The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time

by Phyllis Rose

A brilliant and original memoir of midlife-a writing life, a reading life, a woman's life-by the distinguished author of Parallel Lives
Phyllis Rose, a biographer, essayist, and literary critic, finally got around to reading Proust in middle age. As Rose learned, you don't have to live through an unhappy childhood or celebrity adulthood to write an autobiography. You just need patience, candor, and a close-to-scientific passion for truth. She begins to learn how to navigate the intricacies of Proust's novels, at the same time reflecting on the course of her own life.

With striking honesty, Rose writes about marriage, friendship, childbirth, and her own mortality. As she moves from daily experience to what she's read and back again, she illuminates how the close reading of her own life reveals truths for the rest of us and how such a subtle celebration of books can help us live.

Genres: Books About Books, Memoir, Biography, Nonfiction, Literature, Literary Criticism, French Literature

272 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1997

About the author

Phyllis Rose is an American literary critic, essayist, biographer, and educator.

She lives in Connecticut with her husband, writer and illustrator Laurent de Brunhoff

Reviews

[Catherine Mustread · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing! If you're looking for a memoir by Phyllis Rose, author of several books, then this is the book for you. The connection with Marcel Proust is so slight – a tiny bit at the beginning and a few pages at the end – that I would not recommend it to anyone interested only in the Proust angle. Interesting literary trivia is that Ms. Rose is married to Laurent De Brunhoff of Babar fame, and there are lots of references to authors and books. In fact a 12 page list of "Recommended Reading" is included at the end of the book. A few of the books even have to do with Proust, but the rest I presume are books/authors of which Rose is a fan.

[ReemK10 (Paper Pills) · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was so refreshing to be able to read a book without a pen in hand and without stopping every few paragraphs to do a google search. What a relief! You have no idea how good it felt to just read.
I enjoyed reading about Phyllis Rose's life and her journey of reading Proust. Rose is quite the storyteller. This was an enjoyable read because Phyllis Rose is an interesting woman.
For me, this was reading regained.

[Dottie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this(1997) and when we went off to Belgium(1998), I took the latest 6-volume Proust along figuring I could read in in the one to two years we were to be there. I did well but we were there five years and only began Vol. VI -- then it languished until last year(2006) when there was some instigation on Constant Reader to form a Proust group under the Classics Corner conference -- and so we read and discussed and this month(Sept 2007, after our move to the Goodreads site) began our final volume of Proust -- anyone is welcome to join our small band of erstwhile Proustians.

MAY 2010 second reading:

Found on rereading that I largely had noted in the margins or on the tiny dog ears those places where Rose had actually placed quotes from Proust's book/s and paid little attention to any connection I might have picked up relative to the year's worth of Rose's musings on her own life which were tied into her year with Proust. This time around I found a great many connections, either which existed back when I first read this or which came about due to my own life-expanding experiences during the five years spent in Belgie -- including my own time with Proust both in Belgie and thereafter and, to be perfectly frank, presently. More connections turned up relative to changes which have taken place in my own life recently as well. She speaks a great deal about her mother and the mother's health and I am at that point with my own mother so I noticed that a lot more. I think what I mostly picked up on was that she seems to relate to books and reading in many ways which reflect my own involvement with them.

It held up pretty well overall and I gathered some notes for use in my own current musing project related to Proust.

[Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really liked this book. Proust didn't seem to play as large a role as I thought he might - and that was fine with me. Love literary memoir.

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a feeling I won't enjoy reading Proust (too verbose, too exacting, too droning on and on), so this might be as close as I come. I found the book on a whim looking for another book at the library, so I hope to finish in 3 weeks before it's due back. Wish me luck!

[Romany · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started reading this in 2010 but it was probably too soon after my own year of reading Proust. Coming back to it now was beautiful. The memories of Proust, and Rose's calm and ordered words are a lovely combination. Absolutely perfect. A million stars.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phyllis Rose is a great writer. I picked this book up in a used book store when I wanted to read Swann's Way but couldn't find it. Very pleasantly surprised.

[Jacob Russell · Rating 1 out of 5]

Disappointing. She should have stuck to writing about Proust, which seems to have been the most interesting thing she did that year.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some year I will also find the time to read Proust (well, probably not, but it seems like a noble goal.)

[Ann · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had hoped that this book would link Proust to the author's life, preferably with extrapolations applicable to everyone's (or at least : my) life. This was true for perhaps the first couple of chapters, but then it seemed that the author had exhausted her analysis of Proust and moved over to pretty straightforward memoir. This included repeated stories of the health troubles of her octogenarian mother, allusions to winters spent in Key West, with lots of entertaining, and some stories of her first and second marriage. There is nothing wrong with this, of course, except that on many pages I searched in vain for something beyond straight narrative. I just wasn't all that interested in the pure memoir part - I just didn't think Phyllis Rose's life was all that interesting. I did pick up a few hints about next books to read, but much of this came close to gossip about her more famous writer friends and guests (Annie Dillard, Salman Rushdie, Robert Stone, Alison Lurie). The first chapters, where she analyzes her response to Proust, were the most interesting. So I did not finish this book - I lost the motivation.

[mxd · Rating 2 out of 5]

This little book, so much of it made me roll my eyes hard enough to give me a few headaches. If I can't even put up with the flowery real-time thoughts of Phyllis, Proust has no chance. I am, once again, wondering if there's a part of my brain missing where the ability to appreciate good things is kept (I've seen some pretty positive reviews for this), because this book, to me, seems even too self-indulgent for a memoir, and those things are meant to be ALL ABOUT ME.

Phyllis is quite the character though. There are some really interesting bits regarding her first marriage, her horrible experience giving birth, her relationship with a gay friend, but I just couldn't warm to this author who seems to see the world from inside a shiny little bubble of privilege. I just couldn't relate to her. There was very little about the actual experience of a year of reading Proust, but to be fair there didn't really have to be because this is primarily the author's own attempt at Proustian naval-gazing.

[Geoffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although the title of this memoir is The Year of Reading Proust, there is far less Proust in it than I expected. Phyllis Rose uses the fact that she spent a year reading In Search of Lost Time as a jumping-off point for discussions of a number of subjects. For example, pages 76 to 78 provide a fantastic explanation of the Beatles. Elsewhere, she explains why the original translation of the title of À la recherche du temps perdu — Remembrance of Things Past — may actually be better than In Search of Lost Time.

Full disclosure: when I read À la recherche du temps perdu (in the original), it took me longer than a year. Reading The Year of Reading Proust was a bit of a Proustian madeleine for me, as it did help me remember some of these things past.

[Martinxo · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really wanted to enjoy this book but in the end there is too much memoir and not enough Proust. I quite enjoy memoirs but there was little of Rose's life that I found particularly interesting. There is one scene where she describes watching the sun set over the sea from her Florida beach house but how is that possible? The Florida shore faces east, the sun goes down in the west...what should I make of this?

Anyway, I abandoned the work midway through, life is too short for dull books.

[Muaz Jalil · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like her writing style. My second book by Rose. There is a line where she says "My humility rested on the bedrock of my arrogance ". Fascinating.

She also criticized George Painter's bio of Proust, which I am currently reading. I also found them dated and problematic. She is right that Painter uses Proust's novels as fact and fodder for spurious Freudian speculations.

I wish Rose wrote a book just on Proust and not mix it with her bio. Very erudite

[Robert B · Rating 3 out of 5]

This memoir of a year in the life of author Phyllis Rose barely touches on her reading of Proust, which is somewhat disappointing, but the focus on her own life — her mother’s declining health, her life in Key West and New York, a dinner that she hosted for Salman Rushdie, her friends (Annie Dillard and Alison Laurie, among others) — is nonetheless interesting. Very well written.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this memoir, with its meditation on Proust and his applicability to the author's life while she was reading it. Something in the way Phyllis Rose writes really moves me and strikes a chord. I love her work

[Cassandra C · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found it very hard to relate to the author, who has such different values and life experiences to me, but that’s what made reading this memoir worthwhile. We do share an admiration of Proust though.

[Alicia · Rating 5 out of 5]

An ideal book to introduce you to the wisdom in Proust and how to apply it to your own life (and to encourage you to read him yourself). I didn't always like/agree with the author's opinions but I always enjoyed her company. Wonderfully written.

[Gail Kennon · Rating 3 out of 5]

enjoyed it but expected and wanted far more meditation and sharing on reading proust and less day to day gossip...perhaps the book showed her writing like proust but that's above my pay-grade to appreciate.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly about her with only passing reference to Proust - so a bit disappointing. Well written though.

[ab · Rating 5 out of 5]

picked up from the basement of the strand with the label “rare find” . very lovely prose i liked it very much and i wish phyllis could be my best friend . now i need to read more proust

[Nic Rowan]

Incredible to find that on the “recommended reading” list at the end, among the works of Newman, Joyce, and Proust, are all the books by Phyllis Rose!

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to start off by recommending The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time, Phyllis Rose's account of her experience of reading the great work after years of stalling early on in the oeuvre. I'm starting with that because my responses to the work were so ambivalent and complicated that I'm not sure how this review will sound or if it will seem to be a recommendation. So I'm stating up front that I'm glad I read Rose's highly intelligent account of her life in the light of times past and regained.

Another reason I find it difficult to write this review is that by the end of the book, I felt as though I knew the author and did not want to write anything that might hurt her feelings. The ruthless honesty with which the author examines herself is sometimes painful and I didn't want to add to that pain (which, in fact, is what I felt and may or may not have anything to do with Rose's feelings). My personal reactions to the writer-as-presented-in-text were charged and shifting. I looked forward to spending time with her, I identified with some of her family history (especially as a New Yorker only somewhat younger than she is and probably about the same age as she was when she wrote the book. I enjoyed her stories about her friends even while I was irritated that she made me work so hard to discover who they are ("Annie"= Annie Dillard; "Bob S."=Robert Stone, I assume). I wondered if she was attempting a variety of roman a clef a la Proust and if so, why? Her situations seemed sketched rather than deeply analyzed, more worried over than illuminating.

The first chapter was so wonderful it made it difficult for me to give myself to the more memoirist chapters that followed. Rose certainly got me to care about the people of whom she wrote but I wanted more Proust. The first chapter was gripping in its outline of the project, the rest only interesting. Rose is clever but rarely digs in to the moment the way Proust constantly does and her work, or my reading of it, suffered by the comparison.

But it did awaken in me a desire to re-read a la Recherche Du Temps Perdu.

[Steve Turtell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was delightful. My own experience of Proust was more relaxed--it took me ten years from the time I began at the age of 16, till I finished the summer I was 26. But by reading it all in one year, Rose has been able to observe the interconnections between the novels more than I did at first (I've since re-read all of it several times) and her reaction to one section about the narrator's grief over the death of Albertine made me want to reread it although I swore I never would.

The most moving sections concern Rose's coming to terms with the extent and nature of her achievement, which is nothing to sneer at--I suppose this is something every writer who knows they are not going to be part of "the canon" has to do at some point. But I think she sells herself short--only literary historians (like art historians) have to concern themselves with ranking and lists and including or excluding this or that writer or artist from an assessment of "the age"--the rest of us can relax and enjoy the major and the minor alike all at the same time, and not have to worry about which is which. Auden said it best, great poems, like great novels, should be reserved for the high holy days of the spirit. This made me want to read more and so I picked up a collection of her essays next.

[GONZA · Rating 2 out of 5]

I chose this book because I found it used and because I also thought of using at least a year to read Proust, it took me less, but I was pleased to discover the thoughts of this writer about it. Clearly there is little Proust and much of her life in this book, but there are significant connections that she makes between what happens to her and the way that Proust had to face the same problems. For lovers of the genre.

Ho scelto questo libro perché l'ho trovato usato e perché pensavo anche io di metterci almeno un anno a leggere Proust, ho impiegato di meno, ma mi ha fatto piacere scoprire i pensieri di questa scrittrice a riguardo. Chiaramente c'è poco Proust e molta della sua vita in questo libro, ma sono significativi i collegamenti che lei fa tra quello che le capita e il modo che aveva Proust di affrontare lo stesso problema. Per gli amanti del genere.

[Kathie Harper · Rating 2 out of 5]

After spending more than two years reading Proust, I was interested in hearing an esteemed literary critic's view of the same experience. There were some worthy insights, like in the last chapter but I wanted her to dig deeper, reveal more about herself, not just the day-to-day happenings of disgruntled neighbors, the numerous false alarms of her mother's hospitalizations, and students picking flowers from her garden at Wesleyan. Yes, I presume you could make the argument that they are Proustian, focusing on the mundane while elucidating the finite but they just didn't cut it for me. I wanted more. I agree with the reviewer that this material would have been better served in essay form. Stretched much too thin.

[Stacey · Rating 4 out of 5]

At turns poignant, funny, catty, engaging, pretentious, and literary, I found this memoir of Rose--with only minimal examination of Proust's work as a backdrop to her own experiences--both fascinating and alienating. While I found her writing strong and smart, I also found the representations of her literary circle exhausting in their ambition and drama. I enjoyed it, but discovered that I had zero interest in wanting to be part of the who's who literary crowd. I did, however, get a great number of books to add to my reading list!

[Lee Kofman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rose is a very interesting thinker but the problem with her having written a memoir is that her life is so boring. Or perhaps she’s just too guarded to tell the interesting bits. Instead, she writes about her haircuts, her son (who never has any issues by the sound of it) and her choice of a car... But she’s definitely wise when it comes to discussing political or literary matters. I think she'd have done much better if she wrote a series of essays about her love of Proust instead of tying reading him to her personal life.

[Angie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love to read about what authors like to read, because what they've read helped them to develop as writers. It's also interesting to "hear" how a book or group of books influenced soomeone's life. Rose's reading of Proust helped her to realize that life isn't always about rushing to do the "next thing", but that savoring the moment, however mundane the moment, brings more joy to life. I think that's a good lesson to learn.

[Carol Reid · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book because, like the author, I have been reading the 6 volumes of Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1 to go) and she refers to and comments on many parts of these books. Rose is a non-fiction writer herself and finds through Proust's masterpiece inspiration and insight. The tone of the book is conversational as Rose describes aspects of her life: family, marriages, friendships, writing, vacations, job as professor, authors and places admired, etc.