Thursday, May 19, 2005

Being Proustified (Alain de Botton)

Alain de Botton’s HOW PROUST CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE (1997) is so educationally inspiring and therapeutically illuminating that it is recommendable for anybody who hasn’t read the whole Proust and who has no time for reading Painter’s colossal biography or Kristeva’s no less voluminous hermetic criticism.

Thanks to this book I learned that Proust’s father, Adrien, was “a pioneer and master of the keep-fit self-help manual” (this section is most hilarious!) and his younger brother Robert was “indestructible” (both his father and brother were nationally famous surgeons). We also learn that Alain’s girlfriend is named Kate and reminds him of “Albertine,” but for this we have little ground for judgment.

The book is particularly nice because of the great quotes from Proust (and especially from his correspondences). This from a letter that Marcel sent to Gide:

“ I have been endowed (and it’s certainly my only gift) with the power to procure, very often, the happiness of others, to relieve them from pain.” (174)

What an angelic statement! Even if one thinks that way, it’s another story to actually WRITE it to a friend. But then, that’s what being a writer is all about. Alain de Botton writes:

“One way of considering In Search of Lost Time is as an unusually long unsent letter, the antidote to a lifetime of proustification, the flipside of the Athenas, lavish gifts and long-stemmed chrysanthemums, the place where the unsayable was finally granted expression. Having described artists as ‘creatures who talk of precisely the things one shouldn’t mention,’ the novel gave Proust the chance to mention them all.” (142)

An unsent letter, to be sure. So much of what is called literature seems to be a bundle of unsent letters, or wrongly delivered postcards!