Books About Proust

I went a little Proust crazy at the library the other day but I managed to stop myself before I had requested more than three Proust books. There are others I want to look at too, but I only have two eyes and so many hours in the day and this is a long project and I must pace myself in order to make it to the end. That said, I am glad you are all with me, otherwise I would very likely burn out somewhere in the middle. The books I got from the library may be of some interest. They are:

• Marcel Proust by Edmund White. It is in the Penguin Lives biography series. If you've not chanced upon the series before, it is very good. Writers writing about writers. And the books are all slim. Not definitive, but a taste to whet the appetite.


• The Year of Reading Proust by Phyllis Rose. It appears to be a sort of interleaved memoir and reading of Proust. I am worried it is more memoir than Proust but hoping it might be good anyway.


• The Proust Project edited by Andre Aciman. This is a book of short essays solicited from 28 writers. The writers writing on their favorite passage from Proust. One of the best things about it is, it appears to be organized by book, so the essays on Swann's Way are first and on down the line.

And there is another book I found on my own TBR shelf that I had completely forgotten about because it was hidden behind some other books. It is called The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them by Diana Fuss. The four writers are Helen Keller, Sigmund Freud, Emily Dickinson and Marcel Proust. It looks like it will be interesting and I find myself wondering how it got shoved to the back of my shelf. I'm sure it was waiting for just the right time to reveal itself. That's my reasoning anyway and I'm sticking to it!