'Proust's Way: A Field Guide to ''In Search of Lost Time'''

An illuminating work that serves as both an introduction to Proust--perhaps Europe's most enduring twentieth-century novelist--and a searching reinterpretation of his work. Since beginning his career, Roger Shattuck has been mesmerized by one writer. First came Proust's Binoculars, a short, brilliant study published in 1964. Then came Marcel Proust, commissioned by Frank Kermode for the Modern Masters series, which won the National Book Award in 1974. A series of essays, lectures, and reviews followed. Now, like Richard Ellmann, whose constant outpourings on Joyce resulted in his triumphant biography James Joyce, Roger Shattuck written a new and definitive work. Devoting special care to Proust's masterpiece In Search of Lost Time (traditionally translated as Remembrance of Things Past), Shattuck laments his subject's defenselessness against zealous editors, praises some translations, examines Proust's place in the path of aesthetic decadence blazed by Baudelaire and Wilde, and presents Proust as a novelist whose philosophical gifts were matched by his irrepressible comic sense. Proust's Way, the culmination of a lifetime of scholarship, will serve as the next generation's guide to Proust.