Marcel Proust (Overlook Illustrated Lives)

Most biographies on Proust are quite large--except for Edmund White's small, albeit excellent, volume. I quite agree that Ms. Caw's illustrated biography is one that would better serve as an addition to (another) rather than a sole source. That being said, the pictures are outstanding--although I was a somewhat bewildered as to why some were in there--or in the case of Nijinsky, why there were so many (since the two men's lives/careers hardly crossed). This work is best recommended for Proust admirers who already have a "foundation".

This is a very nice little book, but anyone turning to it for a brief biography of Proust will be more than a little disappointed. In fact, unless one already knows a fair amount about Proust, I think this book will be more than a little baffling. To be honest, I bought this primarily because with Proust, I am a bit of a completist: I own a substantial number of the books published about Proust in English. I was expecting a short biography perhaps along the lines of Edmund White's excellent short bio in the Penguin Brief Lives series. Instead, this really would function as a nice adjunct to that book. Caws really writes about Proust's world, rather than about Proust. Much essential biographical material is left out entirely, and many characters in his great novel are mentioned, references that will be unintelligible to anyone who hasn't already read Proust. Working in this manner, Caws is able to get in a surprising amount of detail in this relatively brief book.Like the other volumes in the Overlook Illustrated Lives series, this is a gorgeous book. The print is a bit on the tiny side, but the photographs, while small, are superbly reproduced, and for the most part, they do a great job of illustrating the world Proust inhabited. If I have a complaint with the book, it is that in a book of only 117 pages (two completely blank pages are inexplicably numbered 118 and 119), they devote too much space to individuals only peripherally connected to Proust. Why, for instance, an entire page for a photograph of Colette, who was utterly inessential in a book about Proust? I also found some of the paintings to be a bit too peripheral, such as Gustave Moreau's "The Apparition." It would be appropriate for a book on Huysmans, but why Proust? Actually, I do have one additional complaint: I find the book to be a bit too slender for its $19.95 list price. But there is a great deal of value in the book for any lover of Proust. There are a number of photographs that I don't have in any other book on Proust. For instance, while the book collects several of the more famous photographs of Count Robert de Montesquiou, there were a couple I hadn't seen before. In fact, the book functions very well as a photographic supplement to a biography of Proust. The content of the text seems to rely very heavily upon William C. Carter's massive English language biography on Proust, but contains a wealth of images not found in that book. The collection of Paul Nadar photographs, THE WORLD OF PROUST, surpasses this slender volume in its coverage of the personalities of the time, but does not contain images not taken by Nadar himself. For anyone wanting to study Proust's life to any degree, I would strongly recommend reading one of the larger biographies, preferably Tadie or Carter, or the Edmund White short biography, and supplement that with this small volume and the Nadar volume for the illustrations.