Kirjahaku

The extraordinary life and times of Marcel Proust, one of the greatest literary voices of the twentieth century, by “Proust’s definitive biographer” (Harold Bloom) Selected by New York Times Book Review as a Best Book Since 2000 Based on a wealth of letters, memoirs, workbooks, and manuscripts unavailable before, the book examines Proust’s character and development as an artist, the glittering Parisian world of which he was a part, and the passions that enabled him to write his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time. “Serious, thoughtful, well-balanced, well-informed. . . . Carter is the kind of reader Proust hoped for, one who understands that a great work compels us to become better readers of ourselves.”—Victor Brombert, Los Angeles Times “An impeccably researched and well-paced narrative that brings vividly and credibly to life not only the writer himself but also the changing world he knew.”—Roger Pearson, New York Times Book Review

The acclaimed Proust biographer William Carter portrays Proust's amorous adventures and misadventures from adolescence through his adult years, supplying where appropriate Proust's own sensitive, intelligent, and often disillusioned observations about love and sexuality. Proust is revealed as a man agonizingly caught between the constant fear of public exposure as a homosexual and the need to find and express love. In telling the story of Proust in love, Carter also shows how the author's experiences became major themes in his novel In Search of Lost Time. Carter discusses Proust's adolescent sexual experiences, his disastrous brothel visit to cure homosexual inclinations, and his first great loves. He also addresses the duel Proust fought with the journalist Jean Lorrain after he alluded to Proust's homosexuality in print, his flirtations with respectable women and high-class prostitutes, and his affairs with young men of the servant class. With new revelations about Proust's love life and a gallery of photographs, the book provides an unprecedented glimpse of Proust's gay Paris.