Proust in Love

The Lost Paradise:
Although other studies of Proust and the nature of love have been published before, for the most part in French, William C. Carter's fascinating follow-up to his monumental (and standard-bearing) biography of the author is a much-needed work on an endlessly fascinating topic. Proust was a man who may have written a 3000+-page novel, but who also hid much. He was a man of many disguises, and was perhaps most comfortable hiding behind the many versions of "I" in his novel. The man who roams within the corridors of his private life, as he always insisted, is not the same man as Proust the Artist. What Carter has so successfully (and succinctly) done here is to view Proust's attitudes towards love, and indeed Proust's own "love life", with a more enlightened eye. In a time when homosexuality, though always under siege from the extreme Right and the fundamentalists, is gradually becoming accepted by the mainstream, Carter brings to light Proust's ambivalent nature as regards love--and the tension between the abstract and more spiritual notion of love--and eros, pure and simple. What Carter has succeeded in writing is a kind of roman noir, a detective story set in the Parisian underground as the 19th century slides into the 20th. We find Proust in a brothel raid, we see Proust as, perhaps aptly for a writer, voyeur. But love was central to his work--love, and loss, and the impossibility of anything but art--and Carter, with all the lucidity he brought to his great biography, yet again confirms his stature as the finest Proust scholar--and indeed the most enjoyably readable--of our time.

What you've been waiting for:
I've read Remembrance twice. This is the book I've been waiting to read. It's everything I Proust fan could ask for.