Just as James Agee (deceased) and Pauline Kael (alive, but retired) remain the best writers on the Art of Film, so Kenneth Tynan (again, deceased) is still the best writer on the Art of Theatre. Tynan wrote so beautifully and wittily and lovingly about the stage and the people who inhabit it and he was also responsible in a major way for the success of the National Theatre of Great Britain along with his friend and professional partner, Laurence Olivier. (an essay on Olivier is one of the high-points of this book.) It was Tynan who "discovered" Harold Pinter, who "made the career" of John Osbourne and was a major factor in reviving the career of Noel Coward, after years of neglect: as Literary Manager of the National, it was Tynan who urged a revival of Coward's classic "Hay Fever."

This collection of 50 essays is absolutely essential reading for anyone who has a love of theatre or simply of celebrity and star power. No one writing today writes as well as Tynan did nor consistently shows his affection for Show Business. If you regularly read today's so-called critics, you come away with the feeling that they become INSULTED that plays they dislike were actually produced!

I highly recommend this book. It is passionate, charming and, at times, really funny stuff. But, please, do yourself a favor and haunt every used book shop you know to find a copy of Tynan's out-of-print collected theatre reviews from the U.S. (he wrote for "The New Yorker") and England called CURTAINS. It is absolutely the best book of criticism you'll ever read.

Tynan was one of the century's great journalists, capable of capturing a performer in two paragraphs, yet equally adept at longer essays, several of which are collected here. The pieces on Stoppard and Louise Brooks are particularly fine. The reviewer below is right: the writing is to die for; but, compared to Epstein, Tynan is a super-hevyweight, with ten times the force and prose-potency.

Enormously entertaining and the writing is to die for. Epstein regards Tynan as a lightweight and in a way I guess he is, but a skilled lightweight is still a thing of beauty and Tynan IS skilled. I stared underlining favorite passages but had to stop because I was underlining almost everything.

I had been given a copy of Michael Blakemore's novel, "Next Season" by my best friend...a fellow actor, as an opening night gift on the eve of my debut as Max Prince in Neil Simon's "Laughter on the 23rd Floor". My rehearsal process had been a stressful and confusing one - professionally and personally. As I thankfully landed with success on opening night, I avoided all of the festive pageantry and retreated to my room, hopped into bed and opened "Next Season". I was fully engaged from the first line. My post performance exhaustion was warmly soothed, all personal drama evaporated and I was swept up in an endless smile. As I devoured the entire book in one night my mind soared, and my yellow highlighter got a workout, underscoring the endless streams of insightful observations, humorous experiences and creative concepts that spoke so clearly to me and my life. This is what I do. This is about me. This is about all of us. Actors. I related easily to it all – yet up to this point in my life I had never read anything that had come close to putting it all together with such wit and honesty. How wonderful to find a novel that so clearly humanizes artists and reveals to perfection the craft of being an actor. I have re-read this book several times, and I give it as a gift frequently - to actors and audience members. I am ordering one today for my new friend ... on the eve of our opening night - the world premiere of “Just So.” I am confident he will find the same joy in reading "Next Season" and sharing it's wealth and beauty for years to come.

Tom Demenkoff is a professional actor, having worked on Broadway, Regional Theatre, and Television & Film for over 30 years....

If you watched the December 17, 2000 CBS News SUNDAY MORNING feature on Lord Snowdon, you would have noted the photographer's humility. He denies photography's place as a fine art and his significance in his work - the subjects are what is important.

No person with an eye trained to fine art could deny the quality of Lord Snowdon's talent. As a fellow professional photographer, I aspire to capture the human condition quite as Lord Snowdon does. The reader will find a variety of work - black & white and color, famous persons and ordinary people, sharp crisp work to grainy impressionist. Don't look for any ordinary pictures - each is dramatic in some varied fashion. Don't look for sensual nudes - a couple of tasteful nudes adorn the book.

The photo selection is an excellent representation of his 50 years as a photographic master. The book's technical presentation is superb, in terms of paper choice and printing techniques. I eagerly await Lord Snowden's exhibit at the Yale Center for the British Art. Thank you for your wonderful contributions, Lord Snowdon, and thank you Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers!

Simon Callow's thick and detailed biography of Orson Welles is a staggeringly thorough account of the actor/director's life, from his birth up until the release of his most famous picture, CITIZEN KANE. Callow goes to great lengths to separate the man from his inhumanly grandiose reputation. Armed with years of research, his personal interviews, and a keen sense of humor, Callow sets off to discover the real early life of Orson Welles. He finds a man smaller than his gargantuan myth, yet fascinating and brilliant all the same.

Orson Welles is a notoriously difficult man to write about with any great degree of accuracy. This is attributable to the fact that Welles seems to have spent almost as much time publicizing his work as he spent creating. The difficulty arises when one realizes that the majority of what he said wasn't strictly accurate, and yet it's that publicity which has been accepted for many years. Not to say that Welles was lying, or making up facts (at least, not all the time). It would be closer to the truth to say that Welles was prone to exaggerations, sometimes wild ones when it concerned himself. For the sake of his image, and for the sake of his career, he would embellish and overstate what he was doing and what he had done. Some of the more hysterical (and insightful) portions of the book are those where we see Welles describing something that had occurred several chapters previous. The story that gets told later can be almost totally at odds to what the actuality of the situation was. The further on one goes into the book, the farther away from reality these descriptions become. Welles was obsessed with constantly reinventing himself, creating a gigantic legend that became increasingly difficult for any mortal man to live up to.

This is not to say that Simon Callow is merely running down Orson Welles, or making his achievements seem unworthy. Indeed, Callow appears genuinely impressed by what Welles achieved in such a short amount of time. While Welles apparently preferred his fantasy image of himself, the truth was quite remarkable by itself; Welles packed more living into his first twenty-five years than most people do in a lifetime. The respect that he commanded as an actor/director was unprecedented for someone of his young age. But Callow emphasizes with how Welles thought of himself. He sees Welles' drive to continually achieve more. As a fellow actor, Callow understands and relates to the need for constantly promoting oneself for the benefit of one's career. He compares events in Welles' later life to the man's childhood, looking for the reasons for the overriding desire to drive farther and faster.

The book does tend to take slight detours on its road to CITIZEN KANE's Xanadu. Many of the subjects tangentially related to the main feature are given adequate descriptions. Welles' parents, his hometown of Kenosha, Wisconsin, the state of the American theatre in the 1930s and other assorted topics all benefit from Callow's in-depth research and his wonderful attention to detail. These asides and tangents are vital to understanding Welles in his context, and this biography is much the richer for these additions.

As for the portions of Welles' early life that Callow chooses to focus on, it is Welles' theatre work that receives the lion's share of attention. These sections are remarkably detailed, and I simply cannot imagine the book containing any more information. All of his productions are covered, the bulk of the spotlight being aimed towards those plays that Welles approached as both director and actor. Numerous memorable stories are contained in these sections, one of my favorites being the description of Welles directing a collapsing production by punctuating his screams at the cast with intermittent swigs straight from his omnipresent bottle of bourbon.

Descriptions of Orson Welles' other endeavors can only pale by comparison, though they themselves are also covered meticulously. The portions dealing with his radio career aren't given nearly the same attention, and the chapter involved with his WAR OF THE WORLDS broadcast seems remarkably brief given how big a place it holds in the Welles Legend. On the other hand, Callow is quick to point out how little input Welles had in the writing side of that radio play, so in retrospect it shouldn't really be all that surprising to see it neglected here. Still, even Welles' work as The Shadow is only briefly mentioned; again, probably based on Welles' lack of creative input on that series. However, it would have been interesting to see the same flurry of facts, and anecdotes directed towards the radio and film work as it was towards the stage.

For anyone who is slightly curious as to actor Simon Callow's ability to write, let me put your mind at ease. Not only is Callow a competent writer, but he's a very engaging one. The subject of Orson Welles is not a simple one for any biographer to attempt, yet Callow has put together a superbly researched and diabolically entertaining portrait of a man who surrounded himself with so much misinformation that sorting through it all must have been an exhausting task. Callow himself is never far from his descriptions, injecting his wry sense of humor into numerous observations. His style of writing makes it very clear when he's talking about verifiable facts, or when he is basing something on conjuncture. Further to this, there are twenty-five pages of references, as well as two and a half pages of bibliography. This is both a lively read and a superbly researched book --a rarity, but an extremely welcome one. In the preface, Simon Callow states that this is merely the first book of two and the second will deal with Welles' descent from the peak of his career. That second book has yet to be published, but based on the extraordinary achievement of this volume, it should be well worth the wait.

In his later years, Welles often complained that he spent more time trying to find money to make films than he did actually making films. And seeing Welles still scrambling for cash in his last days as a commercial pitchman for such products as Dark Tower and Paul Masson Wines ("Where we will sell no wine before it's time"), you know he was right.

This entertaining and exhaustive book by Simon Callow doesn't deal with most of his film career - only covering up to 1941. (We're still waiting on part two to cover the rest. Simon? Simon?). However, what it does do is clear up much of Welles' confusing past (he often told conflicting stories in interviews) and delve into the two main works that set Welles up for stardom...and the fall...in Hollywood - The War of the Worlds radio broadcast and Citizen Kane. And no wonder they were sharpening knives for the boy wonder when Welles publicly put down the Hollywood community, his Kane script bit the hand that feeds him by taking obvious shots at newspaper mogul Randolph Hearst and he was given the kind of directorial freedom veteran directors could only dream of.

Some people may tire of reading about Welles' theatre days with Houseman, anxiously waiting to get to the meat of his film career. But to understand why Welles became a "has-been" at 26 and the long slide to come, this is required reading.

.... "He wandered it's corridors, looking for money." Simon Callow gifts us with the deep portrait of Orson Welles from a gay man, an actor, and, like Welles, a virtuoso of many fields of endeavor. Like Shakespeare, Orson was comfortable, and indeed dependent upon, those of us who lean toward the familiar in the search for love. (Because, perhaps, of his own stoney heterosexuality). Be that as it may, Mr. Callow's own insights are what add volumes to this biography beyond what all else has already been written. His chronicle of America's Depression-era Federal Theater Project, and Orson's impact upon it, invites us in to the exiting era of the 1930's.

Orson's Road to Xanadu is sad, and it's glorious -- amazing. Read Simon Callow's biography of America's Great Voice -- Orson Welles.

I first learned about this biography when I heard Simon Callow talking about Charles Laughton: I ordered a copy immediately. The book is riveting. One could sit and read it for hours. Mr. Callow read everything he could about Mr. Laughton and interviewed as many people as he could (excepting Elsa Lanchester). The result is that he knows his subject and conveys the story of Mr. Laughton's acting life in a straightforward manner, providing interesting insights into the man and his approach to the acting profession. Here and there, Mr. Callow interjects his opinion to comment on something that has happened and it usually is a welcome and illuminating addition to the text.

The only problem with this book is that we get to know Charles Laughton the actor very well but do not get as much on his personal life. I was curious about the relationship between Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester worked. We get some insight early on but most of it comes at the very end of the book in the "Coda" chapter. It is only when Simon Callow tells us about Laughton's last year, when he was ill, that we get to know something about the lovers he had and his personality outside of acting.

Unfortunately, I found the various movies and plays Mr. Laughton acted in or directed rather tedious reading after a while. There is so much information, particularly the quoting of reviews, that I became bored.

In sum, a well-written book and a good biography of Charles Laughton the actor but I would have liked a little less on his professional life and and more about the flawed personality.

Simon Callow does a wonderful job of letting the reader get "next" to Charles Laughton without resorting to rumor, innuendo or grandstanding. I really appreciated the readability of this book as well as the sensibilies of the author. The best biographies, in my opinion, are ones that allow me to feel an understanding and closeness to it's subject and this book allowed me that and more. Bravo Mr. Callow, encore! encore!

The following is the beginning of a longer and more detailed review of this book at our internet theater magazine, CurtainUp (http://www.curtainup.com). . .This is that rare clelebrity biography that's truly well-written and filled with substantative information. Fascinating as Laughton was, it's as much a book about the creative process generally as it is about him. While Callow, an actor as well as a writer, does not ignore Laughton's private life and personal background, he uses that information as a sandwich to stuff with the results of his inquiry into what Laughton was trying to do as an actor and how far he succeeded in doing it. The top crust of this sandwich, called "Origins" represents the author's attempt to show something of where Laughton and his acting came from. The bottom crust, called "Coda" is designed to help the reader understand his emotional life. This organizing principle works remarkably well. It may not satisfy those looking for a tell all gossipy read but it makes for a must read for anyone interested in the theater, especially so if that interest extends to a theatrical career--Elyse Sommer, editor-publisher, CurtainUp--http://www.curtainup.com

I am a great fan of Shakespeare, so when I bought this book what I was expecting wasn't what I saw. I saw the most intriguing sonnets probaly ever known to man. It wasn't all about love and fear. It was involving a great many things. It had all the human feelings, sadness, happieness, hate, love, curiosity, fear, pain, grief, stress, and you get the ideal. I don't want to give it away so if you seem interested read this wounderful book.

I read these sonnets two a day over the summer, and I wish there were more than 154 of them so I could keep going into the fall. I think I'll pick up "The Tempest" next.

The poetry in this volume is beautiful, equisite and full of passion. What makes Shakespeare worth reading is the way he lets the world into his lines. His metaphors appeal deliciously to the senses, like a beam of sunlight through a high window in the afternoon, or the smell of a new cut lawn in the spring. Shakespeare's writing is immortal, not because a conspiracy of teachers got together and decided it should be, but because it is full of life, and nothing that is full of life can really ever die.

If you're not used to reading Elizabthean English or are put off by the thought of Shakespeare, this is a good place to start. This edition helpfully "translates" each sonnet into modern English on a facing page along with definitions for the more troubling words. Even with the help, I still don't think Shakespeare is all that easy to read. But anything you do in this world that makes you feel more passionate about life is a pretty good thing. If you give Shakespeare some of your time, he's bound to pay you back with plenty of interest.

This edition of Shakespear's sonnets is all you need to read and understand the great Bard.

A very nice feature is the paraphrasing of the sonnets in contemporary English and a translation into ordinary language of the more difficult words.

The edition is a paperback small enough to be carried around to read during one's leisure.

Victory is in many ways more fluid and readable than Conrad's more dense works (for comparison sake I'd previously read Heart of Darkness and Conrad's collection of short stories Tales of Unrest.) In Victory we have Conrad's standard fare of tragedy and man's isolation, but in this case wrapped in a tale of adventure and swept along by an uncharacteristically eventful plot.

Conrad's works have, of course, been reviewed to exhaustion; the only thing that I could hope to add would be my emotional response to the novel as a reader.

Personally through the majority of the novel I found Heyst to be the only truly well defined character. Much of what we learn of him is revealed indirectly through the observations of others, but somehow Conrad manages to use this method to flesh out a complex and intriguing figure in Heyst. The remanding characters, while interesting, serve mostly as scenery. The villains Jones and Ricardo, while interesting, struck me not so much as human characters but as forces of impending doom; they could have as easily been an approaching storm or a plague or any other brand of natural disaster. The girl Lena in the end is the one exception; perhaps the one thing that I found most gratifying is the way in which her character developed as the novel neared its climax.

The Penguin Classics version is well footnoted for those of you (like me) that would have missed some of the more obscure Biblical references and allusions to Paradise Lost. The notes also comment on the narrator's shifting viewpoint, and on revisions Conrad made to subsequent editions. For those readers interested in an insight into Conrad's thinking I'd recommend this version.

Victory is the story of a man named Heyst who leads an isolated life in the South Pacific. However, he is drawn out of his isolation when he brings a woman to his island home. A chance encounter between a dishonest German who dislikes Heyst and two criminals sets up the dramatic ending. Conrad's style is as fluid as in his better known books, such as Lord Jim, and it is amazing that someone could write English so well who did not learn it until later in life and who always spoke it with a heavy Polish accent. Victory is similar to Conrad's other works in that the plot flirts with melodrama, but always is rooted in realism. Those who read the book will find the title apt.

Victory is the best of the handful of Conrad novels I have read (for reference sake, the others are Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo). For one thing, the other novels were much heavier in their narrative and descriptive content. As a result, I often suffered from mental imagery overload when plodding through a page-long paragraph. Victory has more dialogue, making it an easier read. Conrad's characters are always great, and the ones in this book are no exception. I also really liked the correlation between these characters and their environment. Heyst living in a serene yet isolated island matched his aloofness perfectly. As the book reaches its climax and tensions reach a boiling point, Conrad adds to this tension in godlike fashion, as the storm evinces the internal and external struggles occurring in Heyst. Of course, Conrad don't write no happy tales (sic), but in the end, I think that the title Victory was still very appropriate. This was an excellent read and one of the best novels I have read in a long time.

Kenneth Tynan was a marvellous journalist. There is no-one writing for magazines or newspapers today (perhaps with the exception of Christopher Hitchens) who can so readily draw upon an apparently limitless well of wit, and do so in perfect sentences. All of his books are worth reading if you can find them second-hand: his early collection of drama criticism, 'Curtains', and the collection 'Profiles', are probably the places to start. For devotees of Tynan, who bemoan the paucity of his output in the last fifteen years of his life, the Diaries, splendidly introduced by John Lahr, can prove very frustrating. It seems everything conspired against Ken sitting in front of the typewriter and working his magic. His health was abysmal -- emphysema worsened by a heavy cigarette habit; he was preoccupied by a strange strain of socialism, which allows him to finish one entry with a call for action on the part of the workers and begin the next with an account of a tour through France, eating at three-star Michelin restaurants all the way; and he was rather excessively waylaid by a spanking-based dalliance with a mistress. That he managed to eke out portions of 'The Sound of Two Hands Clapping' and the profiles collected in 'Show People' is, on the evidence of the diaries, something of a miracle.

The diaries themselves make for very entertaining reading. There is plenty of celebrity gossip and, as befits writing not meant for public consumption, a good deal of invective. Sir Peter Hall, referred to throughout as 'P. Hall' is dealt with particularly harshly, and the relationship between Laurence Olivier and Tynan is fraught with ambiguity. There is also Tynan's almost comical political naivete; while there is certainly much that can be said for socialism and sexual liberation, Tynan's blatant hypocrisy (there are several references to his employing servants and nannies) and his very middle-class hatred of anything at all tainted by being middle-class, does not make for a convincing advertisement. I can only imagine how awful his 'spanking film', which he spends several years trying to find backers for, would have been. But these are, believe it or not, minor cavils, and actually add to the enjoyment of looking over Tynan's shoulder as he unburdens himself of his daily thoughts. (He certainly does not let himself off lightly, frequently despairing over his lassitude.) And the concluding entries, shadowed as they are by the reader's (and Tynan's) knowledge of his imminent death, are genuinely moving. I trust and hope there is more Tynan to be reissued soon. He's a fine companion.

I remember Kenneth Tynan from an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show shortley before his 1980 death. Until this book, I was unfamiliar with his work. Now I see what I was missing. Not only was Tynan a highly skilled writer of prose, but as a critic he saw things for what they were, even if the majority disagreed. He gives Warren Beatty's pretentious and mystifyingly overrated film Shampoo the swift kick to the rear that it deserves, and even finds a fault with Paddy Cheyefsky's Network that I had not detected prior to reading his assessment of the film in his diaries. He also has his say on economics ("Inflation rides high and I believe intentionally" he writes in 1973) and a myriad of other subjects including his preoccupation with spanking. Overall, these diaries reveal a melancholy soul who found some solace in writing about his life and its disappointments in his journal. Most published diaries promise more than they deliver. Not Tynan's. His diaries are a compelling read.

To paraphrase another wit: This is some of the best fun you can have with your clothes still on. Was Kenneth Tynan the most sophisticated and intelligent critic of his generation? It's hard to think that he wasn't, especially after reading these diaries. Not only does he give you a grand notion of what theater can be, but he also gives you a guided tour of the international theater scene in the late twentieth century. What a grand tonic his intellectually sharp viper tongue is in these days of spineless critics. Bravo!

Though it's rather slow to get going in the initial chapters, Oscar Wilde's "Picture of Dorian Gray" builds up into a splendidly effective piece, written in highly polished prose. Dorian Gray, who is suggestively described as "charming" and "beautiful" ... is painted by his friend and admirer, Basil Hallward. Dorian, a self-centered social luminary whose character is reminiscent of Narcissus, makes a bizarre sub-Faustian wish which tragically comes true: that his beautiful portrait may age, while he retains his youthful looks. The conclusion is disastrous, the culmination of a narrative containing elements of murder, suicide, blackmail, a confrontation in a grimy alley and an episode in an opium den. The characters are very well sketched out, particularly the triad of Dorian, Basil and the intellectual cynic, Lord Henry, Dorian's mentor and the mouthpiece of some of Wilde's most cutting amoral opinions. The style is, typically, marvellous, characterised by brilliant exchanges and aphoristic gaiety. Wilde lacerates English bourgeois culture, the conceptions of sin and virtue and the attitudes towards art of his time with tremendous aplomb. Some of his quips are patently snide, sometimes mysogynistic, as in: "Woman represents the triumph of matter over mind, while man represents the triumph of mind over morals." Oh, isn't that just despicable?! I love it!

This sophisticated but crude novel is the story of man's eternal desire for perennial youth, of our vanity and frivolity, of the dangers of messing with the laws of life. Just like "Faust" and "The immortal" by Borges.

Dorian Gray is beautiful and irresistible. He is a socialité with a high ego and superficial thinking. When his friend Basil Hallward paints his portrait, Gray expresses his wish that he could stay forever as young and charming as the portrait. The wish comes true.

Allured by his depraved friend Henry Wotton, perhaps the best character of the book, Gray jumps into a life of utter pervertion and sin. But, every time he sins, the portrait gets older, while Gray stays young and healthy. His life turns into a maelstrom of sex, lies, murder and crime. Some day he will want to cancel the deal and be normal again. But Fate has other plans.

Wilde, a man of the world who vaguely resembles Gray, wrote this masterpiece with a great but dark sense of humor, saying every thing he has to say. It is an ironic view of vanity, of superflous desires. Gray is a man destroyed by his very beauty, to whom an unknown magical power gave the chance to contemplate in his own portrait all the vices that his looks and the world put in his hands. Love becomes carnal lust; passion becomes crime. The characters and the scenes are perfect. Wilde's wit and sarcasm come in full splendor to tell us that the world is dangerous for the soul, when its rules are not followed. But, and it's a big but, it is not a moralizing story. Wilde was not the man to do that. It is a fierce and unrepressed exposition of all the ugly side of us humans, when unchecked by nature. To be rich, beautiful and eternally young is a sure way to hell. And the writing makes it a classical novel. Come go with Wotton and Wilde to the theater, and then to an orgy. You'll wish you age peacefully.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, a story of morals, psychology and poetic justice, has furnished Oscar Wilde with the status of a classical writer. It takes place in 19th-century England, and tells of a man in the bloom of his youth who will remain forever young.

Basil Hallward is a merely average painter until he meets Dorian Gray and becomes his friend. But Dorian, who is blessed with an angelic beauty, inspires Hallward to create his ultimate masterpiece. Awed by the perfection of this rendering, he utters the wish to be able to retain the good looks of his youth while the picture were the one to deteriorate with age. But when Dorian discovers the painting cruelly altered and realizes that his wish has been fulfilled, he ponders changing his hedonistic approach.

Dorian Gray's sharp social criticism has provoked audible controversy and protest upon the book's 1890 publication, and only years later was it to rise to classical status. Written in the style of a Greek tragedy, it is popularly interpreted as an analogy to Wilde's own tragic life. Despite this, the book is laced with the right amounts of the author's perpetual jaunty wit.

I wish I hadn't waited so long to experience Proust, for now having read "Swann's Way," I see that his deeply sensitive prose is a reference point for almost all of the introspective literature of the twentieth century. As the story of a boy's adolescent conscience and aspirations to become a writer, the book's only artistic peer is James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."

The narrator is presumably the young Marcel Proust who divides his recollections between his boyhood at his family's country house at Combray and his parents' friend Charles Swann, an art connoisseur. In fact, the path that passes Swann's house, being one of two ways the narrator's family likes to take when they go for walks, gives the book its title. Proust uses the theme of unrequited love to draw a parallel between his young narrator's infatuation with Swann's red-haired daughter Gilberte and Swann's turbulent affair with a woman named Odette de Crecy.

Intense romantic obsessions are a Proustian forte. Swann falls for Odette even though she is unsophisticated and frivolous and does not appear to love him nearly as much as he loves her. He is desperate for her, always sending her gifts, giving her money when she needs it, and hoping she will become dependent on him. It comes as no surprise that he is consumed with jealousy when he notices her spending time with his romantic rival, the snobbish Comte de Forcheville, and he is shocked by her lesbian tendencies and rumors of her prostitution. He finally realizes with chagrin that he has wasted years of his life pursuing a woman who wasn't his "type" -- but even this resignation is not yet the conclusion of their relationship.

Proust's extraordinary sensitivity allows him to explore uncommon areas of poignancy, perversity, and the human condition. One example is the young narrator's childish insistence on getting a goodnight kiss from his mother at the cost of wresting her attention away from the visiting Swann. Another remarkable instance is the scene in which a girl's female lover spits on the photograph of the girl's deceased father in disrespectful defiance of his wishes for his daughter's decency. And I myself identified with Legrandin, the engineer whose passion for literature and art grants his professional career no advantages but makes him an excellent conversationalist.

Few writers can claim Proust's level of elegance and imagery. The long and convoluted sentences, with multiple subordinate clauses tangled together like tendrils of ivy, remind me of Henry James; but Proust is much warmer and more intimate although admittedly he is just as difficult to read. The narration of "Swann's Way" is a loosely connected flow of thoughts which go off on tangents to introduce new ideas and scenes; the effect is similar to wandering through a gallery of Impressionist paintings. And, as though channeling Monet literarily, Proust displays a very poetical understanding of and communication with nature, infusing his text with pastoral motifs and floral metaphors that suggest the world is always in bloom.

We apply "classic" and "masterpiece" too liberally, but regardless of how loosely or strictly we deploy the terms, Marcel's Proust's extraordinary novel belongs to the shortest of short lists deserving such description. At the risk of hyperbole (though I do not thing it is hyperbolic), Proust is the one writer of the 20th century who perhaps belongs to the ages more than to his own time, who belongs with Shakespeare and Dante and Homer.

Many are put off Proust by not understanding the structure of his work and his writing strategy. The book, to many, seems to have no point and no plot. The novel actually does have a plot, albeit a simple and not easy to discern one: Will the narrator (usually termed "Marcel") become a writer? Through seven long volumes, we watch Marcel variously resolve to write and then forsake his resolve, we see him even forget for enormous lengths of time his intent to write. Through love affairs, through events with his friends, through reflections on all matter of subjects and experiences of every kind, Marcel finally comes in the final volume to rediscover his vocation and the subject of his work.

This first volume in the series contains many of the most famous episodes in all of Proust. The famous passage in which the Narrator tells of his not being able to fall asleep as a child is found in the first pages. The most famous section in all of Proust, that of his eating as an adult a madeleine that first creates an inexplicable sense of joy and then engenders a plethora of involuntary memories of his childhood, is also found in this volume. The second half is the remarkable story of "Swann in Love," in which family friend Charles Swann falls in love, much to his surprise, with the courtesan Odette.

This first volume glitters for the same reason that subsequent volumes do: Proust's remarkable sentences, in which he heaps phrase upon apt phrase on top of a carefully concealed central idea; Proust's extraordinarily complex, interesting, believable, and brilliant characters (I personally think he handles character better than any other author); and the wonderful passion and sensibility that permeates every page.

I will end with a piece of advice: Proust, more than any writer I know, gives back as much as you point into him. If you expend a great deal of effort in working through his masterpiece, you will be comparably rewarded. If, on the other hand, you pick up SWANN'S WAY casually, expecting a relaxed, entertaining read, you will be profoundly disappointed. But if you approach him with an open mind, a great deal of patience, and a willingness to work your way carefully through each sentence, you just might believe this to be the most remarkable thing you have ever read.

For a long time I could not bring myself to get through this book. The first chapter deals with sleep and going to sleep and this tended to lead to my mind wondering to other things. Unlike another French author (who is as like Proust as chalk is to cheese) Alexander Dumas, Proust does not attempt to fascinate with the first chapter. But once the novel gets underway, I could not put it down. The book has two main sections, one dealing with the denizens of Combray and the other with the title character, Swann and his love for the former prostitute Odette. The book functions as a series of very well etched vignettes complete with unforgettable characters and stories. Proust is a fan of Saint Simon's memoirs of the court of Versailles and uses these to comic effect throughout the book, particularly when describing the last days of an aged bed-ridden aunt, who he likens to the sun king in one comic section.

If it can be said to be about any one thing in particular, the book is a meditation of nature of love and human emotions. Proust is not anti-love, by any means, but he sees human relationships as multi-faceted and not always healthy or positive.

Reading this book has gotten me over my fear of lengthy exposure to Proust. I am eager to see further examples of his mastery of language and plot and look forward to eagerly reading the other books that make up A La Recherche du temps perdu.