How Proust Can Change Your Life - (Vintage International) by Alain de Botton (Paperback)

About the Book

"A self-help manual for the intelligent person" ("The New York Times Book Review"), this stylish, erudite, and frequently hilarious book dips deeply into Marcel Proust's life and work to uncover a font of wonderful advice on such subjects as cultivating friendships, suffering successfully, and recognizing love.

Book Synopsis

A bestselling author draws on the work of one of history's most important writers to show us how to best live life in a book that's "delightfully original.... A self-help book in the deepest sense of the term" (The New York Times).

Alain de Botton combines two unlikely genres--literary biography and self-help manual--in the hilarious and unexpectedly practical How Proust Can Change Your Life.

Who would have thought that Marcel Proust, one of the most important writers of our century, could provide us with such a rich source of insight into how best to live life? Proust understood that the essence and value of life was the sum of its everyday parts. As relevant today as they were at the turn of the century, Proust's life and work are transformed here into a no-nonsense guide to, among other things, enjoying your vacation, reviving a relationship, achieving original and unclichéd articulation, being a good host, recognizing love, and understanding why you should never sleep with someone on a first date. It took de Botton to find the inspirational in Proust's essays, letters and fiction and, perhaps even more surprising, to draw out a vivid and clarifying portrait of the master from between the lines of his work.

Here is Proust as we have never seen or read him before: witty, intelligent, pragmatic. He might well change your life.

Review Quotes

"Delightfully original.... As well as being criticism, biography, literary history, and a reader's guide to Proust's masterpiece, this is a self-help book in the deepest sense of the term." --The New York Times

"One of my favorite books of the year.... Seriously cheeky, cheekily serious." --Julian Barnes

"Curious, humorous, didactic, and dazzling.... It contains more human interest and play of fancy than most fiction." --John Updike, The New Yorker

"A witty, elegant book that helps us learn what reading is for." --Doris Lessing

"A wonderful meditation on aspects of Proust in the form of a self-help book. Very enjoyable." --Sebastian Faulks

"Funny and very refreshing." --San Francisco Chronicle

About the Author

ALAIN DE BOTTON was born in 1969. He is the internationally heralded author of the novels On Love, The Romantic Movement, and Kiss and Tell; his work has been translated into sixteen languages. He lives in Washington, D.C., and London.