This is the first comprehensive biography of Marcel Proust since George Painter's biography was published in 1959. Like Proust's masterpiece, A la recherche du temps perdu, the biography is structured as the story of the writer's slow and at times excruciatingly painful search for a vocation. Proust emerges from Carter's narrative as an extremely complicated, difficult and brilliant man. Carter goes into some detail to elucidate Proust's curious sexual identity - from his intense and often histrionic relationships with his male friends to his quasi-pathological attachment to his mother to the bizarre sexual fetishes that emerged in his visits to Parisian brothels. But the biography focuses firmly on Proust's development as an artist - the distracted years as a dilettantish member of Parisian high-society, the dabbling in journalism and translation and, finally, his emergence as one of the great literary voices of the twentieth century. This is a full, rich, deep, and all encompassing biography of one of the great writers in the world. It is also an elucidating cultural history of the times in which he lived. Carter braves the ascent of one of the highest peaks in world literature, retracing the lifetime of Marcel Proust, from the formative lessons he received as a child at his sensitive mother's knee to his lofty final achievement in publishing, The Search for Lost Time (generally known in the English-speaking world as Remembrance of Things Past ). Newly available correspondence and memoirs provide revealing details of Proust's complicated Parisian social life, his intimacies with male lovers, his disputes with critics and other writers. These same sources also clarify the great difficulties (poor health, editorial skepticism) Proust surmounted in publishing his masterpiece. But it is in limning the erratic and surprisingly slow development of Proust's creative powers that Carter best demonstrates his own considerable gift. He deftly reveals how Proust's artistic talents--finally at full strength in his multivolume Remembrance enabled him to fathom the mysteries of memory, revealing not only how memory recalls the past but how in rare and luminous moments it transforms that past into living meaning. The serious readers attracted to Proust's brilliant novel will thank Carter for illuminating the life that produced it. Bryce Christensen A masterful life of the eccentric pioneer who mapped the modern mind in Remembrance of Things Past (more accurately translated here as In Search of Lost Time), by the noted Proust scholar (French/Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham; The Proustian Quest, not reviewed). In seeking to reveal how one of the centurys towering novelists (18711922) ``came to produce what is arguably the most brilliant, sustained prose narration in the history of literature, Carter has produced a long, loving annotation to the autobiographical In Search. He explores his subject with a scholar's care, a novelist's eye, and a generous tolerance for readers without French. His hero is invariably ill, most often with asthma, a condition he exacerbates with drugs, a nocturnal lifestyle, and an erratic diet (in his last days he consumes only ice cream and beer; his death follows his adamant refusal to accept medical treatment for pneumonia). Proust's legendary eccentricities are on full display: his cork-lined living quarters (to ensure the quiet he craves), his vampirish avoidance of daylight, his endless revisions of his texts (In Search requires ``one of the most demanding productions in the history of publishing''), and his prodigality (he recklessly spends nearly all of his enormous inheritance). Noting the fascination of Prousts lifestyle for contemporary readers, Carter labors to explain his complicated sexuality (he fights a duel with a reviewer who has suggested he is gay, but he also pursues young men, regarding waiters at the Ritz as a particular delicacy) and is determined to establish that Proust ``never attempted to deny his Jewish heritage.'' Not even Carter's considerable narrative gifts, however, can make Proust's bedridden later years, marked by a contentious, complicated correspondence with his publisher, as compelling as his early, more extroverted life. A prodigious work, rich and racy, informed by fact, animated by imagination, utterly worthy of its wondrous subject. (47 illus., not seen) -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. "An impeccably researched, well-paced biography of the great French writer, written by an internationally recognized Proust scholar." -- The New York Times Book Review "Rewarding; it's safe to say that every Proustian will be entertained by Carter." -- George Scialabba, Boston Sunday Globe "Serious, thoughtful, well-balanced, well-informed. Carter is the kind of reader Proust hoped for." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review It is all here...the polite society to which Proust was attracted, his excesses of finickiness, his bizarre wa