The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time [Paperback]

Phyllis Rose (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 23, 1999

A brilliant and original memoir of midlife-a writing life, a reading life, a woman's life-by the distinguished author of Parallel Lives

Phyllis Rose, a biographer, essayist, and literary critic, finally got around to reading Proust in middle age. As Rose learned, you don't have to live through an unhappy childhood or celebrity adulthood to write an autobiography. You just need patience, candor, and a close-to-scientific passion for truth. She begins to learn how to navigate the intricacies of Proust's novels, at the same time reflecting on the course of her own life.

With striking honesty, Rose writes about marriage, friendship, childbirth, and her own mortality. As she moves from daily experience to what she's read and back again, she illuminates how the close reading of her own life reveals truths for the rest of us and how such a subtle celebration of books can help us live.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"For a long time I used to try to read Proust," recalls Phyllis Rose, evoking both the somnolent opening salvo of Remembrance of Things Past and her own resistance to that mighty, melancholic masterpiece. Happily, she did get around to it. And even better, she recorded her dogged progress through all seven installments--and her own, shall we say, parallel life--in The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time. The result is an irresistible hybrid of autobiography, rumination, and lit crit, in which the author puts one Proustian principle after another into action. Some of these efforts end up backfiring on Rose. For example, her attempt to tar a friend with the French novelist's paradoxical brush causes her some deep embarrassment:

Paradox always leads you to a sort of truth, for it gets at truth's many-sidedness. But the tone of what I wrote David, although it amused him, was not Proustian. There's a sweetness that comes with complex understanding, and I didn't have it. The bitterness of my sterility flowed into the style, creating of Annie, whom I sometimes loved, sometimes scorned, sometimes envied, sometimes resented, sometimes relished, and sometimes pitied, a creature of blanket unattractiveness and of myself uncomplicated malice.

Here, of course, the author is being hard on herself, articulating precisely the sort of complexity that she's supposed to be incapable of. The paradox might evoke a faint smile from Proust himself--who also might have relished the pinpoint social observation and relentless honesty of Rose's book. Whether she's recording a late-breaking entente between herself and her mother, or the details of a dinner party for blaspheming bad boy Salman Rushdie, or her own career disappointments, the author withholds nothing. At the same time, she delivers any number of big-picture truths, occasionally wrapping them in you-know-who's favorite sort of simile: "As at a big party, you approach people you haven't seen in a long time with benevolence and perhaps a little too much joy, fearing that you've forgotten how close you were, in a long friendship, you might approach your friend with a tentativeness and uncertainty unwarranted by the degree of affection you feel for her, but understandable in the light of human forgetfulness and the complexity of your particular exchanges." It's all here--generosity, mortification, high intelligence, and top-quality gossip, along with enough Proustian moments to last any reader at least a year. --James Marcus

From Library Journal

A writer (Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, LJ 10/1/83) and professor at Wesleyan University, Rose finally buckled down to read Proust?and rediscovered her own past.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; 1st Counterpoint paperback ed edition (December 23, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582430551
• ISBN-13: 978-1582430553
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,332,821 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars She almost gets it - NOT!, December 10, 2001

By 

Jeff (Pittsburgh, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time (Paperback)

Too bad I couldn't rate this 0 stars because 1 star in one too many. This book is essentially and "hey, look at me and the people I know and the circles I have access to." She misses the whole meaning of Proust. She and everything she stands for is what he mocks.

Not all is lost because this book (if one can call it that) gives me hope that I can get a book published one of these days

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A candid, funny, down-to-earth, five star scholar..., May 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time (Hardcover)

To me, above and beyond all else, Phyllis Rose's sparkling memoir shows us how certain books come into our lives at certain times--almost as if the books find us, we don't find them. In her narrative, Proust is used as a conceit, allowing her to delve into memory while also telling us about her days, as ordinary, or at times, as extraordinary as they may be. It is not a full-scale memoir ("my birth to present, etc"), but an accounting of a year from her life (we learn that it is actually two years condensed). Memories, we must remember, are always fragmented, uncertain, contradictory; Rose's narrative structure makes this point well. The book reads more like a narrativized version of diary entries, and indeed, at the end of the memoir, Rose comes to the realization that she is, when all is said and done, a diarist and woman of letters, as opposed to, say, a novelist. It is this very strength that makes her book so enjoyable. She is a five-star scholar who is not afraid to be candid in her remarks, or in the use of an almost street-wise colloquial tongue. Her tone and style are completely unpretentious, unapologetic (a revelation in our culture of complaint), and at times, laught-out-loud funny. She does not discuss or reminisce on her years as a teacher, and this one finds refreshing: an academic who readily admits that the life of the body is equally as important (perhaps more so) as the life of the mind; an intellectual who is equally as passionate about material culture, whether antiquities, sports cars, houses, travel, gossip and dinner parties, as the writing life; a feminist who can balance her own forms of activism with trips to her Madison Avenue hairdresser and Saks Fifth Avenue. Readers from the NYC metro area will particularily enjoy her memoir, as it is the landscape of her memory, and the cultural base for her sense of humor. A bibliophile at heart, Rose shows us how good readers make the fictions they read their own, and bring to bear on their own subjectivity lessons learned from the marvelous, difficult, and rewarding world of reading.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A sad disappointment from the author of Parallel Lives, June 22, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time (Paperback)

After a promising opening chapter, this book proved to be a great disappointment, especially after Parallel Lives -- lots of Proustian detail but to very little point. It's confessional in tone (particularly with reference to the circumstances surrounding her second marriage) but without the insight necessary to make the confession of much interest to anyone else -- as a result, parts of it read like a literary gossip column. Also, as earlier reviewers noted, sloppy spelling and grammatical errors (in my edition anyway) are annoying. I found two points particularly grating -- her comparison of the emergence of the Beatles to the Passion of Christ (both are "transcendent") and her habit of referring to her literary pals as Annie D. and Bob S. It's apparent who they are from the text so why the coy references? It does seem as if this good writer has run out of steam -- I wish this book had really been about reading Proust. I think I would have enjoyed Rose on that subject.