After nearly 100 years, Marcel Proust's The Remembrance of Things Past remains as formidable a reading task as when it first appeared. Indeed, possibly more so - since it was originally published in single volumes at intervals, which gave contemporary readers a chance to digest its contents slowly. But it now exists in seven volumes totaling 3,200 pages, a million and a half words, and containing more than 400 characters. This is not an intellectual journey to be undertaken lightly, and even experienced readers need all the help they can get to deal with a literary construction of this magnitude. Patrick Alexander's guide is an attempt to provide all the assistance that's required. The book is in three parts. The first offers an overview then a summary of what takes place in each of the seven volumes of the novel. Part two is a who's who - thumbnail sketches of the principal characters, what they do, and ... Read more >>
28 September 2009
A Guide to Reading Proust
15 June 2009
Maupassant's Short Stories
Guy de Maupassant was a prolific and very famous writer in his own lifetime. Between 1880 and 1891 for instance he wrote about 300 short stories, 200 articles, six novels, two plays, and three travel books. He wrote in the heyday of the short story, and it is this literary form for which he is now best remembered. Maupassant was one of the late nineteenth-century writers shaping what was to become the modern short story. His contribution to the genre was to pare down the means of expression and to focus on the effect of the tale. His stories are not abbreviated novels or rambling prose poems. They tell a story - and often it has a sting in the tail. Like other French writers of the late nineteenth century he was keen to explore ordinary everyday life - often exposing its less appetising and even grim features... Read more >>
17 April 2008
Marcel Proust: an illustrated life
This short biographical study offers an introduction to Proust's strange life, and his unrelenting devotion to creativity. It's written by an expert, and presented in a very attractive manner with archive photographs on almost every page. Mary Ann Caws admits from the outset that with so many other excellent biographies of Proust available [by George Painter, Ronald Hayman, and William Sansom] there's no point in writing another. Instead, she produces an account of Proust which takes themes and motifs from his life as a starting point for meditations upon them - some of them not much longer than a single page, and others stretching out in more leisurely fashion to make well-informed reflections on the social context which gave rise to his work... Read more >>
