Proust A Family AffairLaure MuratLabel: Allen LaneDescription: Proust's In Search of Lost Time is many things. It is a staggering achievement an evocation of an elite milieu a literary reckoning with memory; it is also a massive reading challenge a book more abandoned than read. For Laure Murat - who first read In Search... when she was twenty years old - it was a map to the world of the French aristocracy the very world into which she had been born. The chateaux and balls of In Search... were for her the backdrop of her family story understood anew through Proust's eyes.In this beautiful book Murat explores the fixity of the aristocratic life which codifies everything from speech to dress to movement; and Proust's astonishing seven-volume novel which with fluidity and linguistic virtuosity shifts focus from the codes for behaving to the experience of living. In Proust A Family Affair Murat celebrates the emancipating power of literature and the honour of paying close attention to a text that may in turn provoke a close and loving attendance to the self.
