How Proust Can Change Your Life

How Proust Can Change Your Life

In 2000, the BBC made the rather unlikely decision to turn Alain de Botton’s book How Proust Can Change Your Life into a television film, with Ralph Fiennes playing Marcel Proust. The result is neither straightforward biography nor literary adaptation, but something more curious: an attempt to ask what use Proust might actually be to us.

That question could easily have produced something glib. Proust is, after all, the writer most readily associated with daunting length, involuntary memory, exquisite social observation and a famously secluded existence. Instead, the film takes seriously the idea that In Search of Lost Time is not merely a masterpiece to be admired at a distance, but a book about how badly we habitually see our own lives.

Fiennes gives Proust a dry, fragile intelligence, while dramatised episodes from the writer’s life sit alongside commentary from de Botton and other literary figures. The film moves through love, jealousy, friendship, illness, disappointment and boredom, but its central subject is attention. Proust understood how much of life disappears simply because we fail to notice it while it is happening.

That may be why the film has aged rather well. We live with an almost industrial quantity of distraction, yet Proust’s proposition remains stubbornly unfashionable: that depth may matter more than novelty, that observation can be a form of intelligence, and that an apparently ordinary life can become astonishing once we learn to look at it properly.

How Proust Can Change Your Life is a light, witty introduction to a writer who is anything but light, and a reminder that literature need not offer instructions in order to alter the way we live.