书名：How Proust Can Change Your Life拥抱逝水年华

作者：Alain De Botton
出版社名称：Vintage
出版时间：1998
语种：英文
ISBN：9780679779155
商品尺寸：13.2 x 1.5 x 20.3 cm
包装：平装
页数：208
How Proust Can Change Your Life《拥抱逝水年华》是英国作家阿兰·德波顿著散文作品，是“德波顿作品系列”之一。主要讲述作家运用文学传记的手法，通过对二十世纪法国大作家马塞尔?普鲁斯特（Marcel Proust）及其煌煌巨著的回顾，展示其重要作品《追忆逝水年华》的创作风格、独特的写作技巧，以及开创世界文坛小说新纪元的历程，并给读者描绘出普鲁斯特真实而又生动的大家形象。

精彩书评：
“德波顿浑不费力，谈笑之间即胜过布鲁姆、丹比对经典名著的品评。”——《科克斯书评》

“此书引人入胜，实属多年未见有趣的文学批评之作。”——《每日电讯报》

“德波顿写活了普鲁斯特，读德波顿的普鲁斯特，是极愉快的经验。”似乎又看作普鲁斯特的传记或准传记。——《出版人周刊》

德波顿“成功地向我们展示了普鲁斯物小说的精义”——《纽约时报》

Review
“A self-help manual for the intelligent person... witty, funny, and tonic.”  — The New York Times Book Review
“Delightfully original.... As well as being criticism, biography, literary history and a reader’s guide to Proust’s masterpiece, How Proust Can Change Your Life is a self-help book in the deepest sense of the term.”  — The New York Times
“Curious, humorous, didactic and dazzling.... It contains more human interest and play of fancy than most fiction.”  — The New Yorker
How Proust Can Change Your Life《拥抱逝水年华》是“德波顿作品系列”之一。普鲁斯特的煌煌巨著《追忆似水年华》是那种谁都觉得自己应该去读但对大部分人来说又确属望而生畏的书。但在德波顿的这本结合了文学传记和实用、励志手册的书里，作者以他严正详实的专业学识为根基，用他的生花妙笔向我们娓娓道出《追忆》的真正妙处，描绘出普鲁斯特真实而又生动的精神肖像；同时他又把圣典拉到人间，从巨著和大师身上寻觅到改变我们每个普通人谷世人生的妙招法门，指点我们如何珍惜时光、体验人生的真谛、学会调整人生的轻生缓急。

Alain de Botton combines two unlikely genres—literary biography and self-help manual—in the hilarious and unexpectedly practical How Proust Can Change Your Life.
Who would have thought that Marcel Proust, one of the most important writers of our century, could provide us with such a rich source of insight into how best to live life? Proust understood that the essence and value of life was the sum of its everyday parts. As relevant today as they were at the turn of the century, Proust’s life and work are transformed here into a no-nonsense guide to, among other things, enjoying your vacation, reviving a relationship, achieving original and unclichéd articulation, being a good host, recognizing love, and understanding why you should never sleep with someone on a first date. It took de Botton to find the inspirational in Proust’s essays, letters and fiction and, perhaps even more surprising, to draw out a vivid and clarifying portrait of the master from between the lines of his work.
Here is Proust as we have never seen or read him before: witty, intelligent, pragmatic. He might well change your life.
阿兰?德波顿，英国作家，1969年出生于瑞士苏黎世，8岁就被送到伦敦上寄宿学校，四年后全家人移居伦敦。他起初学的是法语，写作以英语为主，同时通晓法、德、西班牙语。18岁入剑桥大学，正式学历为剑桥大学历史系毕业。对学校的课程他一点也不感兴趣，好在学业比较宽松，有足够的时间随心所欲地博览群书，自学成才。整个大学期间他主要依靠大学图书馆和附近一家书店，在那里他父母给他开了一个账户，随他自由买书（后来他买书之多令他父母后悔当初的慷慨）。

1991年，阿兰?德波顿发表处女作小说《爱情笔记》，对爱情进行了哲学式的探讨。此后的《爱上浪漫》和《亲吻与诉说》更是继续着对爱情进行哲学探讨。

1996年，完成《拥抱似水年华》；2000年，《哲学的慰藉》出版，运用欧洲哲学的智慧医治现代人的焦虑不安;之后的《旅行的艺术》以及《幸福的建筑》又从哲学、美学和心理学的角度重新审视了人们对旅行、对建筑的看法。

2011年，德波顿被选为英国皇家文学院成员；2015年，出版《新闻的骚动》。

Alain de Botton is the author of Essays in Love, The Romantic Movement, Kiss and Tell, How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Consolations of Philosophy, The Art of Travel, Status Anxiety, The Architecture of Happiness, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, A Week at the Airport, Religion for Atheists, The News: A User’s Manual, and latest novel The Course of Love, among many others. Alain is a bestselling author in 30 countries. He lives in London, where he runs The School of Life and Living Architecture.

How To Love Life Today抓住现在

How To Read For Yourself读书为己
How To Take Your Time优哉游哉
How To Suffer Successfully直面痛苦
How To Express Your Motion传情达意
How To Be A Good Friend交友之道
How To Open Your Eyes心胸豁然
How To Be Happy In Love享受爱情
How To Put Books Down弃书不观
Following is an excerpt from Chapter 8, "How to be Happy in Love":

Q: Did Proust have any relevant thoughts on dating? What should one talk about on a first date?
A: Advice is scant. A more fundamental doubt is whether one should accept dinner in the first place.
There is no doubt that a person’s charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: "No, this evening I shan’t be free."
If this response proves bewitching, it is because of the connection made...between appreciation and absence. Though a person may be filled with attributes, an incentive is nevertheless required to ensure that a seducer will focus wholeheartedly on these, an incentive which finds perfect form in a dinner rebuff.
Q: Was he against sex before marriage?
A: No, just before love. And not for any starchy reasons, simply because he felt it wasn’t a good idea to sleep together when encouraging someone to fall in love was a consideration.
Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones.
Q: Surely not?
A: Other women may of course be fascinating, the problem is that they risk not seeming so...
Q: Are there any secrets to long-lasting relationships?
A: Infidelity. Not the act itself, but the threat of it. For Proust, an injection of jealousy is the only thing capable of rescuing a relationship ruined by habit...The threat of losing their partner
may lead them to realize that they have not appreciated this person adequately...If someone threatens the relationship, they get jealous, wake up for a moment, have another kiss with the horny tusk, and get bored once more. Condensed into a male heterosexual version, the situation runs like this:
Afraid of losing her, we forget all the others. Sure of keeping her, we compare her with the those others whom at once we prefer to her.