This is a genius-level piece of writing that manages to blend literary biography with self-help and tongue-in-cheek with the profound. The quirky, early 1900s French author Marcel Proust acts as the vessel for surprisingly impressive nuggets of wisdom on down-to-earth topics such as why you should never sleep with someone on the first date, how to protect yourself against lower back pain, and how to cope with obnoxious neighbors. Here's proof that our ancestors had just as much insight as the gurus du jour and perhaps a lot more wit. De Botton simultaneously pokes fun at the self-help movement and makes a significant contribution to its archives.

From Publishers Weekly
Generally writers fall into one of two camps: those who feel that one can't write without having a firm grasp on Proust, and those who, like Virginia Woolf, are crippled by his influence. De Botton, the author of On Love, The Romantic Movement and Kiss and Tell, obviously falls into the former category. But rather than an endless exegesis on memory, de Botton has chosen to weave Proust's life, work, friends and era into a gently irreverent, tongue-in-cheek self-help book. For example, in the chapter titled "How to Suffer Successfully," de Botton lists poor Proust's many difficulties (asthma, "awkward desires," sensitive skin, a Jewish mother, fear of mice), which is essentially a funny way of telling the reader quite a lot about the man's life. Next he moves on to Proust's little thesis that because we only really think when distressed, we shouldn't worry about striving for happiness so much as "pursuing ways to be properly and productively unhappy." De Botton then cheerily judges various characters of A la recherche against their author's maxims. At the beginning, when de Botton drags his own girlfriend into a tortuous and not terribly successful digression, readers may be skeptical, but they will be won over by his whimsical relation of Proust's lessons?essentially an exhortation to slow down, pay attention and learn from life. Is it profound? No. Does this add something new to Proust scholarship? Probably not. But it's a real pleasure to read someone who treats this sacrosanct subject as something that is still vital and vigorous. 25,000 first printing; author tour.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Here's an antidote for readers paralyzed by the anxiety of influence. Novelist and literary biographer de Botton (Kiss & Tell, Picador, 1996) sets out to exorcise the influence of Marcel Proust, using the words of the great French author of In Search of Lost Time most engagingly for and against him. In the process, de Botton fashions a hilarious work of authorial self-help. Like Julian Barnes in his Flaubert's Parrot, de Botton knows his author intimately, from what newspaper snippets he would have read each morning to what he and James Joyce said to each other the one time they met ("Non."). In pithy sections, spliced with kitschy photos and plenty of white space, he takes on Proust's personal and writerly idiosyncrasies: the length of his sentences; his loving devotion to minutiae; his elevation of the quotidian; his hypochondria. De Botton might not make us better people (he quotes the perennially miserable Proust on love in a Q-and-A format: "how to be happy in love"), but he will make us more careful readers. For all literature collections.?Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

New York Times Book Review, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
... [a] delightfully original work of literary criticism.... By characterizing In Search of Lost Time with amusing superficiality, he has succeeded in showing us some of the novel's greatest depths.

From AudioFile
Proust as a self-help book? The idea more and more makes sense in this witty combination of biography, literary analysis, and Proustian commentary on the eternal themes of time, love and friendship. DeBotton recalls the Monty Python skit in which contestants compete to summarize IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME in 15 seconds. His own summation of what Proust has to teach us is artful and entertaining, and especially insightful into Proust's wonderfully dilatory life. West, a British character actor, captures the literate calm that is Proust's unmistakable tone and successfully communicates a sense, not just of the author and his narrative, but of the consciousness and the voice that define them both. D.A.W. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Kirkus Reviews
For the era of the self-help bestseller, novelist de Botton delivers a witty, entertaining literary appreciation of the author of Remembrance of Things Past. Can you find real-life lessons in one and a half million words spread over seven volumes, written by a hypochrondriacal asthmatic Frenchman who divided his life almost exclusively between dinner parties and bed rest? De Botton says you can, whether ``How to Love Life Today'' or ``How to Suffer Successfully.'' De Botton has self-consciously mixed genres in his fiction, e.g., biography and the novel in Kiss and Tell (1996), which hinted at his Proust worship. This blend of literary criticism by both de Botton and Proust, snippets from Remembrance of Things Past, biographic tidbits, and self-improvement pastiches is not as unserious as it appears. Proust, after all, was an almost-epigone of John Ruskin- -the embodiment of seriousness about art in one's life--as well as of philosopher Henri Bergson (who goes, thankfully, unremarked). De Botton even turns up a gem of Proust's miscellaneous criticism in an essay on the artist Chardin, whose closely observed paintings of ordinary people and objects Proust recommends as an aesthetic tonic to an imaginary depressed ``young man of limited means and artistic tastes.'' Elsewhere de Botton discusses the hang-ups of Proust's characters Mme. Verdurin and Charles Swann, Proust on love, and the verb ``to proustify'' (``to express a slightly too conscious attitude of geniality, together with what would vulgarly have been called affectations''). Quoted selectively, Proust himself proves aphoristic--``In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.'' For a painless crib, de Botton's tongue-in-cheek tract beats out Harold Bloom on the Western canon and David Denby on Great Books without even a madeleine break. (b&w illustrations, not seen) (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The New York Times
"A delightfully original work of literary criticism...a self-help book in the deepest sense of the term."

Book Description
A perfect companion to Swann's Way, this innovative study explores Proust and why he matters. Alain de Botton combines two unlikely genres --literary biography and self-help manual -- in this charming and unexpectedly practical book. Drawing from Proust's letters, essays, and fiction, de Botton transforms Proust's life and work into a no-nonsense guide to life, including: enjoying your vacation, reviving a relationship, articulating yourself in an original way, being a good host, recognizing love, and why not to sleep with someone on the first date. De Botton succeeds in creating both a brilliant biographical sketch of one of literature's most beguiling figures and a witty exercise in literary criticism. 2 cassettes.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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 uncliched 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 inspiration 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Nan Goldberg

If you know anything about Marcel Proust's life, the idea of a self-help tape based on Proust is hilarious. This is a man who rarely left his bed. His first thirty years were spent in halfhearted attempts to find a career (he was actually fired from his nonpaying position at a library).

The last fourteen years were spent holed up in a tiny room in Paris, writing the seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past, the first volume of which he was forced to publish himself, since no publisher wanted it. He was a hypochondriac who refused to open windows (because of the germs), would eat only once a day and only from a select group of foods, and experienced terrible insomnia at night. He was always cold, yet refused to heat his room in winter, spending most of his time under blankets or dressed in thick layers of sweaters and overcoats. He was a homosexual who had only one or two brief relationships, which ended badly. He was, as you might imagine, a huge disappointment to his father. He was so devoted to his mother that he rarely agreed to leave Paris while she was alive. De Botton's semisatirical tour de force, while revealing all these facts, manages to read between the lines of Proust's brilliant ouevre and find wise lessons in it. That the author seldom took his own wisdom to heart is no reason to ignore it, de Botton argues.

The chapters, with titles such as How to Love Life Today, How to Take Your Time and How to Suffer Successfully, provide an engaging blend of biography, literary criticism and philosophy that are a joy to listen to. The reading by the dry-witted Samuel West is quite good. However, this is a book that might be more profitably read than listened to, if only because you may want to return to certain chapters again and again, to re-experience both the pleasure and the point.

David Futrelle

Marcel Proust would seem an unlikely role model, to say the least. His life was, generally speaking, miserable. He had asthma; he had a severely troubled stomach; his skin was so sensitive he couldn't use soap; he was terrified of heights, of mice, of travel, of too-loose underpants; noise from neighbors drove him nearly mad. He spent his life as a perpetual invalid, passing through a succession of colds and fevers, never breaking away from his clinging mother, with whom he lived until she died. His love life, such as it was, consisted of a series of unrequited crushes on unsuitable men. "Without pleasures, objectives, activities or ambitions, with the life ahead of me finished and with an awareness of the grief I cause my parents, I have little happiness," he wrote when he was 30. After completing all seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past, the anxious hypochondriac developed pneumonia and died at the age of 51.

And this is the man from whom we're expected to take life lessons? Well, lessons of a sort. Alain de Botton does in fact attempt to explain How Proust Can Change Your Life. His engaging new book -- not quite self-help, not quite literary criticism -- explores how a careful reading of Proust can help us to solve such problems as "how to be a good friend," "how to be happy in love" and "how to suffer successfully." For no matter how miserable Proust made himself, he was always a keen and insightful observer of others. "Infirmity alone makes us take notice and learn, and enables us to analyze processes which we would otherwise know nothing about," he wrote.

Spoken like a true hypochondriac. But even in those areas of life in which he did not exactly excel -- love, for example -- Proust was able to accumulate considerable knowledge, which de Botton draws forth with cleverness and wit from the novelist's various writings, public and private. Proust wrote with scorn of those who spoke only in clichés, in part because he knew how easy it was for stock phrases to substitute for real emotions. An effusive and perhaps overdevoted friend to many people, he recognized that a sort of amiable insincerity is necessary for friendship -- and that it's often worth the effort it takes to bite one's tongue.

De Botton's book may not, literally, change anyone's life, but it may prompt a few of its readers to have another go at Proust. Since it's likely more people have watched Monty Python's "All-England Summarize Proust" competition than have actually finished even one of the volumes of his sprawling, digressive novel, this in itself is something of an accomplishment. -- Salon

Publishers Weekly

Generally writers fall into one of two camps: those who feel that one can't write without having a firm grasp on Proust, and those who, like Virginia Woolf, are crippled by his influence. De Botton, the author of "On Love, The Romantic Movement" and "Kiss and Tell", obviously falls into the former category. But rather than an endless exegesis on memory, de Botton has chosen to weave Proust's life, work, friends and era into a gently irreverent, tongue-in-cheek self-help book. For example, in the chapter titled "How to Suffer Successfully," de Botton lists poor Proust's many difficulties (asthma, "awkward desires," sensitive skin, a Jewish mother, fear of mice), which is essentially a funny way of telling the reader quite a lot about the man's life. Next he moves on to Proust's little thesis that because we only really think when distressed, we shouldn't worry about striving for happiness so much as "pursuing ways to be properly and productively unhappy." De Botton then cheerily judges various characters a la recherch against their author's maxims. At the beginning, when de Botton drags his own girlfriend into a tortuous and not terribly successful digression, readers may be skeptical, but they will be won over by his whimsical relation of Proust's lessons-essentially an exhortation to slow down, pay attention and learn from life. Is it profound? No. Does this add something new to Proust scholarship? Probably not. But it's a real pleasure to read someone who treats this sacrosanct subject as something that is still vital and vigorous.

Library Journal

Here's an antidote for readers paralyzed by the anxiety of influence. Novelist and literary biographer de Botton ("Kiss & Tell", "Picador", 1996) sets out to exorcise the influence of Marcel Proust, using the words of the great French author of "In Search of Lost Time" most engagingly for and against him. In the process, de Botton fashions a hilarious work of authorial self-help. Like Julian Barnes in his Flaubert's Parrot, de Botton knows his author intimately, from what newspaper snippets he would have read each morning to what he and James Joyce said to each other the one time they met ("Non."). In pithy sections, spliced with kitschy photos and plenty of white space, he takes on Proust's personal and writerly idiosyncrasies: the length of his sentences; his loving devotion to minutiae; his elevation of the quotidian; his hypochondria. De Botton might not make us better people (he quotes the perennially miserable Proust on love in a Q-and-A format: "how to be happy in love"), but he will make us more careful readers. For all literature collections. Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"

AudioFile - David A. Walton