Discoveries: ‘Proust’s Overcoat’ by Lorenza Foschini

Proust’s Overcoat

The True Story of One Man’s Passion for All Things Proust

Lorenza Foschini, translated from the Italian by Eric Karpeles

Ecco: 128 pp., $19.99

Things can make you happy. Jacques Guérin, a French perfume magnate, had a passion for Proust. He spent his life collecting manuscripts, clothing, furniture, letters — anything that the great author might have touched. His doctor, Robert Proust, was Marcel’s brother, and he provided the collector with an inside track. When Proust’s family began to throw away things that might reveal the writer’s homosexuality and bohemian lifestyle, Guérin offered much-needed cash. The overcoat Proust wore when he wrote was the ultimate dream of a collector like Guérin. Too worn and fragile to be exhibited, the coat is in storage at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris. Bedroom furniture is also on display, including the brass bed covered in blue satin counterpane in which Proust wrote much of “In Search of Lost Time.” Lorenza Foschini’s portrait of Guérin and his Proust obsession is delightful, and the objects themselves take on a life of their own and do a jig in this little volume.

Notes from the Night

A Life After Dark

Taylor Plimpton

Broadway Books: 190 pp., $22

“Here in New York,” this memoir begins, “a good night never ends. We will not let it. Though the hour is late, we are more awake than we have ever been in our lives, we are wild-eyed and grinning and dancing around like fools … and we do not want to go home, we do not want to go to sleep. Above all, we do not want to miss anything.” Where’s the guilt? Where’s the lonely emptiness? Where’s the hangdog hangover? Nowhere. Taylor Plimpton (whose father was that late paper lion, George) and his friend Zoo enter the New York night some time after 10 p.m. and return home, well, after that “final point where there is nothing left to look for — no next, no future, no horizon, only this.” This is a rhapsodic book: light and free, the model for the memoir of the future — a future in which each moment is precious and the writer is as good as Plimpton at grabbing and showing it to us, his friends and readers.

The Typist

A Novel

Michael Knight

Atlantic Monthly Press: 200 pp., $20

Young Americans like Francis Vancleave in Michael Knight’s novel “The Typist” were posted in Japan after World War II, typing reports and wandering aimlessly through the streets of Tokyo. Van, bewildered and disoriented, is forced to reconfigure his Western view of the world, his ideas of power and kindness from a kind of ground zero — Gen. MacArthur’s headquarters. “Our job in Japan was to nourish the Japanese brain with the example of our kindness, with our innate American decency,” the soldiers are told. But that is not what Van sees. Experiencing a form of post-traumatic shock, Van replays his life and the decisions he has made. He sees his life “unspooling” like a “half-remembered dream.”

“I don’t know if I have chosen this life or it has chosen me,” he says. A character such as Van, like Camus’ stranger, becomes more meaningful as a reader gets older. Do we grab our lives, exert our dubious will, or do we just ride them? “I wish you were the father of this child,” his wife writes to him. “The Typist” is reminiscent of “The English Patient” — slow, sad, wistful and romantic.

Salter Reynolds is a writer in Los Angeles.