Marcel Proust: A Biography, Volume 1

Marcel Proust: A Biography

by George D. Painter

Painter exhausted all available resources to create this portrait not only of Proust and his work but also of turn-of-the-century France with its salons, its political tension, its poets and its painters.

Genres: Biography, France

351 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_...

Reviews

[John]

My least favorite of the Proust biographies in English. What a homophobic prig! And Painter uses most of his pages in a pointless effort in discovering traces of Proust's friends and acquaintances with a character in his novel. What do we learn from that? It's really quite boring. And of course, he, like the upper class Englishman that he is, ignores family life altogether.

[Muaz Jalil]

I am gradually preparing myself to read Recherche (In Search....). Read a biography of Scott Moncrief before.

I wonder whether Painter's key thesis is that one needs to understand Proust's life to appreciate "Recherchesuffersr from the intentional fallacy. If I understand the author, he thinks Recherche is an allegory of Proust's life. A Platonic Ideal or Form of the actual life lived by Proust. So different characteristics of different individuals or locations are juxtaposed to create the ideal characters or locations in Recherche.

At a young age, Proust fell in love with much older women; I am sure Freud would have something to say. Or as Painter suggests, it was the subconscious trying to fail or self-sabotage.

Montesquiou is a fascinating individual and there is evidence that he was the inspiration for Wilde's Dorian Grey.

[Tomi Kaukinen]

Lays to rest a lot of the speculation (and Proust himself) that A la recherche is totally fictional. In incredible detail and through massive research Painter outlines the events of Proust’s life and encounters that ended up in the novel.

A must read for Proust aficionados. The four is because at times the amount of details hinders the flow of reading.

[T.E.]

Well written and engaging but genuinely insane in the way it addresses Proust’s sexuality

[Avis Black]

Highly recommended not just a biography of Proust, but as a social and literary history of Proust's time.

[David]

On to the second volume!