Benjamin Taylor is a founding member of the Graduate Writing Program faculty at the New School and the author or editor of six previous books, including The Book of Getting Even and Saul Bellow: Letters.
“Benjamin Taylor’s Proust: The Search is a marvel of brief
biography, reanimating the hapless, almost Chaplinesque figure who
by all logic should never have accomplished what he did. With a
kind of worldly tenderness, Taylor shows Proust’s work accruing
amid personal pratfalls, French anti-Semitism and the catastrophe
of World War I.”—Thomas Mallon, New York Times Book Review
“This engaging book, invitingly elegant to handle with its
beautiful deckle-edged pages, should encourage those who have
quailed at the thought of Proust’s colossus to have another
go.”—John Carey, Sunday Times
“Taylor’s loose, multi-clausal sentences are as bendy as the
master’s, and there is the same shimmery quality to the prose, like
sunlight glancing off a shallow Normandy sea.”—Kathryn Hughes,
Guardian
“An excellent brief biography of Proust.”—Andrea Barrett, New York
Times Book Review
“Taylor’s slim and elegant biography will bring new readers to
Proust, and remind us to see him as a true modern.”—Ingrid
Wassenaar, Times Literary Supplement
“An important contribution to the study of this complex individual.
. . . A riveting summary of the rampant anti-Semitism found in late
19th-century France. . . . Excellent analysis of the Dreyfus affair
and how it split French society. . . . A noteworthy biography of a
great writer.”—Library Journal
“Deeply researched, and immensely well considered, Benjamin
Taylor’s own search is an outstanding addition to Proust
studies.”—Robert McCrum, The Observer
“If you’ve read Proust’s novel, Taylor is entertaining and tells
you things you didn’t already know, deepening your appreciation of
Proust and his world. For those who have been so far put off
reading him, this biography is a peerless introduction.”—Max Liu,
The Independent
“Because Taylor has been willing to learn from Proust how to write
his biography—be enjoyably clever but not too presumptuous—his book
is unusually instructive about how we can read Proust. . . .
Explains both formally and intimately, through straightforward
documentary narrative and engaging interpretation, the facts and
fictions of Proust’s extraordinarily improbable life.”—Adam
Phillips, London Review of Books
“Benjamin Taylor’s short readable biography of Proust . . . tells
Proust’s life story briefly and well.”—David Herman, Jewish
Chronicle
“Benjamin Taylor’s brief life is immaculately executed. He writes
with lithe concision, wry wit and deceptive lightness about his
formidable and demanding subject. There are no cloying moments, but
Taylor’s perceptive tenderness will bring tears to the eyes of
dedicated Proustians. Every page has charm and acumen.”—Richard
Davenport-Hines, The Oldie
“Situates Proust in the milieu that nurtured his genius, at once
specific and universal. . . . An important work. What he
demonstrates about Proust’s life is true of everyone. We all change
with time and time changes us all. Pass the madeleines, s’il vous
plait.”—Elka Weber, Segula
“Those who found reading Proust too grand an undertaking over the
years because of distractions and deficiencies of their own, might
well rush to reconsider after confronting this dazzlingly elegant
biography.”—Philip Roth
“Taylor’s endeavor is not to explain the life by the novel or the
novel by the life but to show how different events, different
emotional upheavals, fired Proust’s imagination and, albeit
sometimes completely transformed, appeared in his work. The result
is a very subtle, thought-provoking book.”—Anka Muhlstein, author
of Balzac’s Omelette and Monsieur Proust’s Library
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