How Proust Can Change Your Life

I do enjoy Alain de Botton's work whenever I get the time to appreciate it. I very much enjoyed The Art of Travel a few years ago. I was sold on How Proust Can Change Your Life from the time I first saw the front cover, and given that it was first published in 1997 that was some time ago. I bought the book a few years ago but it has sat on my shelf patiently waiting its turn although occasionally I would glimpse that lovely cover and hope to read it sooner. 

Happily a couple of recent(ish) events conspired to get me there. My friend Lisa at ANZLitlovers read it in March last year, and I read her review eagerly. And then it came time for Paris in July 2016 and it seemed the perfect time to pop the audiobook in the car CD player. Sadly I've long ago run out of July, and 2016, for the review. Indeed it's nearly time for Paris in July again. Ah, c'est la vie. 

How Proust Can Change Your Life is told in a series of nine lessons.

How to Love Life Today

How to Read for Yourself

How to Take Your Time

How to Suffer Successfully

How to Express Your Emotions

How to Be a Good Friend

How to Open Your Eyes

How to Be Happy in Love

How to Put Books Down

On one level it is a biography of Proust in some detail- his habits, his prodigious tipping, the precarious state of his health. I don't think I ever knew that Proust was self-published!

I haven't read Proust. Well, I did try to once but didn't get beyond the initial 30 pages of the narrator falling asleep, but I have an increasing fascination with him and his work. I want to give it a red hot try at some stage, but until now I'll read about him, and think about him. I've stalked him in his room. 

I couldn't help but wonder what the modern diagnoses for poor old Marcel may have been. He had such problems with his skin, his digestion, his asthma. 

Proust frequently has to suffer distressing insinuations that he is not as sick as he suggests. At the outbreak of the First World War the medical army board call him up for an examination. Though the man has been lying in bed more or less continuously since 1903, he is terrified that the severity of his illness will not be appropriately considered, and that he will be made to fight in the trenches. 

Alain and Marcel also had some helpful suggestions for Reconsidering My Life. Alain de Botton suggests that n'allez pas trop vite could well be a Proustian slogan. Don't go too fast. Wise words I'm sure, but is that even possible in the modern world of a single working mother?

Proust famously did not realise the nature of what he was trying to write until he had begun to write it. When the first volume of The Search of Lost Time was published in 1913, there was no thought of the work assuming the gargantuan proportions that it eventually did; Proust projected that it would be a trilogy [Swann's Way, The Guermantes Way, Time Regained], and even hoped the last two parts would fit in a single volume. 

However, the First World War radically altered the plans by delaying the publication of the succeeding volume by four years, during which time Proust discovered a host of new things he wanted to say, and realised that he would require a further four volumes to say it. The original five hundred thousand words expanded to more than a million and a quarter.

None of which is surprising in the least when you see the pictures that Alain has included of the rewritten manuscripts and the revisions and comments that Marcel poured onto every square millimetre available of the publishers proofs. 

Picture source
From the internet, not from the book

Chapter 7 How to Open Your Eyes, was my favourite chapter, about what would now be labelled gratitude, and of seeing the beauty in the quotidian.  Proust recommended studying the works of Jean-Baptiste Chardin in order to see the beauty in everyday objects. "Chardin's paintings succeeded in being extraordinarily beguiling and evocative."

The Silver Goblet
Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin
Musée du Louvre

"A peach by him was as pink and chubby as a cherub, a plate of oysters or a slice of lemon were tempting symbols of gluttony and sensuality." And I'm at least moderately certain that I would have walked past them in the Louvre- another reason to go back to Paris...

Why don't we appreciate things more widely? The problem goes beyond inattention or laziness. It may also stem from insufficient exposure to images of beauty, which are close enough to our own world in order to guide and inspire us.

While I do seem to prefer non-fiction audio books to fiction, the audio format does leave the listener without illustrations, or the rather intriguing layout of the book form of How Proust Can Change Your Life. A layout that I really wasn't expecting from de Botton.

Picture source

Fascinating titbits

Marcel's surgeon brother (gynaecologist, urologist and general surgeon) Robert Proust did indeed introduce radical prostatectomy via a perineal approach in 1901, a "proustatectomy".

Proust spent lots of time at the Ritz entertaining, and was a legendary tipper

Though he was well catered for at home, and had a maid adept at preparing wholesome meals, and a dining room in which to give dinner parties, Proust repeatedly ate out and entertained at the Ritz in the Place Vendôme, where he would order sumptuous meals for friends, add a two hundred percent service charge to the bill and drink champagne from fluted glasses. 

I can't express my relief that I've finally finished this post. I finished listening to the audiobook last August I think. This post has been an albatross around my neck. Now lifted. I can move on. 

Dreaming of France is a wonderful Monday meme
from Paulita at An Accidental Blog  

Chambre de Marcel Proust

Some things are worth waiting for. I had to wait for my visit to the Chambre de Marcel Proust. Proust's room is on display at the wonderful Musée Carnavalet. I tried to see it on my first visit to Musée Carnavalet in 2010, but of course the only wing that was closed that day was the wing housing Marcel's famous room. I had more luck in 2014.

Musée Carnavalet is a fantastic free museum of the history of Paris. It's really worth a visit. (Update: Musée Carnavalet was free on my visits in 2013 and 2014, they now request a voluntary €5 payment).

I've never read Proust (well I did start one time, and I think I read one sentence or 20 or so pages, I wasn't ready for it), but I'm rather intrigued by him. I do like reading about Proust. I've got the audiobook of Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life on in the car at the moment, and it got me to thinking about Proust again. 

The lovely courtyard at Carnavalet

Proust's famous cork lined room. I don't remember it as quite so yellow as it seems in my photos. It certainly wasn't what I expected of a cork lined room.

Alain de Botton in How Proust can Change Your Life describes Proust as "a man who has spent the last 14 years lying in a narrow bed under a pile of thinly woven blankets writing an unusually long novel without an adequate bedside lamp." 

The inadequate bedside lamp 

Portrait of Proust's father, Dr Adrian Proust,
a famous author in his own right and an
eminent public health physician

The commentary indicates that the furniture and objects are from three successive addresses where Proust lived in Paris after the death of his parents. 

102 Boulevard Haussmann (December 1906 - Juin 1919)

8 rue Laurent Pichat (July- September 1919)

44 rue Hamelin (October 1919 - 16 November 1922)

Apparently the cork was installed  in 1910 at Boulevarde Haussmann at the suggestion of Anna de Noailles ( who has the adjoining room in the Musée Carnavalet) to give him the silence necessary for his writing. He was to write the majority of Á la Recherché du Temps Perdu lying in his single brass bed. 

I've had two quick visits to Musée Carnavalet, but still haven't had the time to do the audio tour. Clearly, I need to go back. 

Saturday Snapshot is a wonderful weekly meme
 now hosted by WestMetroMommy

Paris in July 2016

Proust's Overcoat

I haven't read Proust. There. I've said it. Now, having read Proust's Overcoat I'm not sure that I want to read him. Perhaps I'm just not old enough to read him yet. 

I was vaguely aware of this book having read newspaper reviews when it came out I think, so pounced when I found it in a remainder store on a recent trip to Canberra.

Unlike James Joyce's Ulyssess, which I don't expect to ever read, I do still harbor vague notions that I might get to reading Proust one day. Til then I'll read about reading Proust I guess. 

But this book isn't just about Proust. It's also about Jacques Guerin, a perfumier, who was to amass "one of the most important personal libraries of all time." He had books and papers by Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Cocteau, Genet, Hugo, Picasso, Rimbaud and Proust. His collection was so important that he was twice visited by Francois Mitterand to try to secure the collection for the Biblioteque Nationale. Sadly, Mitterand left empty handed and the collection was eventually sold at a public auction at the Hotel George V in Paris in the 90s. 

I was a bit surprised to learn that Proust died so young (aged 51 in 1922). He had asthma from a young age and was quite sickly. He was a rather fascinating character- he lived in a cork-lined room on boulevard Haussmann, and worked at a frantic rate night and day "to bring his great work to completion in an incessant race against death."

The book starts with the author visiting Proust's coat itself at the Musee Carnavalet in Paris (another reason to visit next year). Although Proust's coat is stored away in a box and not on public display. It is a threadbare, dark gray wool otter-lined double-breasted coat. It is shabby and worn. 

Proust wore his coat year round. He used it as a blanket whilst lying in his brass bed in his cold, unheated room frantically composing his magnum opus. Indeed, the descriptions of Proust's obsession with his coat made me wonder about his sanity. He arrived at his brother Robert's wedding in 1903 not having slept for three nights and his "appearance was frightful. He was dressed astoundingly, swaddled in multiple layers of clothing; he wore three sweaters underneath a jacket, and three coats on top of that. He had wrapped his chest and neck in flannel, bits of which poked out from the collar of his shirt." I can only imagine that his coat still smells despite the cleanings. 

This is a rather fascinating little book, a mere 120 pages, but it spins a web containing Paris, Proust, his unusual family and Guerin's world of literary obsessions and perfume. 

Paris in July is cohosted by Karen at BookBath 

and Tamara at Thyme for Tea