부산대학교 도서관

A century after his death, Marcel Proust continues to attract and intimidate. Readers want to make sense of his celebrated novel In Search of Lost Time, but are often afraid to try. Hence the value of this short, funny, and highly readable book, which makes the unapproachable approachable and the impenetrable intelligible. With Landy (Stanford) as expert guide, Proust’s 3,000-page, 1.3 million-word masterpiece can become an exciting, even joyful reading experience, and its dizzying changes in perspective a source of invaluable life lessons. Some may find Landy’s conversational tone, humor, and repetitions annoying, but his argument convinces. Proust matters today for his idiosyncratic narrator and the fundamental questions he raises about identity, community, self-fashioning, art, and the search for fulfillment. Replete with references to pop culture—Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Little Miss Sunshine—this is an ingenious work by a scholar who employs lightness of touch to reveal the mystery and wonder of a byzantine, endlessly transformative literary text. For further reading, see Landy’s Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (CH, Feb'05, 42-3293)​ and Christopher Prendergast’s Living and Dying with Marcel Proust (2022). Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.