Proust's Way: A Field Guide to "In Search of Lost Time"

For many years, Roger Shattuck has been mesmerised by one writer. Now, after a lifetime of musing on Proust he has written this new and definitive work. PROUST'S WAY is a beautifully written, ingenious and entertaining guide, offering both an introduction to Proust and a reinterpretation of his work. Shattuck examines Proust's place in the path of aesthetic decadence blazed by Baudelaire and Wilde and presents him as a novelist whose philosophical gifts were matched by his irrepressible comic sense. He also makes a compelling case for getting away from stereotypical images of the novelist as being totally detached from reality, in his words 'Forget the cork-lined room and the invalid's bed, Proust lived in this world'.