In spite of the depth of his magnificent biography, Marcel Proust (2000), Carter had more to say about Proust's "amorous adventures-and misadventures" and so wrote Proust in Love, a moving chronicle of the comic and tragic aspects of Proust's sexual escapades. "The dark side of passion both attracted and repulsed him," writes Carter as he insightfully considers Proust's fascination with androgyny and photographs, affairs with handsome waiters and chauffeurs, and some rather strange proclivities. Although Proust "never had a sexually fulfilling relationship with a companion whom he loved," he did discover profound truths about love's subjectivity and pain. Proust emerges from these well-wrought pages as a man of courage, defiance, curiosity, and moral and artistic conviction, and a writer who confronted anti-Semitism and prejudice against homosexuals with radical candor.
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From Publishers Weekly
Marcel Proust—whose In Search of Lost Time is, as much as anything, a study of love in all its polymorphously perverse forms—himself loved not wisely but all too well. As Carter (_Marcel Proust: A Life_) shows, he alienated the objects of his affection with the same obsessive, possessive love he portrayed so effectively in Swann and the narrator of his great work. The one man with whom he had a passionately reciprocated relationship, composer Reynaldo Hahn, was alienated by Proust's dalliance with a very young Lucien Daudet and by Proust's imposing demands. And he too often loved men who couldn't return his affection, particularly his secretary, Alfred Agostinelli, who was heterosexual and finally fled his employer's suffocating love. Did Proust also love women? After weighing the evidence, Carter says it's impossible to know definitively; his professed love for certain women may have been to deflect charges that he was homosexual. Indeed, amazingly, when a journalist insinuated in print that Proust was involved with Daudet, the novelist challenged him to a duel to defend his honor (both emerged unscathed). Carter offers a warmly sympathetic portrait that skillfully links a study of Proust's philosophy of love to his own unhappy experiences of it—experiences that inspired him creatively; he saw love, in Carter's words, as a "superb folly," the wellspring of art. (May)
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From Booklist
In spite of the depth of his magnificent biography, Marcel Proust (2000), Carter had more to say about Proust's "amorous adventures-and misadventures" and so wrote Proust in Love, a moving chronicle of the comic and tragic aspects of Proust's sexual escapades. "The dark side of passion both attracted and repulsed him," writes Carter as he insightfully considers Proust's fascination with androgyny and photographs, affairs with handsome waiters and chauffeurs, and some rather strange proclivities. Although Proust "never had a sexually fulfilling relationship with a companion whom he loved," he did discover profound truths about love's subjectivity and pain. Proust emerges from these well-wrought pages as a man of courage, defiance, curiosity, and moral and artistic conviction, and a writer who confronted anti-Semitism and prejudice against homosexuals with radical candor.
Donna Seaman
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