Alain de Botton started life as a writer. Starting with The Consolations of Philosophy, he started to drift into writing popular philosophy. How Proust Can Change Your Life continues in this vein.
Most popular philosophy manifests as self-help manuals. I'm more or less convinced that the choice of title here is to satirize this sort of trash writing. The title isn't, thankfully, Changing Your Life with Marcel Proust in 24 Hours or Less! The choice of title makes it clear that the book is only about opening up the possibility for having one's life changed by reading Proust. Specifically, while I've read How Proust Can Change Your Life, since I have yet to read In Search of Lost Time my life continues to be unchanged.
De Botton argues that Proust lived and idealized a certain form of aesthetics that, while not terribly practical in its idealized form, could be useful in the context of modern consumer-driven society. Following the template of popular self-help manuals, the book is divided into nine "How to X" lessons. Each combines anecdotes from Proust's own life with plot elements in Proust's books, focusing on the aforementioned epic In Search of Lost Time.
- How to Love Life Today
- How to Read for Yourself
- How to Take Your Time
- How to Suffer Successfully
- How to Express Your Emotions
- How to Be a Good Friend
- How to Open Your Eyes
- How to Be Happy in Love
- How to Put Books Down
I include these nine chapter titles to demonstrate just how hokey and cliche this book could have been. Thankfully de Botton is just joking here — the actual text is very revealing. At times I wonder how he learned some small personal detail about Proust's life. I imagine he scoured all the personal communications de Botton could get his hands on. It's hard to tell how much of it is anecdote, even.
Finally we have a book from the literary side of philosophy in the popular sphere that doesn't rip philosophy to shreds in its attempt to be popular. We'll be watching de Botton more closely from this point forward.