Volume 49, Number 12 · July 18, 2002
Proust Regained
By André Aciman
Marcel Proust: A Life
by Jean-Yves Tadié
translated from the French by Euan Cameron.Viking/Penguin, 986 pp., $40.00; $20.00 (paper)
Marcel Proust: A Life
by William Carter
Yale University Press, 946 pp., $35.00
Marcel Proust was unusual in this as well: he turned every moment, from the most rarefied to the most ordinary, into an occasion for boundless introspection. He took the private temperament and mental habits of someone accustomed to prolonged solitude and applied them to the world around him, giving, as would become his signature, an internal mold to anything external. Everything, he discovered, from tea biscuits to stewed chicken to asparagus when they were in season, or from the very first stirrings of jealousy when a lover isn't even aware he's being cheated on down to the early morning streets with their telltale sounds that it rained all night—everything cried out to be looked at from the inside.
Review, 7553 words
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