Author: Anka Muhlstein
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1590515676
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 161
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Book Description
Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a personage without a book in hand. Everybody in his work reads: servants and masters, children and parents, artists and physicians. The more sophisticated characters find it natural to speak in quotations. Proust made literary taste a means of defining personalities and gave literature an actual role to play in his novels. In this wonderfully entertaining book, scholar and biographer Anka Muhlstein, the author of Balzac’s Omelette, draws out these themes in Proust's work and life, thus providing not only a friendly introduction to the momentous In Search of Lost Time, but also exciting highlights of some of the finest work in French literature.
Author: Céleste Albaret
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781590170595
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 460
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Book Description
Céleste Albaret was Marcel Proust's housekeeper in his last years, when he retreated from the world to devote himself to In Search of Lost Time. She could imitate his voice to perfection, and Proust himself said to her, "You know everything about me." Her reminiscences of her employer present an intimate picture of the daily life of a great writer who was also a deeply peculiar man, while Madame Albaret herself proves to be a shrewd and engaging companion.
Author: Anka Muhlstein
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1590518055
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
A scintillating glimpse into the lives of acclaimed writers and artists and their inspiring, often surprising convergences, from the author of Monsieur Proust's Library With the wit and penetration well known to readers of Anka Muhlstein’s previous books, The Pen and the Brush revisits the delights of the French novel. This time she focuses on late 19th- and 20th-century writers--Balzac, Zola, Proust, Huysmans, and Maupassant--through the lens of their passionate involvement with the fine arts. She delves into the crucial role that painters play as characters in their novels, which she pairs with an exploration of the profound influence that painting exercised on the novelists' techniques, offering an intimate view of the intertwined worlds of painters and writers at the time. Muhlstein's deftly chosen vignettes bring to life a portrait of the nineteenth century's tight-knit artistic community, where Cézanne and Zola befriended each other as boys and Balzac yearned for the approval of Delacroix. She leads the reader on a journey of spontaneous discovery as she explores how a great painting can open a mind and spark creative fire.
Author: Benjamin Taylor
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030016596X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
“Taylor’s endeavor is not to explain the life by the novel or the novel by the life but to show how different events, different emotional upheavals, fired Proust’s imagination and, albeit sometimes completely transformed, appeared in his work. The result is a very subtle, thought-provoking book.”—Anka Muhlstein, author of Balzac’s Omelette and Monsieur Proust’s Library Marcel Proust came into his own as a novelist comparatively late in life, yet only Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky were his equals when it came to creating characters as memorably human. As biographer Benjamin Taylor suggests, Proust was a literary lightweight before writing his multivolume masterwork In Search of Lost Time, but following a series of momentous historical and personal events, he became—against all expectations—one of the greatest writers of his, and indeed any, era. This insightful, beautifully written biography examines Proust’s artistic struggles—the “search” of the subtitle—and stunning metamorphosis in the context of his times. Taylor provides an in-depth study of the author’s life while exploring how Proust’s personal correspondence and published works were greatly informed by his mother’s Judaism, his homosexuality, and such dramatic events as the Dreyfus Affair and, above all, World War I. As Taylor writes in his prologue, “Proust’s Search is the most encyclopedic of novels, encompassing the essentials of human nature. . . . His account, running from the early years of the Third Republic to the aftermath of World War I, becomes the inclusive story of all lives, a colossal mimesis. To read the entire Search is to find oneself transfigured and victorious at journey’s end, at home in time and in eternity too.”
Author: Patrick Alexander
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307472329
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
An accessible, irreverent guide to one of the most admired—and entertaining—novels of the past century: Rememberance of Things Past. There is no other guide like this; a user-friendly and enticing entry into the marvelously enjoyable world of Proust. At seven volumes, three thousand pages, and more than four hundred characters, as well as a towering reputation as a literary classic, Proust’s novel can seem daunting. But though begun a century ago, in 1909, it is in fact as engaging and relevant to our times as ever. Patrick Alexander is passionate about Proust’s genius and appeal—he calls the work “outrageously bawdy and extremely funny”—and in his guide he makes it more accessible to the general reader through detailed plot summaries, historical and cultural background, a guide to the fifty most important characters, maps, family trees, illustrations, and a brief biography of Proust. Essential for readers and book groups currently reading Proust and who want help keeping track of the huge cast and intricate plot, this Reader’s Guide is also a wonderful introduction for students and new readers and a memory-refresher for long-time fans.
Author: Anka Muhlstein
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1590514742
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 197
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Book Description
“Tell me where you eat, what you eat, and at what time you eat, and I will tell you who you are. ”This is the motto of Anka Muhlstein’s erudite and witty book about the ways food and the art of the table feature in Honoré de Balzac’s The Human Comedy. Balzac uses them as a connecting thread in his novels, showing how food can evoke character, atmosphere, class, and social climbing more suggestively than money, appearances, and other more conventional trappings. Full of surprises and insights, Balzac’s Omelet invites you to taste anew Balzac’s genius as a writer and his deep understanding of the human condition, its ambitions, its flaws, and its cravings.
Author: William C. Carter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300211078
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
The acclaimed Proust biographer William Carter portrays Proust's amorous adventures and misadventures from adolescence through his adult years, supplying where appropriate Proust's own sensitive, intelligent, and often disillusioned observations about love and sexuality. Proust is revealed as a man agonizingly caught between the constant fear of public exposure as a homosexual and the need to find and express love. In telling the story of Proust in love, Carter also shows how the author's experiences became major themes in his novel In Search of Lost Time. Carter discusses Proust's adolescent sexual experiences, his disastrous brothel visit to cure homosexual inclinations, and his first great loves. He also addresses the duel Proust fought with the journalist Jean Lorrain after he alluded to Proust's homosexuality in print, his flirtations with respectable women and high-class prostitutes, and his affairs with young men of the servant class. With new revelations about Proust's love life and a gallery of photographs, the book provides an unprecedented glimpse of Proust's gay Paris.
Author: David Ellison
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521895774
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
A detailed analysis of Proust's masterpiece, aimed at students coming to the work for the first time.
Author: Doreen Rappaport
Publisher: StarWalk Kids Media
ISBN: 1630831301
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 30
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Book Description
Describes an incident in the life of John Parker, an ex-slave who became a successful businessman in Ripley, Ohio, and who repeatedly risked his life to help other slaves escape to freedom.
Author: Jean Lorrain
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781943679034
Category : Novel
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Fiction. LGBT Studies. French Literature. Translated from the French by Eva Richter. In Jean Lorrain's MONSIEUR DE BOUGRELON, an eccentric, outmoded dandy leads ennui-filled French tourists around misty Amsterdam. Guiding them through sailors' bars, whorehouses, and costume galleries, Monsieur de Bougrelon recounts hallucinatory stories of his past and delves into his heroic friendship with his aristocratic companion Monsieur de Mortimer. MONSIEUR DE BOUGRELON is a unique character: loquacious, proud, a leftover from an earlier age, wearing garish outfits and makeup that drips. To his speechless audience, he waxes nostalgic about his life as an exile in Holland, as well as what he calls imaginary pleasures - obsessions with incongruous people, animals, and objects. These obsessions are often sexual or border on the sexual, leading to shocking, surreal scenes. MONSIEUR DE BOUGRELON also enthuses over his beautiful friend Monsieur de Mortimer, making this novella one of the rare works of the nineteenth century to broach homosexuality in a meaningful way, years before Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet. Originally published in French in 1897, MONSIEUR DE BOUGRELON is now available in English translation for the first time. Its inventiveness and sheer decadence find kindred spirits in the novels of Comte de Lautréamont, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and even Louis-Ferdinand Céline, while the novella's indulgent language and unconventional vision of art and sex embody the best of fin-de-siècle literature. It is, in the novella's own words, a true boudoir of the dead.
