Should Alain de Botton ever require fictional evidence of ‘How Proust Can Change Your Life’, he could do worse than to turn to Clara, the protagonist of Stéphane Carlier’s latest delightful novel. Clara is a hairdresser in a rather rundown provincial salon in France. She has a good relationship with her boss, Madame Habib, her colleagues, Nolwenn and Patrick, and her loyal clientele, and a more vexed one with JB, her boyfriend of three years, a muscular firefighter who resembles Flynn Ryder in the Disney cartoon. 

One day, a mysterious stranger comes to the salon. He barely speaks while Clara is cutting his hair and leaves her no tip, but she finds that he’s left something far more precious: a paperback copy of Swann’s Way.  Leafing through it, she spots an underlined sentence: ‘You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist’s nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs.’

Instinctually, she applies it to herself and, like another hairdresser, the heroine of Willy Russell’s Educating Rita, embarks on a voyage of literary and personal discovery. After initially struggling with Proust’s prolixity, she comes to realise that his rich sensibility more than compensates for his labyrinthine sentences.

 She becomes obsessed with the novel, prioritising it over her relationships with both JB and her parents. She starts to imagine how Proust would have portrayed her clients. She has her own moments of involuntary memory and even dreams of sleeping with the writer, thinking ‘how strange it is that aside from his literary talent, nobody talks about the fact that Proust was an exceptional lover’.

At a friend’s request, she reads passages from Swann in Love to the elderly Madame Renaud. Her success encourages her to give a series of public readings, through which she encounters a coterie of artists. Then, in the novel’s epilogue, its own version of Time Regained, Clara returns to the town after a 16-year absence and sees what has changed and what remained the same.

Clara Reads Proust is a book of great charm and quiet distinction. Its brevity, uncluttered sentences and discrete paragraphs could not be further from Proust’s style. Yet, in Polly Mackintosh’s expert translation, it proves to be the perfect vehicle for Clara’s literary odyssey. Her impressions of Proust’s novel, both acute and naive, should encourage readers who might otherwise be daunted by its length and complexity.