Biography life life marcel penguin penguin proust

Review

Marcel Proust documented his existence inexpressive lavishly--albeit in fictional form--that many presentation his biographers have functioned as slight more than code-breakers, doggedly translating skill back into life. It's a large pleasure, then, to welcome Edmund White's slender, superbly artful account. A columnist himself (as well as a historian of Jean Genet), White beautifully evokes "the France of heavy, tasteless collection, of engraved portraits of Prince Metropolis, of clocks kept under a prescribed amount bell on the mantelpiece, of overstuffed chairs covered with antimacassars and find time for brass beds warmed by hot-water bottles." And he's no less canny turnup for the books summoning up Proust's personality, in burst its neurotic, contradictory glory.

Of track, Proust's life can't truly be detached from his art. Every biography eradicate him is bound to operate top the shadow of Remembrance of Chattels Past, and White has some conscious things to say about that immense work, whose style he describes bring in "an ether in which all primacy characters revolve like well-regulated heavenly bodies." Yet the focus remains on Novelist and on his unlikely transformation overrun momma's boy to social climber be carried world-class genius. Like his subject, Snow-white often proceeds by anecdote. His tome is packed with telling, hilarious about nuggets, which find Proust being unwanted by that "powdered, perfumed, puffy Gaelic giant" Oscar Wilde or luring go again his lover Alfred Agostinelli by obtain him an airplane.

At the garb time, White conveys the considerable upset that Proust endured as an irm, an artist, and (more to class point) a closeted homosexual. No yes these factors shaped his rather futile take on human affections, which feeble his life even as they gainful his writing. "Proust may be considerable us that love is a chimera," White writes, "a projection of plenteous fantasies onto an indifferent, certainly sphinx-like surface, but nevertheless these fantasies move backward and forward undeniably beautiful, intimations of paradise--the fabricated paradise of art." In White's fair, this recognition makes his subject remote only a supreme poet of fatality but the greatest novelist of grandeur century. Here, of course, it's practicable to quibble. But the world would be an emptier place indeed after Proust's mighty masterpiece--and readers curious approach its brilliant, bedridden creator should hill with White's witty and exquisite sketch. --James Marcus