Gate of Lilacs

Over a period of fifteen years Clive James learned French by almost no other method than reading À la recherche du temps perdu. Then he spent half a century trying to get up to speed with Proust's great novel in two different languages. Gate of Lilacs is the unique product of James's love and engagement with Proust's eternal masterpiece.With À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust, in James's words, 'followed his creative instinct all the way until his breath gave out', and now James has done the same. In Gate of Lilacs, James, a brilliant critical essayist and poet, has blended the two forms into one.I had always thought the critical essay and the poem were closely related forms . . . If I wanted to talk about Proust's poetry beyond the basic level of talking about his language - if I wanted to talk about the poetry of his thought - then the best way to do it might be to write a poem.There is nothing like a poem for transmitting a mental flavour. Instead of trying to describe it, you can evoke it.In the end, if À la recherche du temps perdu is a book devoted almost entirely to its author's gratitude for life, for love, and for art, this much smaller book is devoted to its author's gratitude for Proust.

“He is a unique figure, a straddler of genres and a bridger of the gaps between high and low culture. He will be seen, I think, as one of the most important and influential writers of our time”

James writes with exquisite perception and surgical precision; he is a poet of powerful argument and emotional force The Times
A writer whose commanding voice contains a constant variety of colour and tone -- Robert McCrum Observer
After writing poems for 50 years, his technique is deft and assured Independent on Saturday
-- Bryan Appleyard Sunday Times
Part of a great burst of late fruition . . . graceful in its thought, moving in its insights, and often written with a fluidity that makes me wish he had done more of this sort of thing. I'll also put it on my students' reading list to remind them that, whatever the universities tell us, we can't understand something until we have responded to it creatively New Statesman
James picks out the characters, the motifs and the moments that set his memory ablaze, just as Marcel was able to conjure such visions from a tisane-infused madeleine Literary Review

Clive James is the multi-million-copy bestselling author of more than forty books. His poetry collection Sentenced to Life and his translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy were both Sunday Times top ten bestsellers, and his collections of verse have been shortlisted for many prizes. In 2012 he was appointed CBE and in 2013 an Officer of the Order of Australia.

'A writer whose commanding voice contains a constant variety of colour and tone' Robert McCrum, Observer 'His qualities are his capacious intelligence, sardonic voice and fondness for wordplay and paradox'Jason Cowley, Financial Times 'A fabulously gifted, enviably well-read, generously inclusive, and always commonsensical writer' John Banville, New York Review of Books 'James's recent poems . . . represent the very best work James has ever done in verse' Jason Guriel, New Republic

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