Roger Shattuck has provided readers of Proust's masterpiece with an invaluable guide and analytical touchstone for thinking through what we're reading. I found especially powerful the concept of a stereo-optic presentation of time for the way Proust presents remembering, recognition, memories and experiences. Having now read Shattuck's book, I can't imagine reading Proust without it and am glad to be so well prepared as I head into the next volumes. ( )

A very fine scholarly description and analysis of Proust's great work including tables and graphic explanations of theme and structure, a discussion of almost all of the English translations available, an appendix just on optics, and an addendum written as a dialogue between fictional characters. As nice as it all is, I would not read this before reading In Search of Lost Time . ( )

A close friend just started Proust for the first time, which excited me so much that I wanted to reading group it with him. But I don't have time, so I read this instead. Not as good as Proust! Surprise, surprise.

It suffers a bit from being two books, one for people who haven't read the Search yet, and one for people who have. The one for newcomers is a better book, being an actual book. The book for veterans is less good, because it's just a bunch of stuff Shattuck has written over the years. But if you've read Proust and want an intelligent man's understanding of the thing, this is enjoyable enough. Shattuck suggests that the book is about desire as much as it is memory; human beings fail to understand their own desires, which leads to suffering. A new vision of life (literary critics always end up with these wild generalities: why can't a book be about society and art? Why do they have to be about 'life' and 'love'?) follows.

More helpful was Shattuck's take on the 'memory' theme; he understands Search less as an investigation of memory than as showing how an objective observer can combine a vision of memory and the present to better understand the past and the future. I think. He also stands against the aestheticist view that the novel holds art up as superior to life. A worthy argument, for all its generality.

There are also completely unrelated bits on translation, editions, and an almost unbearable 'creative response' to the novel.

If you love Proust, this is worth reading; if you're about to read Proust, half of it is worth reading; if you've read Proust and might not read him again, this won't change your mind, and you should avoid it, because you should absolutely read Proust again. ( )

Seems more insightful and helpful the further I get with In Search of Lost Time. This is a guide for the ages. ( )

For many years, Roger Shattuck has been mesmerised by one write. First came "Proust's Binoculars", a short, brilliant study published in 1964. Then came "Marcel Proust", commissioned by Frank Kermode for the Modern Masters series, which won the National Book Ward in 1974. A series of essays, lectures and reviews followed. Now, like Richard Ellmann, whose constant outpourings on Joyce resulted in his triumphant biography "James Joyce", Roger Shattuck has revisited his earlier writings and musings on Proust, and used them as a springboard to write a new and definitive work. Devoting particular attention to Proust's masterpiece "In Search of Lost Time", Shattuck laments his subject's defencelessness against zealous editors, praises some translations, examines Proust's place on the path of aesthetic decadence blazed by Baudelaire and Wilde, and presents him as a novelist whose philosophical gifts were matched by his irrepressible comic sense. This book is the culmination of a lifetime of scholarship; it should delight and enthral readers, and serve as the next generation's guide to Proust.