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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary

editor of The Spectator and this week my guest is Christopher Prendergast, Emeritus Professor of Modern French

Literature at Cambridge and the author of a new book which appropriate in this centenary year of the UK

publication of Swan's Way is called Living and Dying with Marcel Proust. Christopher, welcome.

Now by calling your book Living and Dying with Marcel Proust, it gives at least

the first impression, oh, this is going to be an entry in the Marcel Proust self-help genre,

but it's very much not that, is it? Can you talk about what you were trying to do with the book?

Yes, sure. Of course, it didn't occur to me till really rather late in the day,

and notwithstanding the fact that the first chapter of the book is basically an ironic

stroke satirical excursis on the concept of therapeutic Proust. It didn't occur to me that the title

might resonate in the very direction I was contesting,

namely that Proust can be properly and appropriately read as a sort of self-help manual

in the arts of living and dying. But of course, in retrospect, you're absolutely right,

Sam, that it inevitably resonates in that direction, or at least it can, and I'm afraid it's too late, I can't do anything about it.

But I can assure you that I do not, the first chapter I hope makes unambiguously clear,

apart from two or three seriously amazingly exotic tales of therapeutic priests, that I tell that I do not subscribe to the

how Pris can change your life school of thought.

No.

These tales are kind of extraordinary, though.

I mean, before we get on to the literary critical stuff, can you tell one of them?

Because you've got three examples of sort of asthma, insomnia and addiction that Proust has sort of cured.

...