The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 23 November 2008
by André Maurois
As is the case with many autobiographical or historical novels, it is common for fans of Marcel Proust and his giant novel A la Recherche du Temps Perdu to seek out the original people and places that populate his work. He wrote of places in a fairly literal manner, but his people were vast amalgams of the many people he knew in high and low society in his time during the transition from the gilded nineteenth century to the First World War. André Maurois was a literary scholar and biographer who had ties with Proust's society (married to the descendant of a woman who appears in the Search...), and would know whereof he spoke when writing this light biography. First published in 1960, this book was a sort of commemorative volume, densely illustrated, that reflects upon Proust and the Paris (as well as Illiers-Combray) of his time and of his book. A later edition, published in English in 1974, came just after the centenary of Proust's birth and contains many more photographs than the first, including images of the descendants of Proust's originals and the remnants of the society that Proust wrote about with such withering wit and detail. Maurois's text is a small biography of the man, heavily littered with the names of the people with whom he associated, along with many of the links between these people and the characters in his novel. Most of these are well known, especially to readers familiar with Proust's work. Often, though, the pictures in this large volume (the 1974 version is considerably larger than the 1960) aren't closely associated with the text. It is less a serious attempt to reconstruct Proust's world than a kind of postcard visit to his times and with his characters. For one thirsting for the real details behind Proust's fiction, it is an enjoyable coffee-table book, full of evocative images from the turn of the 20th century and suggestive connections to the world much closer to our time. Proust insisted that no one person could be the true model of any one character in his writing. He didn't want to have his novel seen as an autobiography. But, considering the lavish attention Maurois devotes to Proust's milieu, it is hard to a imagine that Proust would not have approved.