Proust

August 17, 2015
This brief but thorough biography of Marcel Proust (1871–1922) from esteemed author and editor Taylor (Naples Declared) isn’t intended to be the definitive biography of the French novelist who wrote In Search of Lost Time. Instead, Taylor touches on the influences of Proust’s Jewish heritage, homosexuality, and debilitating asthma, as well as the pivotal event of the Dreyfus Affair, on his art and life. Among Taylor’s conclusions are that Proust did not see himself as a Jew but rather as “the non-Jewish son of a Jewish mother,” and that he protested the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus on espionage charges because he believed the French-Jewish artillery officer was innocent, rather than out of ethnic solidarity. Starting in childhood and proceeding briskly through the major events of Proust’s life, Taylor quotes liberally and wisely from Proust’s massive correspondence, early writings, essays, and interviews. In the process, he traces the complexities of Proust’s personality and painstaking artistic development from mere talent to genius, only achieved “after long years of application to his native language, and nine of servitude to Ruskin’s.” Taylor writes that “time, the only divinity Proust acknowledged, which makes dust of us, also makes us giants,” evocatively capturing the lasting importance of Proust’s masterpiece and its theme.

October 15, 2015

Marcel Proust (1871-1922), arguably one of the greatest French novelists of the 20th century, is best known for his epic In Search of Lost Time. Although numerous Proust biographies exist, Taylor (Naples Declared; The Book of Getting Even) makes an important contribution to the study of this complex individual. With this concise account, the author captures a "lost time," the "Belle epoque" days of pre-World War I France, especially the Parisian society Proust frequented. This title highlights the writer's many loves, the deaths of his parents, and the publications of his works. It also provides a riveting summary of the rampant anti-Semitism found in late 19th-century France. Taylor offers excellent analysis of the Dreyfus affair and how it split French society. Although raised Catholic, Proust's mother was Jewish, and Taylor evocatively relates Proust's interactions with those who discriminated against Jewish people. VERDICT A noteworthy biography of a great writer. This title will attract readers interested in French literature, civilization, and history.--Erica Swenson Danowitz, Delaware Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Media, PA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 15, 2015
A sensitive study of literature's favorite neurasthenic. The French Jewish novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922), writes Taylor (Graduate Writing Program/New School; Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay, 2012, etc.), was sickly and of course really sick, physically and emotionally. Yet even before he locked himself into a cork-lined room and bid high society adieu, he labored endlessly, putting sickness to good use. At 15, for instance, he read endlessly. "Much of the literature that would be most important to Proust was internalized during this period of insatiable reading," writes Taylor, a reading list that included huge and ambitious novels by Tolstoy, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, and George Eliot. Against the backdrop of essentially private activity, Taylor does good work in locating Proust among more or less privileged contemporaries, gay and straight and indifferent, and against a time that saw the emergence of a nationally tolerated anti-Semitism in events that Proust followed carefully and incorporated into his books. But for all the strength of his cultural historicizing, the author is best as a reader of Proust alone-and an observer of Proust at work writing A la recherche du temps perdu, complaining bitterly to his publisher about the agonies of editing ("The struggle to read four thousand pages of proofs," Taylor sagely notes, "was exhausting and enraging"), and howling, "I cannot cut the book as easily as a lump of butter." Readers of Proust will be fascinated to find clues as to who his characters were in real life, and they should be moved to appreciation by Taylor's assessment of Proust's accomplishment, capturing nothing less than time itself, that thing that, if it turns us into dust, "also makes us giants." And not only that, but capturing time in "a moral accounting as comprehensive as Dante's...." Though brief, a densely packed and rewarding book.

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