How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel

Can an inward turning figure be an activist? What revolution would Proust lead? There has famously been a conservatism to great 20th  Century modernism, Ezra Poind ended up in St. Elizabeth’s in the wake of his fascist broadcasts during the Second War. Tolstoy is an exception particularly with regard to the Christianity which infused his writing in the latter part of his career. Andre Malraux, a Gaullist political figure, wrote both Man’s Fate and Man’s Hope (if manifest content is significant, the titles tell part of the story). Camus, the editor of the famed resistance paper Combat, was the author of The Stranger, a unique combination of interiority with intention and there were Koestler, Silone and, indubitably, George Orwell whose complex convictions are an essay in consciousness itself. Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Save Your Life  fuses the how-to genre with a Proust's excavations of memory in both its voluntary and involuntary forms (as exemplified by the iconic madeleine). The potential humor and even silliness of the endeavor is belied by acuteness of the author's insights.

Read "Boudu Saved From Drowning" by Francis Levy with a painting by Hallie Cohen in The East Hampton Star