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