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“... on mushrooms, William Emboden on narcotic plants, D.H. Lawrence on meeting interesting women, and Marcel Proust babbling about French society in a most peculiar syntax. I’d never heard of any of these writers; the slow-rising central horror of education in Middle America is that Great Expectations and that hollow little bastard Pip represent all there ...”

“... ascribe our interest to respectable literary values. Is Knausgaard, despite all the comparisons to Proust, more like reality TV – abject self-exposure from which we just can’t look away? Or perhaps, Clune suggests, people liken My Struggle to a drug because reading it can feel like consuming vast quantities of essentially undifferentiated material: all ...”

“... girl in France, although Albert is widespread for a boy.2. Albertine’s name occurs 2363 times in Proust’s novel, more than any other character.3. Albertine herself is present or mentioned on 807 pages of Proust’s novel.4. On a good 19 per cent of these pages she is asleep.5. Albertine is believed by some ...”

“... Translating​ Proust’s novel back into his life, and then the life back into the novel, has been an abiding temptation both for those who know it well and for those who don’t. In part this is an effect of the novel, which is itself obsessed by what people want to know about one another, and why. As ‘the world of people we associate with bears so little resemblance to the way we imagine it,’ Proust writes, it would seem sensible to try to bridge the gap ...”

“... however, and tried complimentary copies on his relations and acquaintances, not forgetting young Marcel Proust, whose path he had very likely crossed socially – in the Boulevard Malesherbes the Prousts were living at No 9 when the Roussels were at No 25. Proust’s short thank-you note later formed part of the ...”

“... how tiresome that is. Take my last book, on the satirist David Sedaris. Not only do you get more Proust than you’d ever care for, you get an awful lot of Sedaris – pure, unadulterated Sedaris. It’s not that I’m lazy. Or rather, it’s not just that I’m lazy. I do much more in Sedaris than quote Sedaris, much more than simply ‘rhapsodise’ (to ...”

“... I write her a letter to express my feelings in a way she would understand? But then you’re not Marcel Proust, Os, so take your Valium and go to sleep. An intermittent boyfriend, Peter, walked out on Clark for good one night, but stopped at Ossie’s request to explain why: He said I looked battered. It was all so untidy and depressing, cigarette ...”

“... achievements is startlingly clear from his response in 1918 to a meeting with Marcel Proust: ‘We exchanged compliments and he assured me that my books had been bread and meat to him ... I confess I often wondered while reading Du Côté de chez Swann whether my books had not influenced him.’ In fact, we know that although ...”

“... The heroic image of Proust in his cork-lined room, valiantly racing against death to finish his masterpiece, is now so ingrained that it eclipses that of the spoiled 30-year-old who left messages for his mother complaining about noise made by the servants; bullied her into throwing dinner parties for people who sneered at the family; and, later, challenged the father of a young man he had flirted with to a duel because the son had failed to respond with sufficient indignation to rumours about Proust’s sexual tendencies ...”

“... racked by asthma and all the ills of a youth whose mother had unmanned him with her kisses, lay Marcel Proust, completing his own great work about time present and time past. At Hogarth House, Richmond, on 4 November, Virginia Woolf, who had been ill again during the summer, wrote the last pages of Jacob’s Room, an experimental novel which declared ...”

“... at all hours. It is piquant to think of those two drugged insomniacs, Archie Rosebery and Marcel Proust, simultaneously barrelling through the night, comforted by the moonlight and the scent of the blossom in the hedgerows. McKinstry gives us painstaking (but never dull) blow-by-blow accounts of the endless manoeuvrings to persuade Rosebery to ...”

“... sensation of emptiness and severed relationships.’ The Nobel committee described Modiano as a ‘Marcel Proust for our time’, and praised him for his exploration of ‘the art of memory’. But forgetting, not memory, is the real engine of his novels. His novels are usually told in the form of investigations, with touches of noir that led his early ...”

“... an erotic obsession not her own in A la recherche du temps perdu: her Albertine struggles to deny Marcel’s containment. Now that Modernism is beginning to shift into history, Proust’s vast and complex novel is acquiring a cultural status akin to that of Hamlet. Rose’s is among a flurry of Proustian ...”

“... decided to write a book exploring his life, work and influence on a variety of artists, from Marcel Duchamp to Michel Foucault, John Ashbery to Georges Perec. I recently spent several months working my way through this enormous archive in the stately gloom of the ornately carved Salon de Manuscrits on the first floor of the Bibliothéque Nationale, just ...”

“... left his fingertips painful to the touch, and he wore a scarf all summer. ‘It was like visiting Marcel Proust in his bedroom,’ a friend recalled.Philosophy became his refuge, from the moment he read Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. But he soon abandoned Sartre – and indeed anything influenced by Hegel and dialectics – in favour of vitalist ...”