How Proust Can Change Your Life

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

'He's been read as somebody who was obsessed with his own concerns,' says Phyllis Rose, a literature professor at Wesleyan University and author of a memoir, The Year of Reading Proust (Scribner, 1997), which looks to Proust for wisdom about everyday life. 'But most of what he writes is very outer-directed. He makes sense of how people behave in groups. After reading him, you develop a sort of X-ray vision about your own relationships.'

Proust changed Rose's life, but he absolutely transformed the world of P. Segal, a San Francisco writer, caterer, bohemian diva, and publisher of Proust Said That, a fanzine and Web site (www.proust.com) with readers and contributors all over the world. In 1993 she co-founded the Proust Support Group to help would-be Remembrance readers in San Francisco make it to the end of the book. By the time she had scaled the Proustian mountain herself, she says, 'I found that just about every time some friend of mine made an observation about life or love, I would reply with, 'You know, Proust said that.''

Hence the zine, which mixes Proustian minutiae (madeleine recipes, recent mentions of Proust in the media) with scholarly assessments, fan letters, and Segal's own exuberant accounts of her yearly Proust Wakes (where she serves some one hundred dedicated Proustites food mentioned in the novel, plus plenty of Pernod) and her trips to Marcel-related sites near and far.

'I don't know of anyone who is as obsessed with Proust as I am,' says P. (who insists on keeping her first name hidden behind its Proustian initial), 'but I know hundreds of people who care about Proust, and I've given a lot of thought to what he has to say to us now. We've had the women's movement and the men's movement, and we're more confused than ever about relations between the sexes. The time has come to look at humanity as a whole—and that's just what Proust does.'

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print