How Proust can change your life
The starting point of How Proust Can Change Your Life is that a great novel can be nothing less than life-transforming. This is an unusual claim: our education system, while stressing that novels are highly worthwhile, rarely investigates why this is so. How Proust Can Change Your Life takes Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as the basis for a sustained investigation into the power and significance of literature. Proust’s novel, almost a byword for obscurity and irrelevance, emerges as an invaluable source of insight into the workings of love, society, art and the meaning of existence. The book reveals Proust’s thoughts on how to revive a relationship, choose a good doctor, enjoy a holiday, make friends and respond to insult. A vivid portrait of the eccentric yet deeply sympathetic author is built up out of extracts from his letters, essays and fiction and is combined with a commentary on the power of literature to change our lives. A self-help book like few others.
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5people
2009–2026years
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What Hacker News says
- A Guide to the Good Life by William Irvine (about the Stoics, and last I knew, free to download online)
The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt (about the impact of the Roman poet Lucretius' poem On The Nature of Things--everything from the idea of the atom, Botticelli's Venus on the Half Shell to why Thomas Jefferson put "the pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence--and much more)
The Food Explorer by Daniel Stone (about David Fairchild, who introduced 10,000 plants to U.S. agriculture at the turn of the 20th century, most of the groceries we buy today)
The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf (a biography of Alexander von Humboldt)
How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton
- There's an influencer self-help industry, and then there's the likes of Alain De Botton whose output like 'How Proust Can Change Your Life' firmly sits in the self-help arena. Important to distinguish the two imo.
- > I think it is safe to assume that Alain de Botton writes for what he feels is "most people"
He also wrote "How Proust Can Change Your Life", which may or may not be for "most people"
- The "founder" of this is Alain de Botton. He studied philosophy and started writing books. His greatest success is "How Proust can change your life". In it he explains how to become a happier person by reading Proust for a big public. In interviews at that time (end 90's) he talked about erecting a school of happiness and he did that. The list features philosophers who can make you happy not the ones looking for the "truth". Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Spinoza the whole school of rationalism is missing here.
- I once picked up de Botton's "How Proust can change your Life" in an airport impulse purchase; found it disappointing. But based on others' positive reviews of his other works, I might check those out.
Related
In Search of Lost Time
24 recommend · 74
On love
2 recommend · 2
Remembrance of things past
3 recommend · 24
The School of Life
3 recommend · 6
The Fountainhead
64 recommend · 176
The life you can save
13 recommend · 27
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
40 recommend · 70
