The World According to Proust

Scholar Landy (How to Do Things with Fictions) commemorates the 100th anniversary of Marcel Proust’s death with this pithy introduction to his magnum opus In Search of Lost Time. Landy wears his erudition lightly, pointing to Proust references in pop culture from Monty Python, which “hilariously imagined a ‘summarize Proust’ competition,”to Little Miss Sunshine, which featured Steve Carrell as “the number one Proust scholar” in America (“Yes, my friends do ask me. And no, I wish,” the author quips). Landy explores the ideas within Proust’s novel with a sense of fun, likening Proustian involuntary memory to a time machine that can take one back, for instance, to humiliating oneself at a New Year’s Eve party decades ago. Elsewhere, Landy separates Proust’s narrator from Proust himself (for whom “the everyday self is entirely different from the writing self, also known as the ‘true’ self”), analyzes why Proust chose fiction as the vehicle to deliver his ideas to the world (initially, Proust went back and forth between fiction and the essay form), and admits that he originally found In Search of Lost Time intimidating. Accessible and amusing, this is a must-read for anyone who has considered reading Proust but was too afraid to try. (Nov.)