Marcel Proust: A Life

Marcel Proust: A Life by Carter, William C.. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780300081459.

This is the first comprehensive biography of Marcel Proust since George Painters biography was published in 1959. Like Prousts masterpiece, A la recherche du temps perdu, the biography is structured as the story of the writers slow and at times excruciatingly painful search for a vocation. Proust emerges from Carters narrative as an extremely complicated, difficult and brilliant man. Carter goes into some detail to elucidate Prousts curious sexual identity - from his intense and often histrionic relationships with his male friends to his quasi-pathological attachment to his mother to the bizarre sexual fetishes that emerged in his visits to Parisian brothels. But the biography focuses firmly on Prousts development as an artist - the distracted years as a dilettantish member of Parisian high-society, the dabbling in journalism and translation and, finally, his emergence as one of the great literary voices of the twentieth century. This is a full, rich, deep, and all encompassing biography of one of the great writers in the world. It is also an elucidating cultural history of the times in which he lived.