How Proust Can Change Your Life - Reviews

Alison Lurie in The New York Review of Books, 15 March 2007
Today we expect nonfiction to be either comic or somber: to make us laugh, or to inform us, warn us, or terrify us with accounts of miserable childhoods or natural and political disasters. The idea that prose might be both casual in manner and serious in intent is almost forgotten. It survives, however, in the work of Alain de Botton. More...

Amy Kiernan in Humanitas, Volume XI, No. 1, 1998
"Generations of critics have told us we are not supposed to read novels for what they have to tell us about life," observes Phyllis Rose. If this is true, if fiction is not supposed to tell us about life, then the contemporary literary world is a fabulous success. More...

Frank Gannon in The New York Times (Book Review Section), 15 June 1997
When Marcel Proust was asked by a French newspaper how he would spend his last hours on earth if he knew that a great catastrophe was about to end his life, he replied that he would throw himself at the feet of Miss X, go to the Louvre and take a little excursion to India. More...

Julie K.L. Dam in Time, 2 June 1997
Even the most diligent of readers may be excused for falling short of conquering the Mount Everest of 20th century literature, Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Considering the thousands of pages in the 13-part autobiographical novel, there should be no question where that lost time went. More...

John Updike in The New Yorker, 2 June 1997
Alain de Botton, the author of "How Proust Can Change Your Life" , is described on the dust jacket as living in London and Washington, but his name and his passion for codification savor strongly of the Gallic. His curious, humorous, didactic, and dazzling book bears the subtitle "Not a Novel"; it contains, however, more human interest and play of fancy than most fiction. More...

Christopher Lehmann-Haup in The New York Times, 22 May 1997
One doesn't usually think of Marcel Proust as the author of a great self-help book. Unless of course what you admire most about 'Remembrance of Things Past' is its usefulness for killing huge amounts of time. More...

Benito Rakower in The Washington Post Sunday, 4 May 1997
MARCEL PROUST, a perpetual invalid who rarely left his cork-lined room, lived as no sane man could even imagine, while writing a novel that only the most determined readers have been able to f