Product Description

The first book to address everyone who relishes reading Proust and wants to know more about how his writing works. This is a matchless close reading of a literary masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, and a lesson in how to read the Great Books profitably and pleasurably. 'Read this excellent book' Stuart Jeffries, Guardian 'Very refreshing...a splendidly tough-minded and generous introduction' Gabriel Josipovici, Independent 'Brilliant' Peter Conrad, Observer 'A splendidly thought-filled book' Eric Griffiths, Evening Standard A book that recalls that Proust's novel is one of the great exercises in speculative imagining in the world's literature; and that its originality lies first in the quality of Proust's textual invention, page after page, line after line. Art, death, sex, politics, loss, guilt, morality -- all Proust's major themes are here in all their glory, but revealed close up.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1057502 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

From the Publisher
some excerpts from the British reviews
‘Read this excellent book…it sends you off enthusiastically into Proust’s imaginative world.’ STUART JEFFRIES, Guardian

‘Malcolm Bowie is one of our best living critics. He writes beautifully, subtly and lucidly about very difficult subjects. He explains genuinely complex ideas with wit and clarity because he understands them through and through. Proust Among the Stars will surprise and intrigue Proust fanatics but can equally be recommended to the general reader as a way of looking. It is arranged in a series of thematic chapters – Self, Time, Art, Politics, Morality, Sex and Death – which trace the forming of the book and its narrator like a series of circles made by a stone in water. Bowie’s method is to examine Proust’s plenitude with both a microscope and a telescope. He analyses those long, looping, lassoing, curling sentences, with their qualifications, their disparate metaphors, their lyricism and their harsh contradictions, and shows both the brilliance of the writing, and how each detail, each adjective, hooks into the whole scheme… The critic’s moving wit sends his reader straight back to the text itself. Which is what criticism should do, but does not always do.’ A S BYATT, Telegraph

‘This remarkable book offers brilliant close readings of many passages, acts of sheer literary critical magic; it has a particular, slanted and surprising reading of A la recherche as a whole, of its complicated manners and its moral and metaphysical project; it places Proust among other authors, from Dante to Emily Dickinson, and from Erasmus to Kierkegaard and Cole Porter , and it situates reading among a set of other activities like listening to jazz or Mahler or looking at Rothko. How many other high powered critical works, I wonder have, Buñuel next to Sir Thomas Browne in the index, or Stan Getz next to Giotto?’ MICHAEL WOOD, London Review of Books

‘A splendid thought-filled book.’ ERIC GRIFFITHS, Evening Standard

‘Bowie writes in a flexible vigorous style, that occasionally begins to surf on the lip of its own inventiveness, riding a breaker of allusive prose to its full fling.’ ROGER SHATTUCK, TLS

About the Author
MALCOLM BOWIE is Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature in the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College. He was born in 1943, educated at Edinburgh and Sussex universities, and taught from 1969 to 1976 at Cambridge and from 1976 to 1993 at Queen Mary, London. His most famous book is the student classic Freud, Proust & Lacan (CUP 1987)

Customer Reviews

Sublime details
Malcolm Bowie's Proust Among The Stars is one of the most appealing works of thematic criticism that I read in a long time. By concentrating on specific themes such as Self, Time, Art, Politics and Sex, Bowie explains in great detail how Proust in his novel treats these topics in their sublime aspects, but at the same time how the sublime is given a human habitation as it were. Bowie, with many fine textual examples draws our attention to how the profundity and profusion everywhere apparent in Proust's masterpiece, coexists with dispersal and loss. He explores the many ways in which Proust is able to embed his rich and allusive art firmly in the real world; how Proust's attention to the minutiae of everyday life is never lost within the plethora of the Proustian paragraph. In his chapter on Sex, Bowie explains how Proust creates in his central protagonist someone who is "by turns a Lothario and a spoiled child, a visionary and a pathological case, a hero of the speculative intellect and a paragon of self-defeating folly".