This is a good Agatha Christie style mystery, though I was able to correctly determine the guilty party halfway through the book (something I fail to do when reading Poirot...so this should provide for you a good gauge of the book's mystique). What is remarkable about this book, and what I think was omitted above in the reviews, is that it was written by the real life editor of The Friends of Marcel Proust and Combray society's bulletin, Elyane Dezon-Jones. Her descriptions of Proust's home make you feel like you are really there. When this book was first published, in French, it caused a stir amoung the Society's members, most notably with association's real life Secretary. Can you guess who the book's first murder victim was...?

Jeff Plimpton has issues. A school teacher, bored with his life, and downright disgusted with the unruly brats and failing school system, decides one day that he has had enough. A voice of no particular origin makes itself known and convinces Jeff that a new "educational system" is in need. Jeff builds his new classroom in his basement and the festivities begin. Three students are enrolled in class and only one graduates. Torture, sensory deprivation, beatings, starvation (just to name a few) are the subjects for the three month course. Quite a turbulent term, indeed. Outcome rather predictable though. Still, I enjoyed.

I guess if you are a person who thought having to read a history of the English Monarchy was good as a companion piece to understanding Shakespeares Henry IV ..etc, then this would be helpful to appreciating IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME.

The interconnections of smells, memory and impressions that make Proust's work flow like a river are undone by books like this.

A much better guide would be the 10 pages or so in Vladimir Nabokov's LECTURES ON LITERATURE...the chapter on Proust.

It gives you a simple,yet incisive, outline.. of the path of that meandering "river" of smells sounds and reflections.... without attempting to reproduce it like some cheap postcard print.

I cannot recommend this book for any reason. Bowie dishonors his subject and himself. In particular, he appears to have set himself the goal of out-writing Proust, as well as out-thinking him. And he fails entirely, producing nothing but glitter and smoke.

Bowie needs to take to heart Proust's goal in writing his book: to set down the truth, no matter how difficult. In particular, Proust's comments on Bergotte should be heeded. (Quoting from memory here...)

"Many lesser authors imitated Bergotte's style, and critics would approvingly say that they had written something in the manner of Bergotte. But these lesser authors and critics overlooked the true merit of Bergotte: that in his immaculate style he expressed keen insights and profound truths. They imitated the style, but neglected to have something true or interesting to say."

Malcolm Bowie's Proust Among The Stars is one of the most appealing works of thematic criticism that I read in a long time. By concentrating on specific themes such as Self, Time, Art, Politics and Sex, Bowie explains in great detail how Proust in his novel treats these topics in their sublime aspects, but at the same time how the sublime is given a human habitation as it were. Bowie, with many fine textual examples draws our attention to how the profundity and profusion everywhere apparent in Proust's masterpiece, coexists with dispersal and loss. He explores the many ways in which Proust is able to embed his rich and allusive art firmly in the real world; how Proust's attention to the minutiae of everyday life is never lost within the plethora of the Proustian paragraph. In his chapter on Sex, Bowie explains how Proust creates in his central protagonist someone who is "by turns a Lothario and a spoiled child, a visionary and a pathological case, a hero of the speculative intellect and a paragon of self-defeating folly".

Excellent fare indeed and a book to read and reread.

My review is based only on the Proust chapter; I bought the book because "errancy" is an important element in my work on Proust. In general, this chapter is a disaster, but to her credit, Lamos does a good job articulating some aspects of error, and some of her comments on the narrating/narrated "I" opposition are worth rereading. First, Lamos NEVER cites from the French text! She only works with a translation (Montrcrieff/Kilmartin). No credible scholar would make claims about a text based on its translation. Provide translations for an English speaking audience, surely, but if you are basing your interpretation on what Proust wrote, then you must address the exact words he used, and Proust wrote in French. Second, Lamos succumbs to multi-culti/queer theory newspeak: "This exchange of places between the desiring reader and the desiring text...is analogous to the relation between penetrator and penetrated in the economy of sodomy" (180); the hero's nocturnal wanderings in Venice are "an allegory of anal sex" (187) [certainly some reference, any reference to the words Proust actually uses is called for here...but no]; "The body of the text, originally the enclosure of the self and the site of masturbatory pleasure, is fantasized as the body of the other, penetrated and mastered by a desire that circulates according to the economy of sodomy" (190); "The hero's first mistake is to get to the bottom of Albertine, whose illegibility is a paradigm for the errancy of all texts" (191) [that's right, "all" texts]; referring to Proust's preface to his translation of Ruskin, "Combining his Sodomic and Gomorrahan aesthetics, Proust imagines that this hymenal 'mist which our eager eyes would like to pierce is the last word of the painter's art'" (193); "The structural opposition between the narrating and narrated 'I' parallels another well-worn, dubious distinction: the phallus and the penis" (198); "The ambiguous factual/fictive status of the text is thus directly linked to the enigma of lesbianism....by posing female same-sex desire as an occult mystery, Proust fictionalizes fact and factualizes fiction, making it impossible to account for one in terms of the other" (199); "Above all, the novel incites the desire to expose the hero's-and Proust's-homosexuality" (215). Above all? Above all! Lamos' goals are commendable: to show the "errancies" or heterogeneous elements in texts that appear monolithic and coherent. But the outcome is embarrassing and laughable. Her ideas are malformed compared to Sedgwick's, and even though her syntax might be less complex than that of "Epistemology of the Closet," her writing in general is poor. She does not develop ideas or make transitions between paragraphs. It's as if she had a collection of loose notes and ideas that she's intent on including, even if they make little sense as a whole. This book has been well-reviewed here at Amazon. For me it was a total waste of [money]. If you do really want to read it, I suggest you look for it at the library of your local university.

Despite having only read the sections of this book that deal with Proust, I feel comfortable saying that Colleen Lamos makes excellent use of wonderful insights in her work. Concentrating on volumes of Proust that other critics consider "digressions," she is able to address important epistemological issues that cannot be ignored in any true reading of Proust. If you liked Sedgwick, you'll love Lamos--her ideas are just as good, and her writing infinitely more readable.

Colleen Lamos' text is wonderfully insightful. I have only had the opportunity to read the sections dealing with Marcel Proust, but their quality can only point to how wonderful the rest of the book must be. Any lover of the works of these three authors will benefit tremedously from Dr. Lamos' work.

I picked up a copy of this book when I saw it marked down in price. I did not have to read very far before I discovered why the bookstore was unable to unload the large stock they still have on hand. The writing is simply atrocious.

On every page there are non-sequiturs or convoluted sentence that are impossible to understand, even after reading them two or three times. The fault is not in the translation, which seems to be faithful to the original, but in the publisher who clearly made no attempt to edit the text properly.

How ironic that a work about one of the greatest writers of modern literature should be presented in such a careless, clumsy way.

Having heard much about Marcel Proust and his role in 20th century literature, several years ago I began the odyssey of reading a standard English translation of "A la recherche". There is something unsettling about reading Proust for the first time: the extravagantly-long sentences, the concentration on emotion and aesthetic experience, the depth of perception he invests in his characters, and the extended attention he pays to their everyday conversations and experiences. He can frustrate easily, but if you are able to abandon your habits from reading typical American best sellers, and allow Proust's unique approach to literature to grab hold, the rewards are enormous. There are few if any novelists like him, and you wonder as you are enveloped more and more into his world, how much of Proust's real life intruded into the life of his characters.

Jean-Yves Tadie's biography "Marcel Proust - a Life" provides the answer. So much of Proust's personal experience, and that of his acquaintances in French high society, are to be found in "A la recherche" that you cannot fully understand Proust's work without understanding Proust's life. And an everyday biography chronicling where Proust went, what he did, and who he met, would not be sufficient. What is required is a biography which explains how Proust developed his philosophy; why the aesethic experience was so vital, and sometimes so overwhelming for him; what is was that drew him to associate with the French nobility; and most importantly, what role love played in his life. Proust, after all, is the 20th century's pre-eminent chronicler of love's passion, and its destruction through jealousy.

Tadie's biography satisfies these requirements, in a way that perhaps only a French author could do. The biography traces Proust's academic career and the philosophical influences which found their way into his novels. It is well-laced with selections from Proust's letters to his mother and father, as well as to those he loved and to his friends. It provides considerable information, and occasional speculation, on the connection to the people in Proust's life with the characters in his novels. So thoroughly immersed is Tadie in Proust's life and his writings, that his biography has occasional passages which read as if Proust wrote them himself.

It is surprising to learn how well-placed Proust was in the intellectual and artistic developments of turn-of-the-century France. He knew well, or at least met, most of the famous French authors, composers, actors, and critics, and certainly did not spend his time exclusively at high-society functions. Tadie's biography illuminates these links between Proust and such famous figures as Robert de Montesquiou, Gustave Moreau, James Whistler, Camille Saint-Saens, Stephane Mallarme, Daniel Halevy, Sarah Bernhardt, Jean Cocteau, and Gabriel Faure. Yet the biography is also filled with references to hundreds of individuals unfamiliar to American readers. Some reviewers have suggested that this is a weakness; that Tadie's biography is too detailed and Franco-centric to be of value to those who don't speak French or have a solid grounding in the France of Proust's time. But if this is true of Tadie's book, it is certainly true of Proust's novels. Proust's world is so all-encompassing, and his style is so poetic and distinctive, that he creates a desire in the reader to learn French just to savor his creativity in its original power, and to visit France to see first-hand the places which excited his extraordinary descriptions.

Tadie's biography satisfyingly entwines Proust's imaginary world with Proust's real existence. He understands Proust in a way few other biographers have. His biography will be the indispensible source for anyone wishing to travel behind the characters and experiences in "A la recherche", to the life of Proust himself.

This huge biography of Proust might also be termed the background to "A la recherche du temps perdu", as Tadie links Proust and his masterpiece so inextricably. As Tadie puts it of Proust's writing "...nothing that has been experienced is wasted or lost; everything has been disseminated throughout the novel."

This, then, is a biography for those who have read "A la recherche du temps perdu" rather than for those seeking a path to it via a Proust biography. It's an immensely detailed account in which the author attempts to enter Proust's mind, to answer the questions of how Proust interpreted the world around him and then turned his experiences into his fiction.

Proust's homosexuality, his physical frailty, and his social milieu are all documented by Tadie. But Tadie is disarmingly honest in stating the limitations of his research and therefore of this biography - so much of the detail of Proust's life, especially his early formative years is simply not available, and cannot be recontructed with any real confidence.

The early parts of this book are therefore a patchy affair, necessarily so, but it makes for uneven reading. I found that the book got better as it went along, as more material became available to Tadie, and he had more to interpret, more to work upon as it were.

In the end, there emerges a picture of a deeply sensitive man, exasperating at times, yet consistently capable of great kindness and, above all, a great writer.

G Rodgers

This is a very accessible, readable introduction to a very very long and thematically complex work, which is illuminating and perceptive without resorting to tedious jargon (his quotations from the book are in English too, which is a relief for those with non-Proust level French academics usually ignore). His thematic divisions are sensible and lucid, and if you don't always agree with him than such is the nature of debate.

He is endearingly evenhanded in discussing the great writer, acknowledging and revelling his genius, while pointing out crucial flaws, failures, evasions and unexpected conservative elements. He also draws unexpected paralells with other works of literature, such as the marvellous comedies of PG Wodehouse.

The book's main blemish lies in the writer's seeming lack of familiarity of literature outside his field, and especially of different theories of the erotic, for example. He suggests that English literature has been slow in analysing the psychological and social complexities of sado-masochism, and refers to Anthony Powell. Is it because he is not interested in Angela Carter or John Banville that their major contributions are ignored? His attitude to sexual relations are also rather quaint, referring, for instance, to homosexuality and lesbianism as sexual deviances.

before this study. This study is a collection of transcribed lectures by an award winning poet. Great insight but keep in might they are lectures to students who are concurrently reading the text and thus are familiar with the exacting details of the text. The author quotes from a prize study, which I would highly recommend next to Beckett's thesis, by Howard Moss THE MACIG LATERN OF MARCEL PROUST.

Ms Rose is without a doubt a talented writer, but her work here is tediously self-indulgent and trite and sheds very little light on Proust, or indeed on his effect on her. Give it a miss and read the master! I don't think I'll be visiting Ms Rose's other work anytime soon...

Phyllis Rose introduces the reader to Proust. Because of this book I was inspired to start reading In Search Of Lost Time and possibly I will not stop for at least a year, if ever. Phyllis Rose encourages and inspires the reader to have their own personal and rewarding remembrance of things past and to recognise that the mighty and the modest share in what it is to be human. .

If you have read Proust, or attempted to, or mean to someday... Ms. Rose will not let you down. I love how she sees Proust...and how others feel he "doesn't apply" and miss the point. How many times have we been told that some great writer is "passe" or "impossible" or just not trendy enough? (those who sneer may just feel unequal to the task of reading a particular author) Rose takes it slowly, she weaves Proust into her daily life. It is a brisk read, but I found myself stopping & sharing bits with others. I hope to re-tackle Proust soon! I have been inspired.

It's incredible that Amazon.com sells such a badly printed book. While the lousy printing is painfully evident in both the text and the photographs, it is the photographs where the reader suffers it the most: more than seen, the photographs have to be imagined. Since I've seen some of them in other books and the quality was fine, the poor quality cannot be blamed on the original photographs! It's really a shame.