Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison

I'm only around a quarter of the way through this book. But it has been so good that even if all the rest of the pages were blank, I'd still give it a strong five stars. This is one work of literary criticism that is worth every literature reader's time. I've been reading Proust off and on for over thirty years, and Proust is easily my favorite author. But when I read Weinstein's book, my eyes really opened. Even with my already deep appreciation of Proust, I had no idea of how much I was missing, or how superficially I was reading. I can't say enough about this book. It has taught me so much already about literature, how to read (more deeply and carefully), about what Modernism is (something I've never understood until reading this book, and I have taken whole college courses on just that topic), about the arts in general, and, finally, about life. What a great book, a classic; for few books manage to bring such deep and meaty relevance, along with pure enjoyment into their pages. Reading this book makes me dearly wish that Weinstein lived in my neighborhood. I would love to have him over as a dinner guest. I'd make sure the meals were extra tasty and that his wine glass was always filled with good wine. I'd love to converse with him (that would be a pure joy) and I would be happy to promise him that I would do most of the listening! If you care about the arts, modernism, the great authors he discusses, as well as the nature of a human life (your life included), then do yourself a favor and buy this book. It will be one you always treasure. It's easily the best book I've read this year, and possibly one of the best books I have ever read.

I have been working for a long time writing a novel: this work elicits polar opposite reactions from readers (when I have them) and I did not know what to think except that I decided I better learn how to read (although I did read voraciously) as well as how write fiction. How lucky I was to come across Arnold Weinstein's Recovering Your Story early in this quest! He traces how Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and VA Woolf (the ones I have read--also Wm Faulkner and Toni Morrison come under his reading eye) drew their writing problems from their own lives (why Proust felt a glow from a tea-dunked Madeleine, why VA and her siblings peered through the gate of the house by the sea one evening shortly after their father died) and pulled their readers into those worlds with new forms prose that brought the writer and reader closer together. As Hermione Lee, chairman of the 2006 Booker prize committee, said all the novels entered in that competition had as their message, "something happened." This work will let the reader see how several great writers sorted out "something happened" and developed the writing styles and forms that let the reader experience it.

Professor Weinstein speaks with warmth of his journey with these authors and conveys the growth that can be gained by traveling with them. Though they have a reputation for difficulty, he communicates the richness and depth won from living through their characters. The mundane, painful and joyful can be met with more insight and appreciation, if we can witness our own inner narration. From the moment we wake, memories and observations, thoughts and feelings emerge and form our (often chaotic) inner world. To witness this story and create meaningful links is to recover our own story everyday. As a result, we can weather the tragedy with more grace and laugh harder at the comedy.

Arnold Weinstein has been teaching Proust, Joyce and Faulkner (and many other writers) to students at Brown for more than 30 years. Recovering Your Story is his seminal work sharing his life's study of these writers with general readers for the first time. His readings of Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Morrison and Woolf are without peer - instead of the garbled prose of the academy, Weinstein delivers a poetic and humanistic argument for why these authors speak to us now and will speak to so many generations to come. But more importantly, it is Weinstein's argument itself about literature and life and the relationship between the two that speaks to us as few critics do today. In a world where reading - especially among young people - seems to take a back seat to other media, Weinstein passionately makes the case for the experience of sitting down with a book and entering a writer's universe as an active participant. Reading in this fashion becomes a creative act and an act of self-making and self-discovery or, as Weinstein puts it, self-recovery; it provides us with access to parts of our lives that otherwise lay buried under the routine of every day life. In that way, literature - like all great art - draws us deeper into ourselves while inspiring us to live our lives more fully. Literature as such is a gift, and this remarkable book is a gift from one of the great humanist critics and thinkers on the scene today. This book should be of great interest not only to students of the specific authors and novels discussed, but to anybody interested in understanding life. The book rings with the truth of somebody who has lived a full and deeply contemplated life, and who has a great deal to teach students of all ages (we are all students, whatever our age) of how to continue to educate our brains and our hearts as we forge ahead through our lives.

This is my favorite of all of Weinstein's books (and I have read all of them) because it makes available some of the most challenging works of the twentieth century and in all of the ways that count. I think the piece on Virginia Woolf is the most sensitive and moving treatment of To the Lighthouse out there. His reading of Proust makes me have the courage to read the whole collection and I have just ordered it for my summer project. Though he has written a great deal elsewhere about Faulkner, Weinstein shows us that there are new ways of connecting with that text, and that the project of Modernism has much to offer all readers still. Though I am not wild about his title, the first few chapters show the logic of it. I urge readers to read the whole damn thing. This is an English teacher's treasure trove. Morrison's Beloved is beautifully explained and "uncovered." What a fresh take on these familiar authors!