LIBRARY NOTES
 
Anka Muhlstein
Proust the Reader
Tuesday, April 6, 2010 at 6:30 PM
Members' Room; $10 in advance/$15 at the door
Marcel Proust often commented that people did not know how to read, and indeed, few people read as he did. He avidly consumed novelists, poets and playwrights, memoirists like Saint-Simon, letter-writers like Mme. de Sévigné, and even writers he did not enjoy except for their style, like Flaubert. Quoting French classical literature was second nature to him but he was also particularly attuned to American, English and Russian literature. Among his favorites were George Eliot, Hardy, Stevenson, Poe and of course Ruskin. He referred to Dostoyevsky frequently in his novels.
Proust's reading is a constant underscore to his great work. If La Recherche du Temps Perdu were an opera, the mother and the grandmother would always be announced by the theme of Mme. de Sévigné; Racine would always accompany the Narrator; Balzac would hum alongside M. de Charlus, and the Duchesse de Guermantes would sing to Victor Hugo. In this event, scholar and biographer Anka Muhlstein will draw out these themes in Proust's work and life and lead discussion of the proverbial work that the readers of today find challenging, yet always rewarding.
Anka Muhlstein is the author of
Astolphe de Custine,
LaSalle: Explorer of the North American Frontier, and
Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart: The Perils of Marriage, among other titles in English and French. She is a contributor to the 2004 collection
The Proust Project, edited by André Aciman.
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