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Cover of How Proust Can Change Your Life

How Proust Can Change Your Life

by Alain de Bottonliterary work· published 1997

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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.

Adaptations (1)

How Proust Can Change Your Life was adapted into a 2000 television film.

  • Poster for How Proust Can Change Your Life
    How Proust Can Change Your Life
    2000 · television film · 60 min · dir. Peter Bevan · IMDb ↗
    IMDb6.2

    A docu-drama portrait of the early-20th-century French author Marcel Proust, based on Alain de Botton's updated analysis of his work as a modern-day self-help guide. Ralph Fiennes plays Proust, with Phyllida Law and Donald Sinden as his contemporaries, while commentators including de Botton, Louis de Bernières and Doris Lessing explain their enthusiasm for his work.