Proust's Overcoat | Granta

  • Published: 03/11/2011
  • ISBN: 9781846274107
  • Granta Books
  • 144 pages

Proust’s Overcoat

Lorenza Foschini

Translated by Eric Karpeles

The story of the overcoat began with a chance meeting – between an obsessive book collector, Jacques Guérin, and his physician, Dr Robert Proust, brother of the late writer. Guérin immediately glimpsed the possibility of acquiring the novelist’s personal effects, but it would be decades before he finally came to possess the relic he had most coveted: Proust’s moth-eaten otter-lined overcoat…

A rare and wonderfully written book of literary detection that is heartbreaking as well as thrilling, about the afterlife of a writer's manuscripts and the things he carried.

Michael Ondaatje

It's exquisite, delicate, fascinating. I put Proust's Overcoat on the same shelf as Serena Vitale's Pushkin's Button and Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum.

Edmund White

This book is just my style. In the spirit of La Bohème, a brilliant aria to the coat.

Patti Smith

The Author

Lorenza Foschini is an Italian journalist, writer and television news anchorwoman, and a former Vatican correspondent. She is the author of Investigation at Millennium’s End (Rizzoli), which won the Prix Scanno. Born in Naples, she lives in Rome.

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