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  • How Proust Can Change Your Life

  • By: Alain de Botton
  • Narrated by: Nicholas Bell
  • Length: 5 hrs and 6 mins
  • 4.3 out of 5 stars (75 ratings)

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How Proust Can Change Your Life

By: Alain de Botton
Narrated by: Nicholas Bell
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Publisher's Summary

For 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, de Botton dips deeply into Proust’s life and work - his fiction, letters, and conversations – and distils from them that rare self-help manual: one that is actually helpful.

Here, tendered in prose almost as luminous as its subject’s, is advice on cultivating friendships, suffering successfully, recognising love, and understanding why you should never sleep with someone on the first date. And here, too, is a generously perceptive literary biography that suggests that the master is as relevant today as he was in fin de siècle Paris.

©1997 Alain de Botton (P)2010 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd

What listeners say about How Proust Can Change Your Life

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Terri’s and improves with each listening

Will I read Proust now? Quite likely. Have I come to appreciate Proust:? Absolutely.

A well constructed and narrated walk into the world of a great author with wry perspectives and a utter lack of either toadieism or worship. A book about an author who writes about other books and authors and places and in the end acknowledges literatures place in inspiring and instigating rather than delivering and which does the same itself.

Worth the time. I’ve listened twice and plan a third.

Peter Howie
Brisbane
Australia

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4 people found this helpful

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Superb

Most memorable moment was chapter seven. Still thinking about it. Wasn't too familiar with Proust before this, but I loved being introduced to his philosophies and would like to read his books now.

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A reference point to always return to!!!

This review kept me great company while I was painting. I will return to it soon after I re listen to Marcel Proust work.

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3 people found this helpful

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A Great Introduction to Proust

Given that many of us will not have the time to read Prousts In Search of Lost Time save in retirementment or a year of long service leave, this book serves as a means benifit from Proust without having to put life on hold for a while.

De Botton has here distilled some of the lessons that Proust put forth in his seminal novel on love, friendship, art and reading. His ideas should help us look at the world with wonder once again rather than being pleased only by the fleeting extraordinary.

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“How Proust Can Change Your Life”. By Alain De Botton.

Sometimes when you read a book, you just want to reread it.

I am an artist and a scribe and an Invalid confined to quarters. So there is much that I can identify with. I have tried to read Proust over the years and found it too wordy. And de Botten demystifies a personal experience.
I also studied philosophy in the Visual Art Degree I completed and have loved de Botten since the time he wrote the preface in a book I bought on Plato, that was over 30 years ago. Cheers and enjoy listening.

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