Bookshelf: 'A Wild Snail Eating,' 'Proust's Overcoat'

We seek metaphors. When we find them in the natural world, we feel better about things, perhaps because we see ourselves as part of something larger. Elisabeth Tova Bailey's "The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating: A True Story" (Algonquin, $18.95) has much in common with memoirs of prisoners who find comfort in the company of a spider or a plant outside the bars. When she was 34, Bailey returned from a trip to Switzerland with a mysterious and debilitating flu. Hospitalized for months, she was told that recovery would take years. A friend gave her a pot of field violets with a snail. Bedridden, Bailey watched the snail for hours each day. She fed it portobello mushrooms, heard the snail eating. She watched it journey up and down the pot. "As the months drifted by," she writes, "it was hard to remember why the endless details of a healthy life and a good job had seemed so critical." Life was condensed into a room, the companionship of another creature and visits from friends, whose energy astonishes Bailey ("They were so careless with it"). "There is a certain depth of illness that is piercing in its isolation," she writes. "The only rule of existence is uncertainty." Trapped in her studio apartment, Bailey finds enormous comfort in the snail, in its insistence on life (her snail lays eggs that become 118 baby snails).

Bailey's illness lasted two decades, although the snail didn't make it that long. Learning about the snail, thinking about its life cycle, its shape, led Bailey down many paths. This curiosity drew her forward and slowly out of her illness. "Naturally solitary and slow-paced, it had entertained and taught me, and was beautiful to watch as it glided silently along, leading me through a dark time into a world beyond that of my own species."

Things can make you happy. Jacques Guerin, 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, Guerin offered much-needed cash. The overcoat Proust wore when he wrote was the ultimate dream of a collector like Guerin. 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." "Proust's Overcoat: The True Story of One Man's Passion for All Things Proust" (Ecco, $19.99) is Lorenza Foschini's delightful portrait of Guerin and his Proust obsession (translated from the Italian by Eric Karpeles). The objects themselves take on a life of their own and do a jig in this little volume.

Edmund de Waal, a well-known potter, is the fifth generation to inherit his family's collection of 264 netsuke, Japanese miniature ivory carvings collected by his great-great grandfather, banking magnate Charles Ephrussi. In "The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26), De Waal explains that the netsuke, smuggled out of Vienna during the Nazi occupation by one of the family's maids, are all that remains of an extensive art collection. De Waal was on an internship in Japan in 1991 when he first heard the story of the netsuke from his 84-year-old great-uncle, Iggie, who lived there. It was Uncle Iggie who bequeathed the collection to De Waal, who carries the tiny figures around London in his pockets: "You work your fingers round the smoothness and stoniness of the ivory. . . . They are always asymmetric, I think with pleasure. Like my favorite Japanese tea-bowls, you cannot understand the whole from a part." The netsuke teach De Waal a great deal about his family, their lives during and after the war, his own creative legacy and the lives of the artists who made the miniatures. Talisman is too light a word - the netsuke carry a greater power: "It is not just that things carry stories with them," he writes. "Stories are a kind of thing, too . . . a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed."