En el París de fin de siècle, Jeanne Proust, una culta mujer judía casada con un médico católico, escribe en sus libretas todo tipo de acontecimientos personales y generales, aunque el tema más recurrente es su hijo Marcel, a quien sus altas aspiraciones sociales, sus insatisfechas ambiciones literarias y su delicada salud impiden terminar de encajar en la vida burguesa de la época. En la relación de los desvelos de Madame Proust irrumpe el relato de las insatisfacciones de Marie Prévost, traductora de los diarios, cuya obsesión por el documento será un bálsamo contra su amor no correspondido hacia el enigmático Max.

Highly detailed, descriptive writing. Seventeen lines to describe a man's lips (p.422). Trying to imitate Proust? Proust had an extraordinary imagination. Taylor did a lot of research.
Ideally, parallel story lines create a sense of complexity. Here, I felt my interest in any one character was repeatedly fractured. The interweaving of the stories was belaboured. The novel lacked focus.
I read the book through to the end--as opposed to stopping after fifty pages--but I was disappointed. ( )

This novel contains three connected stories. The first is told through the diaries of Marcel Proust's mother, Jeanne. The writing in the diaries flows quickly and gives a wonderful picture of life in Paris during Proust's time. They also tell the story of a mother's love for her son.

The second story is that of Sarah Bensimon, whose parents sent her away from Paris at age 12 to protect her from the Nazis. Sarah is raised by a childless couple in Toronto, and struggles to deal with the loss of her parents. She marries and has a son, Maxime, whom she worries over, much as Mme Proust worries over Marcel.

The third story is that of Marie, a translator working in Montreal who falls in unrequieted love with Maxime. As that relationship ends, she moves to Paris to study Proust and discovers his mother's diaries, and the parallels to her own life.

This was an interesting read, but the connections among the three women were not strong enough to support the premise of related lives. The link Maxime provides between Sarah and Marie is vague as the two women never even meet. Max's character isn't developed strongly enough to forge an emotional bond in the reader. Similarly, neither Sarah nor Marie seem to develop or gain any self-knowledge; there is no real momentum to their stories. ( )

I read this author's second book and enjoyed it so much that I had to read this one which was her first novel. This is a very complex tale that spans the 20th century. The setting is in France and in Canada. It is a story of three separate women from three separate times and how their stories overlap. The connecting thread is the diaries of Jeanne Proust (the author Marcel Proust's mother). As a young woman tries to untangle the life of her favourite author she stumbles upon his mother's diaries and quickly becomes fascinated with her story. Mme. Proust is a mother who totally doted on her son. The second story thread is about Sarah Benisimon who is forced to leave her family and her country (France) in order to escape the Nazis. Her life is totally defined by this event. Her son Maxime, born in the 1960's in Canada suffers because of his mother's demons. And last we have young Marie Prevost, a young Canadian translator who is the one who discovers Proust's mother's diaries and as she translates them she finds all the similarities to people in her own life. This novel must be read in order to understand and appreciate the lives of these women. ( )

This book tells the story of three women: we read the diaries of Marcel Proust's mother in the late nineteenth century, and hear the thoughts of two French-Canadian women in the mid- and late twentieth.

I really enjoyed this book to start with - the diaries are crisp and the prose is very well-written, with themes of memory - and smell, of course, along the lines of Proust's famous madeleines. However, after about halfway, I realised that the stories of the two modern women were not really going anywhere.

It became apparent that they were linked by one man, Max - son to one and close friend to the other - with many echoes of Proust's relations with his mother and a close female friend. And as the many things which their stories could have been about narrowed down to this, I wondered whether it was really enough to hang a story around - Max is visible to the reader only in small glimpses and he doesn't seem a strong enough character to be worth all the emotional commitment that the women put in. ( )