Monsieur Proust's Library: Celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of Marcel Proust [Paperback]

Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a personage without a book in hand. Everybody in his work reads: servants and masters, children and parents, artists and physicians. The more sophisticated characters find it natural to speak in quotations. Proust made literary taste a means of defining personalities and gave literature an actual role to play in his novels.
   In this wonderfully entertaining book, scholar and biographer Anka Muhlstein, the author of Balzac’s Omelette, draws out these themes in Proust's work and life, thus providing not only a friendly introduction to the momentous In Search of Lost Time, but also exciting highlights of some of the finest work in French literature.

“This gemlike exploration of the literary underpinnings of À la recherche du temps perdu reveals a Marcel Proust who did not so much read books as ‘absorb’ them.” —The New Yorker
 
“With Monsieur Proust’s Library, Anka Muhlstein has added another volume to the collection of splendid books about Proust. A woman of intellectual refinement, subtle understanding, and deep literary culture…Muhlstein is an excellent provisioner of high-quality intellectual goods.” —Wall Street Journal
 
“[Muhlstein] here turns her attention to Proust’s enthusiasms, antagonisms, and literary influences…sensitive to nuances of style and echoes of older standard French authors.” —Edmund White, New York Review of Books
 
“[Muhlstein] is thoroughllSz