How Proust Can Change Your Life Buttons

“A self-help manual for the intelligent person…witty, funny and tonic”. — The New York Times Book ReviewFor 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, the acclaimed young author of On Love and The Romantic Movement dips deeply into Proust’s life and work and distills from them that rare self-help manual: one that is actually helpful.

In de Botton’s reading, the infamously unhappy author turns out to be a font of good advice on such subjects as cultivating friendships, suffering successfully, recognizing love, and understanding why we should never sleep with someone on a first date. And here, too, is a generously perceptive guide to the Proustian oeuvre that suggests that the master is as relevant today as he was in fin de siecle Paris.

“Literary criticism wearing its slyest disguise since Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot”. — Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Dazzling….It contains more human interest and play of fancy than most fiction”. — The New Yorker