SOURCE: Rakower, Benito. “Tea and Empathy.” Washington Post Book World (4 May 1997): 8.

In the following review, Rakower deems How Proust Can Change Your Life a “brilliant tour de force.”

Marcel Proust, a perpetual invalid who rarely left his cork-lined room, lived as no sane man could even imagine, while writing a novel that only the most determined readers have been able to finish. Some readers have felt like Mallory and Irving, 500 feet from the summit of Everest, gasping for breath in an increasingly rarefied atmosphere. But despite its enormous difficulty, In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past) dominates the literary horizon as a supreme peak.

Alain de Botton has written what seems, at first, a whimsical “self-help” manual based on Proust's 3,000-page novel. His book [How Proust Can Change Your Life] is at once a brilliant tour de force and a seriously legitimate guide for the perplexed...