White, Edmund (Penguin Lives)

"Marcel Proust" by Edmund White (Penguin Lives) Lipper/Viking: 1999

I enjoyed reading this slim 165 page book. It is part of the Penguin Lives series and each author of the series is chosen for his or her expertise on the author in question. Edmund White is a Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Award for Literature from the National Academy of Arts and Letters. His book, "Genet: A Biography" won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Award.

Proust is most known for the seven volume novel, "Remembrance of Things Past" and White chooses to intersperse the creation of this epic novel along with details of his life in this book. Memory plays an important part of the novel as well as Proust's life and how he lived his life. He was active in French social life and the novel includes his experiences and his conflicts associated with the double life he led as a homosexual in a time where it was not socially acceptable although not as condemned as it was in England.

White writes with authority and yet the story of Proust is readable and interesting as he moves through his relatively short life. Many people thought of him as a shallow socialite but he was anything but that. He was a gifted observer of the life of those who lived from party to party and of the art world at the time. Many were astonished that after his death when the final two volumes were finally published that they were reading the work of a genus and that he was one of the most important writer of the 20th century.