Proust is less the subject of Rose's pleasurable, rambling memoir
than its guiding spirit, whose wisdom and worldview Rose invokes as
she reviews the travails and satisfactions of a year in her life. A
row with her Key West landlady involving potted palms and banana
treees; hectic preparations for a dinner honoring a mystery guest
(who turns out to be Salman Rushdie); her friend Annie Dillard's
cancer scare; and her own mother's halting progress toward death -
these and other events take biographer Rose (Jazz Cleopatra:
Josephine Baker in Her Time, 1989, etc.) into a Proustian blend of
social gossip (mostly of literary Key West) and a remembrance of
things in her own past. The passing of time, the attempt to
transcend it (in collecting antiquities), the need to create
something original before it is too late, and the immense
difficulty of doing so, are among the novelist's themes that
resonate for Rose. Most affecting is her newfound appreciation of
the middle-class suburban 1950s childhood she had long reviled: "I
never 'understood' my childhood because I never understood what a
happy childhood it was." This encounter with her past culminates in
a visit with her sister to their childhood home for the first time
in 36 years. Unlike the fictional Marcel, who returns to Paris
after a long absence and finds it much changed, Rose finds the
house miraculously preserved, like a museum of her childhood, thus
bringing no epiphany but merely the satisfaction of memories
confirmed. Still, while there is much to savor here, there are
disappointments, an occasional sense of incompleteness; we learn
more, for instance, about the social hubbub over her dinner for
Rushdie than we do about the writer himself. Perhaps the best part
of the book is its opening chapter, in which Rose, having overcome
her own inability to penetrate Proust, explains richly how one can
do so, and why it is worthwhile. (Kirkus Reviews)
A brilliant and original memoir of midlifea writing life, a reading
life, a womans lifeby 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
dont 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 Prousts 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 shes
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.
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