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How Proust Can Change Your Life
- Narrated by: Nicholas Bell
- Length: 5 hrs and 6 mins
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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.
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- By Tad Davis on 05-10-19
By: Leo Damrosch
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Zelda Fitzgerald
- The Tragic, Meticulously Researched Biography of the Jazz Age's High Priestess
- By: Sally Cline
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Zelda Fitzgerald was the mythical American Dream Girl of the Roaring Twenties who became, in the words of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, "the first American flapper." Their romance transformed a symbol of glamour and spectacle of the Jazz Age. When Zelda cracked up, not long after the stock market crash of 1929, Scott remained loyal to her through a nightmare of later breakdowns and final madness.
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The Beautiful and the Bungled
- By Silverthorne on 12-08-17
By: Sally Cline
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How Fiction Works
- By: James Wood
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
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Ranging widely from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings, Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. He sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision, resulting in nothing less than a philosophy of the novel, which has won critical acclaim nationwide, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times Book Review.
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Educational!
- By Don on 05-04-09
By: James Wood
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Romantic Outlaws
- The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley
- By: Charlotte Gordon
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- Length: 22 hrs and 31 mins
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Charlotte Gordon's new work is a fresh look at the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, who together comprise one of the most illustrious and inspiring mother-daughter pairs in history.
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Tons of info, poor format choice.
- By Gotta Tellya on 02-06-17
By: Charlotte Gordon
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At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
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Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
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Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
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By: Sarah Bakewell
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Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know
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Elegant, profound, and riveting, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know illuminates not only the complex relationships between three of the greatest writers in the English language and their fathers, but also illustrates the surprising ways these men surface in their work. Through these stories of fathers and sons, Tóibín recounts the resistance to English cultural domination, the birth of modern Irish cultural identity, and the extraordinary contributions of these complex and masterful authors.
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Eminently re-readable
- By Ellen-A on 01-02-19
By: Colm Toibin
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Labyrinths
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- By: Catrine Clay
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Clever and ambitious, Emma Jung yearned to study the natural sciences at the University of Zurich. But the strict rules of proper Swiss society at the beginning of the 20th century dictated that a woman of Emma's stature - one of the richest heiresses in Switzerland - travel to Paris to "finish" her education, to prepare for marriage to a suitable man. Engaged to the son of one of her father's wealthy business colleagues, Emma's conventional and predictable life was upended when she met Carl Jung.
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Carl plays center stage
- By Sparrowhawk on 12-23-16
By: Catrine Clay
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Uncle Vanya
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- Length: 2 hrs and 8 mins
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Adapted by David Mamet from a translation by Vlada Chernornirdik. In this classic of Chekhov’s canon, an overbearing professor pays a visit to his country estate, where Sonya and Vanya, his daughter and former brother-in-law, have slaved to maintain his wealth. But Vanya is enchanted by the professor’s new wife, while Sonya has fallen for the town’s melancholy doctor. Includes a conversation with Rosamund Bartlett, author of Chekhov: Scenes from a Life.
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Poor American soap
- By tyrone on 10-22-17
By: Anton Chekhov, and others
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The Fellowship
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- By: Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski
- Narrated by: John Curless
- Length: 26 hrs and 31 mins
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C. S. Lewis is the 20th century's most widely read Christian writer and J. R. R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met weekly in Lewis' Oxford rooms and a nearby pub. They read aloud from works in progress, argued about anything that caught their fancy, and gave one another invaluable companionship, inspiration, and criticism.
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If You Love Literature...
- By Ray M on 07-14-16
By: Philip Zaleski, and others
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What Matters in Jane Austen
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In What Matters in Jane Austen?, John Mullan shows that we can best appreciate Austen's brilliance by looking at the intriguing quirks and intricacies of her fiction. Asking and answering some very specific questions about what goes on in her novels, he reveals the inner workings of their greatness. In 20 short chapters, each of which explores a question prompted by Austen’s novels, Mullan illuminates the themes that matter most in her beloved fiction.
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Intriguing details and background
- By Barbara JA on 11-12-13
By: John Mullan
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The school of life needs to be in schools.
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One of the great, but often unmentioned, causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment: the kinds of chairs, walls, buildings, and streets that surround us. And yet, a concern for architecture is too often described as frivolous, even self-indulgent. Alain de Botton starts from the idea that where we are heavily influences who we can be, and argues that it is architecture's task to stand as an eloquent reminder of our full potential.
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Many elegant words used for a simple topic.
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Disappointing, Erroneous, Implausible
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Wonderful
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terrible voice
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We know that our minds are capable of great things because, every now and then, they come out with a brilliant idea or two. However, our minds are also unpredictable, spending large stretches of time idling or distracting themselves. This is a book about how to optimize these beautiful yet fitful instruments so that they can more regularly and generously produce the sort of insights and ideas we need to fulfill our potential and achieve the contentment we deserve.
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This is a hopeful, consoling, gentle book about failure. Our societies talk a lot about success, but the reality is that no one gets through life without failing–in small and usually also in large ways. Sometimes our failures are very obvious, at other times, we feel we have to conceal them out of shame. This book encourages us to accept the role that failure plays for all of us and to feel compassion for ourselves for the messes we can’t help but make as we go through our lives.
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The second part of the book was really good perceived failure.
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What listeners say about How Proust Can Change Your Life
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Darwin8u
- 02-20-13
A nice petite primer on Proust
A nice petite primer on Proust. It travels similar ground as Bakewell's How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, Bryson's Shakespeare: The World as Stage, and even Wright's The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are. These books are not quite biography, not quite self help, but books that use the respective author's life/work/time as a peep stone into our own world.
Don't be distracted by De Botton's hyperbolic title. Neither he nor Proust is claiming any special power to change your life, but what they are trying to do is simply write something that will be read, perhaps appreciated. In the end they might even hope to deliver something that will be give their readers hints of how to live, how to love, how to suffer, and how to slow down and SEE the world.
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41 people found this helpful
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- Marie-Claude
- 08-17-12
Good book, well read, with just one remark
I own both the print and audio versions of this book and as a Proust fan, I enjoyed reading both. I like Nicholas Bell's lively rendition of the text very much but, as a French native speaker, I regret that he didn't research the pronunciation of French last names (or chose not to bother with it) before embarking on the project. It is weird to hear the 'n' and the 's' pronounced in "Guermantes" for instance or the 'p' pronounced in "Loup". It is a bit as if in a French audio version of Bill Clinton's biography, his name was pronounced the French way, with the "in" and the "on" treated as nasal vowels. Not a biggie but it bothered me, maybe because Proust's writing is so musical, even in English, and because the reading is so good otherwise...
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- Dudley H. Williams
- 12-07-11
‘How To’ About Nothing
This audiobook is entitled “How Proust Can Change Your Life” by Alain De Botton, is in one part and runs for 5 hours, 6 minutes.
I find this audiobook tedious and hard to digest. Having initially skimmed through the titles of the respective chapters, this forewarned (or perhaps prejudiced) me that what would follow might not be to my liking. Taken together, the headings struck me as an over-ambitious venture, contrived, convoluted and laden with affectation. When I eventually listened to the actual contents of the book itself, my suspicions were confirmed.
So, here are these headings of the chapters:
Chapter 1: How to Love Life Today; Chapter 2: How to Read for Yourself; Chapter 3: How to Take Your Time; Chapter 4: How to Suffer Successfully; Chapter 5: How to Express Your Emotions; Chapter 6: How to Be a Good Friend; Chapter 7: How to Open Your Eyes; Chapter 8: How to be Happy in Love; Chapter 9: How to Put Books Down
I myself, having read the novel (after a fashion, for only a few persons can honestly be heard to say that they’ve really read it although they might have done just that) find it difficult to relate any of these headings to what I’ve managed to make myself understand of Proust’s work. Potentially the most boring and impenetrable novel to read, it was surprisingly less taxing on my patience and concentration than listening at times to this audiobook — in my attempt to make sense of it.
In Chapter 2, De Botton introduces what I regard as an unfortunate element of subjectivity into his work. He recognises in some of Proust’s characters (for example, Albertine, Madame Guermantes) certain persons of his own acquaintance. He gives us their names — one of whom, despite her likeness to Proust’s character, has never read Proust and, in any event, prefers George Elliot. I myself of course don’t know these acquaintances of De Botton and I can therefore not identify them in the respective characters in Proust’s work. I also fail to recognise any of my own acquaintances in Proust.
Granted, as De Botton points out, Proust was of the opinion that, in reality the reader is, while he’s reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is therefore merely a kind of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to discern that, without this book, the reader would perhaps never have had inner experience of. Consequently, Proust held, recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.
I’ll concede that to me this information is very informative and helpful. I do not have an in depth knowledge of Proust or his work. I would have been unaware of Proust’s sentiments if I hadn't heard them from Alain De Botton. He gave me more insight into the mind of Proust and goes a long way toward clarifying the manner in which Proust perceives his reader.
However, to the narrator of the novel, characters come and go — he has scant regard for those he falls in and out of love with, or for those aristocrats whose banquets he frequents, or for his closest of his friends, or even, at least in one instance, for his beloved grandmother, when he fumes at her for wanting to have a photograph taken of herself. I don’t think that Proust wanted us to remember his characters as such, or that he wanted us to see in them reflections of those dear us, or wanted them to assist us in Regaining Lost Time. In this regard, Proust (through the narrator) is more interested in the abstract, the inanimate: i.e., the taste of a madeleine cookie and the sound of a teaspoon against a plate. In my opinion, characterisation does not fulfil such a central role in this novel so as to project the characteristics of any of the personae onto those of any acquaintance of the reader.
I find Chapter 3 informative, only because it gives me as a novice to Proust, what I regard as a basic insight into Proust’s novel. And besides, one can never have enough of this basic information, given the complexity of the work. So, I I’ve enjoyed the simplistic approach adopted in the bulk of this chapter, whereby the nitty-gritty of the difficulties associated in approaching Proust is revealed.
Alain De Botton comments that whatever the merits of Proust’s work, even a fervent admire would be hard pressed to deny one of its awkward features — its length. We learn that even Proust’s own brother, Robert, lamented that people have to be very ill or have broken a leg in order to have had the opportunity to read this work. De Botton comments that this reader faces another challenge — the length of individual sentences which are snake-like constructions. The very longest is located in the 5th volume and would, if arranged along a single line in standard sized text, run for a little short of 4 m and stretch around the base of a bottle of wine 17 times.
In 1913 the head of an esteemed publishing house, upon being asked to consider Proust’s manuscript for publication, remarked: “My dear friend, I may be dense . . . but I fail to see why a chap needs 30 pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep.” A reader for another publishing house remarked, at the end of 712 pages of the manuscript, that “one doesn’t have a single, but not a single clue of what this is about. What is the point of all this? What does it all mean? Where is it all leading? Impossible to know anything about it. Impossible to say anything about it.” All other publishers went along with such sentiments and eventually Proust was forced to pay for the publication of his work himself.
The other chapters of this audiobook, oscillate with varying degrees of success, between attempting to give us further insight into the life and work of Proust: on the one hand, Marcel Proust the brilliant novelist, and on the other, Marcel Proust the dilettante artist in general, critic, philosopher and even psychologist. To boot De Botton would have us believe that Proust is apparently instructing us on “How to . . . Love Life Today, to Read for Yourself, Take Your Time, Suffer Successfully, Express Your Emotions, Be a Good Friend, Open Your Eyes, be Happy in Love and Put Books Down”.
Insofar as Alain De Botton purports to enlighten me on “How To” achieve any of the above goals, I regard his attempt as unsuccessful. However, his giving me more basic insight into the life and work of Marcel Proust, I find helpful.
PS: I have recently reviewed another Audible book also dealing, inter alia, with Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”. This audiobook, entitled “The Modern Scholar: Giants of French Literature — Balzac, Flaubert, Proust and Camus” by Prof. Katherine Elkins, is worth acquiring.
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29 people found this helpful
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- Earnest
- 12-15-13
Gentle, inciting and above all, human.
What made the experience of listening to How Proust Can Change Your Life the most enjoyable?
Being aware of de Botton's accessible, yet insightful previous work, helped me enjoy his specific overview of a lengthy series of books I know I will never read or listen to. Knowing that this slim novel is as close as I will ever get to knowing a fraction of what Proust tried to incite his readers to think AFTER they put his books down helped me cope with my awe and wonder. Mostly I loved chuckling along with the whimsical self doubts revealed by the diverse reactions to Proust's monumental achievements by people involved with Monty Python, Virginia Woolf and of course the author himself. Being a fan already of the previous incitements to think further than the parameters of the aforementioned, I could trust this mini guide.
Who was your favorite character and why?
Although this is not quite appropriate for this book, being a Proustian Primer, it helps me to mention the author himself as a "character." His " presence" as he drives through the French countryside near Chartres on the way to find the fabled Proustian Madeleine, I was reminded of we the countless tourists who have travelled the globe, retracing/ revisiting/paying homage to Art and places which have figured previously only as figments of someone else's imagination. Proust himself would have approved, I think, because we are prompted to avoid "artistic idolatry" and relish the every day items we encounter, in the Proustian spirit.
What three words best describe Nicholas Bell’s voice?
Disappointing French accent. I am sorry. Previous reviewers have remarked on the gross mis pronunciation of the names, places, events which form the important foundations of this book. They were correct of course. What a mistake to make by the production company. Although the gentleman's voice itself is pleasant enough, the awful accent jars in nearly every line.
If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?
Not a pilgrimage to points of Proustian artistic interest.
Any additional comments?
How life affirming a gentle book can be. There is no " self help" tone to this book for which some of us are really grateful. Nonetheless, the wisdom of others can be mulled over with no entreaties that this, or any other knowledge is " the key."
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- Mark E. White
- 07-14-15
Whimsical, clever, enlightening.
Wonderful book. I'm getting the paperback to retread and share. It's that good. It occasionally sounds condescending, but this is a quibble.
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- Robert F. Jones
- 04-19-17
Personal
Any additional comments?
Taste of what Proust might be about - focusing on major areas like friends, love, books. Elaborates on how beauty is found in noticing things that might otherwise be considered mundane. It is only through pain and difficult lessons that we really learn. Avoiding the common turn of phrase to really describe what is experienced rather than relying on someone else's perception. Richness in the minutia. Descriptions of Proust as a tortured individual.
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- Vampymissk
- 09-10-18
Could not get through it
I guess this book was not what I expected. I was expecting snippets of his text and how they relate to modern life with many examples. After 2 hours of listening it was mostly about Proust's really sad and tragic life. I found some interest in backstory of Proust's family. But, the book goes into too much detail on some of his work without the real examples of pertinence now. It was not very engrossing and I just couldn't bear to finish it!
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- Joan
- 12-17-12
I loved it!!
I thought this book might be dry and boring, but the exact opposite is true. I have a new-found appreciation for Proust. Very thought-provoking in an enjoyable way.
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- Anonymous User
- 12-26-22
utterly lovely
a great piece on a great lover of beauty. I highly recommend giving it a go
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- Ramon
- 12-16-22
De Botton delivers, as ever
As John Berger would say, "a way of seeing" that's differently perceptive and alters one's approach to Proust, literature in general and the world around one.
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