'Proust Among the Stars' will surprise and intrigue Proust fanatics but can equally be recommended to the general reader as a way of looking. It is arranged in a series of thematic chapters - Self, Time, Art, Politics, Morality, Sex and Death - which trace the forming of the book and its narrator like a series of circles made by a stone in water. Bowie's method is to examine Proust's plenitude with both a microscope and a telescope. He analyses those long, looping, lassoing, curling sentences, with their qualifications, their disparate metaphors, their lyricism and their harsh contradictions, and shows both the brilliance of the writing, and how each detail, each adjective, hooks into the whole scheme.
