Marcel Proust was a perpetual invalid -- and, by most accounts, a world-class hypochondriac.

He suffered from asthma, from constipation, from a perpetually roiling stomach. His nose ran. He couldn't stop coughing. He was always cold. His skin was so sensitive he couldn't use soap, and he had to clean himself with carefully prepared non-irritating towels (he used 20 per washing). He was terrified of mice, of travel, of high altitudes. He needed to wear specially designed underpants held tight with a pin. He spent much of his life simply lying in his bed, inside a cork-lined room designed to shield him from noise, and in which no flowers or perfumes were allowed.

So there is more than a little irony in the fact that, 75 years after his death, the legendarily languid French novelist is making a quiet comeback -- as a self-help guru for the literary set. For all that Proust can teach us about how to live our own lives, he had tremendous trouble living his own.

Proust unleashed the first volume of his big book, the massive seven-volume novel "In Search of Lost Time"(which some may know as "Remembrance of Things Past"), in 1913. But his new status as a sort of motivational speaker from beyond the grave can be traced to two slender books that came out this year.

In May, Pantheon books released a most unusual and ingenious self-help book by novelist and Proust aficionado Alain de Botton. "How Proust Can Change Your Life" sifts through Proust's voluminous writings in search not of lost time but of lost insights into human nature. And last month, Scribner came out with Phyllis Rose's "The Year of Reading Proust,"a quirky literary memoir that draws on Proust's writings to make sense of the vagaries of Rose's own life.

As a result of this new attention, sales of Proust's books have begun to climb.

Like "Seinfeld"in the early days -- before the sitcom's writers felt compelled to load each episode with a half-dozen improbable plots -- Proust's gigantic masterpiece is essentially about nothing. Set in late 19th Century France, the book -- all 1.2 million words of it -- chronicles the life of one Charles Swann as he hobnobs with the rich and semifamous, and becomes smitten with a trollop named Odette. Dinner parties stretch over dozens of pages, the conversation interrupted with the narrator's long digressions on subjects ranging from literary flatterers to the nature of love. And in one famous chapter, the first one, the narrator falls asleep -- very, very slowly.

But as de Botton and Rose show, lurking deep within the baroque structures of Proust's prose there are profound life lessons to be found. To Rose, Proust is "about individuality -- that everybody has their own truth deep inside of them, and that the only way they're going to find it is in silence and solitude." De Botton is much more specific, devoting chapters of his book to such topics as "How to Express Your Emotions," "How to Take Your Time" and "How to be Happy in Love." And then there is the most important lesson of all: "How to Suffer Successfully."

"The fact that Proust had an unhappy life might make him seem an unlikely role model," de Botton says by e-mail, "but . . . the unhappiest people are often in the best position to be the wisest -- the best doctors are those who are themselves ill all the time.

"We definitely need to know how to suffer successfully. In Proust's eyes, nothing is more certain than that we will be unhappy. Therefore, it's important to know how to handle these inevitable griefs, and handle them in such a way that we can learn from them, make use of them, turn them into ideas."

Though the motivations behind Rose's and de Botton's new books are strikingly similar, the authors say they knew nothing of the other's book while working on their own. "It's amazing that Alain de Botton and I would both publish books with Proust in the title in the same year," Rose says, "but when I read his book what was more amazing to me was that two people would write books, at about the same time, who read Proust the same way."

While it's too soon to tell what the effect of Rose's memoir will be, de Botton's book has been exceptionally well received, garnering a number of positive reviews (including a very nice one from John Updike in the New Yorker) and inching its way up to No. 18 on The New York Times' best-seller list. It's no "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," as far as sales go, but for a book about Proust, that ain't half bad.

And it's clear that de Botton's marvelously Proustian explication of the French master has made many readers hungry for a taste of the real thing.

"I think it would be arrogant to take the credit for turning people to Proust," de Botton says. "However, I do know from my publisher that sales of Proust's novel have risen sharply since the publication of my book in May." Moreover, de Botton notes (with some astonishment), no fewer than "four (!!!) Hollywood producers have to date called me up asking me to consider adapting Proust for the screen for them."

Will Proust become the next Jane Austen -- inspiring a half-dozen movies and a mini-series or two to boot? Probably not. After all, Proust's plotless novel would be hard to translate into any language spoken by Hollywood executives. Indeed, the one previous attempt to bring Proust to the silver screen -- 1984's "Swann In Love," starring Jeremy Irons -- made barely a dent in cinematic history. Proust just isn't High Concept.

But that doesn't stop Rose and de Botton from dreaming. Both would love to see Swann on screen again. De Botton says Alicia Silverstone, who starred in the Austen-inspired Beverly Hills comedy "Clueless," would make a "delightful" Proustian heroine.

Still, both Rose and de Botton would be happy enough just to see a few more people give Proust's novel a go. They admit it's not an easy task. For years, Proust has been remembered -- and not without reason -- as the author of a novel that many people start but that no one can finish. Many can't even make it past the book's legendary opening chapter, which devotes several dozen pages to the act of falling asleep. (It's a safe bet that many of his readers enter dreamland long before Proust's insomniac narrator does.)

Even individual sentences take their sweet time to arrive at their various destinations. Proust's longest sentence, as de Botton notes, "would, if arranged along a single line in standard-sized text, run on for a little short of four meters." And that is only one of many.