Paintings in Proust is a book with a simple but fruitful purpose: to list, illustrate and comment on all the pictures referred to in A la recherche du temps perdu. Given the length and sophistication of the novel and the extent of its author’s interest in painting, that is no small task, but Eric Karpeles makes an excellent job of it.

Proust was deeply interested in all the arts, especially painting and music. In early life his interest took the form of an aestheticism which he later satirised in his novel as a sort of spiritual disease, though whether he ever quite recovered from the sickness himself is a

Literary Review

Feb 2009

Categories

Peter Washington

Critical Mass

He was Moral, but Was He Great?

But What Was It?

Critical Thinking

Austen’s Onion

War Made Him

Empires of the Mind

Sons of Scotland

A Child Of Nature

Less Is Moore

A Widower Writes

The Man and The Mask

Writer & Co

A Large Corpus

‘These Fragments I Have Shored Against my Ruins’

Literary Lucubrations

It’s All Relative

Literary Legacies

Age Cannot Wither Us

The Outsider

The Birth of Sredni Vashtar

Out of the Fog

Classics Lite

Kierkegaard & Chocolate