready....

I didn't know this book existed. I was heading across thefloor of a real (not virtual) bookstore, on my way to the Proustsection. I had finally decided I should try and read Proust. Probably because I finally went to Paris for the first time a few months ago and because a friend lent me a book called "Le Divorce," which also reminded me I should read some Proust. On my way to Proust, I passed "The Oprah Table" (which I...

A candid, funny, down-to-earth, five star scholar...

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...