How Proust Can Change Your Life (Audible Audio Edition) Alain de Botton Nicholas Bell Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd Books
Download As PDF : How Proust Can Change Your Life (Audible Audio Edition) Alain de Botton Nicholas Bell Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd Books
For anyone who ever wondered what Marcel Proust had in mind when he wrote the one-and-a-quarter-million words of In Search of Lost Time (while bedridden no less), Alain de Botton has the answer. For, in this stylish, erudite and frequently hilarious book, de Botton dips deeply into Proust's life and work - his fiction, letters, and conversations - and distils from them that rare self-help manual one that is actually helpful.
Here, tendered in prose almost as luminous as its subject's, is advice on cultivating friendships, suffering successfully, recognising love, and understanding why you should never sleep with someone on the first date. And here, too, is a generously perceptive literary biography that suggests that the master is as relevant today as he was in fin de siècle Paris.
How Proust Can Change Your Life (Audible Audio Edition) Alain de Botton Nicholas Bell Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd Books
Absolutely delightful, thought-provoking, educational and full of good humor. A new angle on mindfulness.Product details
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How Proust Can Change Your Life (Audible Audio Edition) Alain de Botton Nicholas Bell Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd Books Reviews
This book is a gem. Full of dry wit, the author imparts much wisdom with Proust's life as the backdrop. This book will be added to my shelf of favorites.
To begin with, I haven't read a word of Proust. Whether Alain De Botton succeeds in rendering Proust faithfully is not something I can address with competence. But I can say that his book makes me want to read Proust; for if the nuggets of wisdom contained in this book are an inkling of what lies in store for the ones who tackle Proust's work, one can be sure of an experience that will deepen one's perception of the world and how we experience it. And, in the Proustian universe, it is this that is the goal of reading.
In a way, I found some of Proust's observations (distilled for us by De Botton) very familiar to those by Walker Percy, addressing the phenomenon of people coming to see the Grand Canyon for the first time one's initial experience is so often conditioned by the images that we already hold of the thing as-yet-to-be experienced. Indeed, some disappointed reviewers of this book have indicated that it failed their expectations. Would that they could have left those at the door, and followed the advice Proust gives!
I would consider Alain De Botton one of the great modern philosophers of our time. The word philosopher might make you cringe, and I get it, but go listen to his interview on the Tim Ferris podcast. It will help in understanding his perspective on how a philosopher should function in the modern day. He also guides listeners to How Proust Can Change your Life as a good entry point into his work, what he believes in, and a book that he feels has held up since its release. I took the nod, and I’m happy I did.
De Botton writes with clarity, concision, and wit. He turns the subject matter, Marcel Proust, and his book In Search of Lost Time, into a thoroughly enjoyable unconventional self-help manual. I say unconventional, but I can only hope the questions you ask yourself after reading this book become conventional in all sorts of ways.
I try to imagine selling someone this book. For me, De Botton had me at the chapter titles. Just to name a few How To Love Life Today, How To Take Your Time, How To Suffer Successfully, How To Be A Good Freind. Compelling questions to think about, and you’ll be surprised to find how Marcel Proust and his masterpiece In Search Of Lost Time provide a point of view on each.
Paradoxically the book concludes with a chapter titled How To Put a Book Down. Simple advice but the message speaks to a much large theme that we all could benefit from. That Beneath every piece of art there is an author with a point of view on the world and the greatest homage we can pay to each is to see our world, for a short time, through their eyes. After that short time, it’s ok to admit that for all the beautiful qualities we might see in each genius work it might eventually prove to be silly, maniacal, false, or just wrong. And as you learn to embrace this indifference you’ll really start to see how Proust can change your life.
I have read several titles by this particular author and have NEVER been disappointed. I studied for a PhD in literature and psychology in my youth. This sort of analysis of Proust is a gem for modern life -- and a guide to appreciating Proust's world as well. Many of Proust's eccentric habits were doubtless "self-inflicted" but the reader will confront how complicated the requirements of his society were at the time. My first exposure was "On the Art of Travel." This is NOT a "Rick Steves" sort of volume with suggestions of places to visit and how to spend less money doing it. It is a first class analysis of what makes us WANT to travel and of what rewards our psyches achieve from it.
Whether you beg, borrow or buy, this author will be a consistently valuable addition to your lifetime reading list.
Good enough to have read it 6 times and still not get all of it. I was taken by surprise at Proust's significance in history and myth -- beyond being a Monty Python joke. What is the name of the phenomenon wherein a person sees himself in an old painting? I will never look at a madelaine the same again. Thank you, Alain.
How Proust Can Change Your Life is a pleasure to read and to ponder. Its observations, though hardly original, seem especially worthwhile at a time when tweets pass for conversation and Facebook postings are a way to stay in touch with friends. Proust and his disciple Alain de Botton advise us to slow down; to take time not only to smell the coffee but savor a croissant or two along with it each morning as you languorously pore over your daily newspaper. Rather than looking for Mr. Right, become him--and start by listening to others rather than nattering endlessly about yourself. Note the beauty in the every day, and acknowledge the irony that one is never more alive or aware of life as when one's own health is threatened by illness.
These are but a few of the bon mots found in Proust Can Change Your Life--a delightful literary "self-help" that really is helpful. If not ground-shakingly original, they are life-shakingly worthwhile. In addition to all of the above How Proust Can Change Your Life ponders how great literature can impact our lives and how real creativity is a way of seeing and feeling an experience more deeply and more profoundly than most. Very worthwhile--the sort of book I'm sure I will be returning to.
Absolutely delightful, thought-provoking, educational and full of good humor. A new angle on mindfulness.
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