Proust among the Nations

“Jacqueline Rose’s brilliant achievement in her new book is to argue knowledgeably and persuasively for the relevance that reading Proust and Freud has to the violent antagonism opposing Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. This is a compelling work that will provoke much debate.”

“Rose has an exceptional gift for writing about a moment in the past in such a way as to light up an entire landscape of human experience—always with an eye to our own times and predicaments. In a sense, the Dreyfus trial is her Madeleine episode. As she brings it to mind, a whole host of thoughts and emotions are stirred—including ones we would rather resist, not least on the subject of Israel-Palestine. Proust, Rose argues, wants us ‘to worry to the very edge of our convictions.’ Her book, written with style, insight, erudition, feeling, and flair, gets us to do exactly that.”

“This book pushes at the limits of postcolonialism and deconstructs some of its certainties—to wit, the smugness that smoothes out complexity in order to make it easier to separate victim from oppressor. Rose shows not only that those in the West are the creators of their own version of the Orient, but that the Orient is embedded, however uncomfortably, in the West, and that there are trading pathways that crisscross between Europe and the Middle East, which must at all cost be remembered and maintained. It is exhilarating to read something so bold, that is reaching so urgently for something beyond itself, so strongly anchored, and yet in search of truths somewhere most people refuse to look.”