27 comments

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  Kathleen Maher

  1 year ago

  Okay, I'll go back to him. I did make it through two volumes once long ago. Not only did reading him feel like work, which was sometimes well worth it and sometimes not, I felt he was a terrible influence on me as a writer. Only geniuses can get away with all that verbosity.(Rhymes with...?) Even without idols who speak in volumes, I don't know how to shut up. It's a nervous habit and oh, god am I nervous.
  Proust was undoubtedly nervous, too. I know he suffered from migraines. He wrote in bed. His bed-room was lined in cork. He once banished a friend from ever visiting him again, because he hated the guy's cologne. Not only did he write his six-volume masterpiece, but belle lettres galore. So he wrote to the friend complaining months after their last visit that he had removed everything that had been in his room that day, all the furniture even, but the stink remained.
  What do you think? Was the cologne lavender-scented? Perhaps with a lime top note. That, Proust never said.
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  Manny Maher

  1 year ago

  Dan, I never once had the slightest desire to read Proust, even though he's been sitting on our shelves for two decades gathering dust (a handsome three-book set that we obtained because some book club or magazine was giving it away as a premium). But those quotes are really nice. You've altered my consciousness. I'm going to do it. When I have a little time...
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  Dan Leo

  1 year ago

  Kathleen, I'm no expert, but apparently Proust was genuinely sensitive to smells and also to all sorts of airborne crap. Very weak lungs, and finally it killed him.
  
  Manny, here's the deal. Just give Proust a shot when you really have the time and inclination, because it does take some real effort, especially the very beginning of the book, which has just about no action for fifty or so pages while the narrator talks about not being able to go to sleep when he was a little kid. If you can make it past that overture you just may be on your way. Also, I'd suggest trying the new Modern Library edition which is based on, but a revision of, the old Montcrieff translation that you have.
  
  Or, what the hell, just read War & Peace or The Brothers Karamazov instead!
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  OutOfContext

  1 year ago

  I've never gotten too far with Proust for a couple of reasons. I'm a fan of tight, dense and resonant writing with plenty of spaces for my own imagination and interpretation. I find expository writing sterile (get thee behind me Henry James), in a way. I love language but I don't love language for language's sake. Plus, in this case, you are really at the mercy of the translator if, like me, you have only high school French for reference. Having said this, I just learned that one of my favorite writers, Lydia Davis, has recently translated "A La Recherche..." so I may just have to try again.
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  Kevin Wolf

  1 year ago

  This has been on my list for ages, though I do not have a copy. Once an acquaintance urged me to read some Proust along with How Proust Can Change Your Life but I never got around to it.
  
  Most "important" books I've tackled on my own, long after college. I suppose I could tackle this too.
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  Kathleen Maher

  1 year ago

  Maybe it's just me, Dan. But I found War & Peace hard to put down and the Brothers K was a breeze, at least compared to In Search of Lost Time. But you're right about the first fifty pages. And we probably do need to acquire a fresher translation.
  PS. Manny and I still show up with the same avatar, even though he's using a separate computer. MyBlogLog says it can't be helped unless he start his own blog from another abode, which is unlikely.
  Readers take note: Although we're very close, we're VERY different. newcritics pinpoints the many areas where we disagree most. Apparently it doesn't bother Manny.
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  Dan Leo

  1 year ago

  Out of C, y'know, I find Henry James really hard to read, more so than Proust for some reason, even though I'm reading Proust in translation. But just wait, after I finish that last volume of "In Search of", it's bring on "The Golden Bowl"! Haven't looked at Lydia Davis's translation, but I really like the Modern Library version, even though it's now credited to three translators (C.K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright); it's a very British translation but I think I prefer my translations to sound British rather than American -- there's just less dissonance for me that way.
  
  Kevin, I was somewhat disappointed by "How Proust Can Change Your Life" -- it just seemed a little facile to me, although in aid of a good cause I suppose, i.e. getting people to read Proust. I'd say just go ahead and give the big book a shot and see what happens.
  
  And Kathleen, you're so right, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy are much easier to read than Proust. In fact I kind of miss the Russians, and as I mentioned to Bob Stein down below I've had "Anna Karenina" sitting on my shelf just waiting for me actually to pick it up and read it for some time now.
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  J. Burruss

  1 year ago

  I think if you just dip in and out of the stream, you're shortchanging yourself. In Search of Lost Time ought, in my opinion, to be read whole, in a full immersion. I have read both the Scott Moncrieff translation and the new Penguin translation (each volume englished by a different translator), as well as the Stephane Heuet "graphic novel" version (at least as much as has come out so far), and the novelette-within-the-novel, "Swann in Love" in French (which was enough to make me realize I'll never read the rest of it in French). If you are hoping to pick up the Penguin Swann's Way and have it sound like Lydia Davis, you will be disappointed. It is rather less purple than the Moncrieff version, but it still sounds like Proust (or how one imagines he would sound in English). If you like that, it isn't hard to finish; if long sentences bore you, or you expect a high density of aphorisms like the ones Dan quoted, it will be a struggle.
  
  Everyone needs a crutch. There are various helps -- Terence Kilmartin I think compiled a character, place, and motif index, and there are various other summaries. As to movies, I found the version of Swann in Love with Jeremy Irons repellant, and the more recent (and star-studded) Time Regained charming although incomprehensible to anyone who has not read the books. My favorite pony is Harold Pinter's unproduced "The Proust Screenplay" (which did have a stage performance in London a few years back). It manages to pick out a few main themes and follow them all the way through in a comprehensible although non-linear narrative structure.
  
  A warning about the Penguin translation: you can buy all the volumes in Canada. Because of the vagaries of US copyright law, the last volume can't be published in the USA for many years to come.
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  Dan Leo

  1 year ago

  Thanks for stopping in, Mr, Burruss. It's such a pleasure to meet another Proustian. Y'know, I've often wondered what it would be like if I could just bang on through with Proust, but I've never been able to do it. It's something temperamental, I'm just a really slow reader, and as indicated above I like to re-read while I'm reading and I like to space out while I'm reading too. And then I get these overpowering urges all of a sudden where I simply must read some other book that I've seen mentioned somewhere. I think, Oh, Proust will be here when I get back. But then that one other book will somehow lead to another book...and then there's all those obscure 70s yakuza movies that I must watch as soon as they appear on the video store shelves.
  
  I console myself with the thought that when "Recherche" first came out it was in installments stretching from, what, 1913 to 1927, and so the people who first read it took an even longer time to do so than I will (maybe).
  
  Any other slow readers out there?
  
  I'm still pushing for the Modern Library translation -- all questions of toning down Moncrieff's purple-osity aside, it works from the latest revised French text, which was not available to Scott Moncrieff, and again, I find its English to be impeccable if very English. And, yes, in the last volume Kilmartin provides a valuable appendix of names, themes, characters and places -- very good for a clod like me who might take six months off because all of a sudden he must read all of Thomas Wolfe or something.
  
  I'm with you on the movie of "Swann in Love". How could a movie with such a director (Schlondorff), such a cast (Irons, Delon, etc.), Sven Nykvist behind the camera, written by Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carrière -- how could this movie turn out so boring?
  
  "Time Regained" (Raul Ruiz) to me was much better; it might be a decent intro to someone interested in tackling the book, just for its beauty and for Malkovich's Charlus, but with the proviso you mentioned, that they won't know what the hell is going on.
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  Mike Molloy

  1 year ago

  Another slow reader here, though maybe not by your standards of slow. I tend to read a very small number of pages per hour, but I am doing a semi-immersion approach to Proust, rather than your exremely deliberate method. I'm currently about half way through Guermantes (Marcel's grandmother just had her little stroke); this is the first time I've tried to tackle Lost Time.
  
  My approach has been to read 1 volume of Lost Time, then to read 1 of something else. I started sometime in the spring and I expect to finish by next spring, maybe before the end of this year. It's working for me.
  
  I've been picking up the volumes as they turn up at local used book stores, using Amazon when I get to a volume I couldn't find that way. Mostly it's been Moncrieff, in some cases as revised by Kilmartin and Enright, some not. I just found the 4th volume used, in the new Penguin translation; if I'd realized it at the time I probably would've held out for Moncrieff et al., but what the heck, a little variety will probably be interesting in its own way. The 2 volumes of the Modern Library edition that I've read have been good, so I can second Dan's recommendation.
  
  [The NY Review of Books reviewer (Andre Aciman) was lukewarm at best on the Penguin translation of Swann's Way (Lydia Davis), and he just hated their translation of Budding Grove (James Grieve), but I haven't seen reviews of the later volumes. I'm comforted by J. Burruss's comment above that "it still sounds like Proust".]
  
  I have found that Proust's reputation for being a difficult read is a little overstated. Lost Time is certainly very long, which is a sort of difficulty in its own right, but it's not hard the way that I've found Joyce or, say, Pynchon to be hard. (Some is harder than others, with both those guys.) You don't get the long conversations without explicit indications of the speaker as in Joyce, and you don't get plunged into the middle of conversations with very little indication of the context as with Pymchon (at least in Mason & Dixon). You don't get unpunctuated stream of consciousness. What you do get are some rather long sentences featuring lots of descriptive clauses, which often feature multiply-embedded descriptive clauses of their own. Sometimes it's a bit of a puzzle, for a given such description, what exactly it's meant to describe, but it usually becomes clear by the end of the sentence. There's a certain amount of carrying a clause along in your head while you're trying to figure out who exactly it modifies, which admittedly can be some work; but that's about it for difficulty. I find that you get used to it; however, Dan's method of reading intermittently and in small chunks surely would make it harder to get accustomed to this sort of thing.
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  Dan Leo

  1 year ago

  Mike, your last paragraph is an excellent description of the wonderful weirdness of Proust's long sentences and paragraphs. It's that clause-into-clause --and then parenthetical aside (and another aside within the aside) -- that makes for the difficulty, but as I said, I really believe that Proust is never more difficult than he has to be, he's never difficult just to be difficult, and he never shows off. You're so right when you say that sometimes it's a bit of a puzzle, but when (on maybe the second or third reading, if you're me) you make the connection (or series of connections) that bring the puzzle so beautifully together, it's all worth while.
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  Mike Molloy

  1 year ago

  Thanks Dan. One more comment that struck me after my previous post: I find that Proust is remarkably easy to pick up again after you've put it down for a while. With the focus on the narrator's observations of the behavior and motivations of himself and the people around him--on everything but plot, basically--there just isn't the usual problem of losing the thread of the plot. It would be much harder to read something like Bleak House the way you're approaching Proust; you'd have to keep going back to the beginning and starting over, I guess.
  
  I think it's especially apt that you treat Proust as vacation reading; the book strikes me as having a very vacation-y feel to it, specifically a beach-vacation feel, the kind of vacation where you get up in the morning, you go for a swim, you have a little lunch, you read a little, go for another swim, maybe watch a little baseball, read a little more.... No hurry, take your time. I read a decent sized chunk of Budding Grove during just such a vacation this summer and, especially given that it mostly takes place at Balbec, the mood of the book seemed well suited to the mood of the vacation.
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  Dan Leo

  1 year ago

  Mike, you're a reader after my own heart.
  
  Now that I think about it again, I strongly recommend picking up the sixth and final volume of the Modern Library edition, which contains the final book -- "Time Regained" -- because of the great "Guide to Proust" in the back of the volume. You've probably already noticed Proust's lovable way of blithely bringing out from the wings a character he hasn't even mentioned in quite some time; with the guide you can quickly look up the character and get a brief identification along with a listing of all his previous appearances. For instance, in the book I'm reading now, "The Captive", M. Brichot suddenly strolls up on p.260, when he hasn't been seen since near the end of the previous book, "Sodom and Gomorrah". I love the way Proust does this, but the "Guide" is great for those times when you just draw a blank or want a quick refresher.
  
  One of my correspondents (initials BG) told me that she just started the first volume and after reading the first ten pages fell into a deep nap. I think that Proust himself would have heartily approved. What better way to bring on some rich dreams than by drifting off with "In Search of Lost Time"?
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  Jennifer

  1 year ago

  Dan. I can't believe your post ate my comment. Are you a comment-hater as well? I am disheartened.
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  Dan Leo

  1 year ago

  Dear Jennifer,
  My post ate your comment? Now I'm really mixed up. By all means please send it in again if it somehow got eaten. I love comments. In the meantime I've read a few more sentences from "The Captive". Like this one, which is so Marcel:
  
  "Unfortunately we carry inside us that little organ which we call the heart, which is subject to certain maladies in the course of which it is infinitely impressionable as regards everything that concerns the life of a certain person, so that a lie -- that most harmless of things, in the midst of which we live so unconcernedly, whether the lie be told by ourselves or by others -- coming from that person, causes that little heart, which we ought to be able to have surgically removed, intolerable spasms."
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  Jennifer

  1 year ago

  Intolerable spasms, indeed.
  
  I can't recall all of my comment... but do know that you are now expected to make
  madeleines for this year's holiday bake-off.
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  Dan Leo

  1 year ago

  I personally think that Blue Girl should bake the madeleines.
  
  Here's some good recipes:
  
  http://frenchfood.about.com/library/weekly/aa02...
  
  I can make the tea though. I confess to being a horrible tea snob. Every day I make a pot of loose Irish breakfast tea that I buy by the pound at Old City Coffee at the Reading Terminal here in Philadelphia.
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  Jennifer

  1 year ago

  If you can mail the tea (complete with cozy so it doesn't get too cold during shipping), we'll count it as an entry!
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  Dan Leo

  1 year ago

  It's a deal!
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  Mary W. Walters

  1 year ago

  I have just happened on this blog entry/exchange and I was delighted to discover it. I too am taking the slow approach to Proust’s magnum opus (after In Search of Lost Time, what work can ever justify the use of that phrase again?), although unlike you, Dan (at least from the sounds of it) so far I have each time read a volume through before turning my attention to other writers and other books. I’ve been at it about three years now, I think, and I am currently well into the fourth volume. Finishing the novel is not something I feel I need to add to my to-do list: I go away for months and months, but after a while M. Proust always calls me back again. I know I’ll get it done someday.
  
  I am reading the Modern Library Paperback Edition. For a few years, the series has been coming out at least here in Canada with complementary covers that fit together on the bookshelf—when I own them all and have placed them in order, their spines will create a picture. While appealing to the collector in me, this has also caused me endless hours of dithering and consternation because I read Swann’s Way in the Vintage Classic edition and it doesn’t match the subsequent volumes I have purchased. What to do? What to do? If I were to buy Volume I of the matching set (or so I have been thinking), how could I live with it there on the shelf, knowing it was not the actual book with which I had spent so many hours— reading it mainly in my bed, as Proust had written it in his? And what would I do with the other Volume I, the one I had read? How could I put it on the shelf beside its stand in? Would I need to complete that set as well in order to sleep soundly? But now, thankfully, Dan Leo has given me an elegant solution to my dilemma—I’ll simply read Swann’s Way again after reading all the others, and thereby legitimize the ownership of both versions of the book. (However, I guess I’d better buy the rest of the set I’m reading now, before another design comes out.)
  
  With Volume IV, I am suddenly finding Proust readable in a way he hadn’t been for me before. I haven’t been able to decide whether he just dropped a very readable section right into the middle of his novel, or whether I’m acquiring an “ear” for Proust’s writing style, as I have in the past after immersing myself in other writers—Shakespeare, for example, or Russell Hoban’s dialect in Riddley Walker, or Jose Saramago, whose lack of punctuational signposts especially regarding dialogue can be mightily confusing. (Compared to any of these, to my mind reading Tolstoy is like falling off a log, at least once you’ve figured out that everyone has at least three names). I imagine the latter explanation is closest to the truth – as Mike Molloy has said so wonderfully well, with time, I have grown more used to carrying Proust’s clauses along in my head.
  
  With Volume IV, too, I have for the first time been noting with great pleasure – as Dan does – Proust’s wonderful ability to be concise (and the irony of that). I’ve even recently marked a few of his bon mots with a pencil (something I do not normally like to do with books, but I couldn’t help myself). They include this astonishing bit of character description: “His short-sightedness, since it caused him to see everything very small, gave him the appearance of seeing great distances so that —rare poetry in a statuesque Greek God— remote, mysterious stars seemed to be engraved upon his pupils,” and this observation, which may be as appropriate to embarking on Swann’s Way as it is to so many other circumstances in life, “For it is a fact that in the most genuine exhaustion there is, especially in highly-strung people, an element that depends on attention and is preserved only by an act of memory. We feel suddenly weary as soon as we are afraid of feeling weary, and, to throw off our fatigue, it suffices us to forget about it.”
  
  It gave me an odd feeling to make those pencil marks, however, knowing that it was unlikely that anyone else, or even me again, would ever get far enough into my copy of the novel to see them. It was a bit like firing a couple of sentences off into space in a time capsule, only in reverse; there was no connective tissue, and not even the taste of a madeleine, to draw them back again.
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  Dan Leo

  1 year ago

  Ah, dear Mary, yet another reader after my own heart. Your obsessing about the different editions of the book, and not wanting to have the edition on your shelf that wasn't the one that you had traveled through, is exactly the sort of thing I would do.
  
  Oh, go ahead and mark 'em up! I do. For instance, here's a bit about M. de Charlus that I recently highlighted:
  
  "When he brought off at the expense of somebody or something, an entirely successful tirade, he was anxious to let it be heard by the largest possible audience, but took care not to admit to the second performance the audience of the first who might bear witness that the piece had not changed."
  
  I've actually been feeling just slightly abashed since writing the above piece because I really haven't read much of the book since then; on the other hand I haven't been reading much of anything else, either. But today I brought it with me to the bank, thinking that if there was a line I might read a sentence or two. Unfortunately there wasn't a line. However, the teller did ask me what that big book was. "I told her, 'Oh, a novel.'" "Wow, that's some long novel!" I didn't tell her there were five other volumes of roughly equal size.
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  Mary W. Walters

  1 year ago

  Ah, M. de Charlus. It has been interesting to have been reading about him and his double-life during a week when there has been so much media attention on events that allegedly took place in an airport men’s room in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Plus ca change.
  
  Why is it that when one brings a book in case there is a lineup at the bank or a delay at the dentist’s office, there never is one? But dare to step out of the house without a book….
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  Dan Leo

  1 year ago

  Yes, Mary, this is why great books never grow old. The times may change but people don't change.
  
  I wonder if Charlus is the first ever fictional representation of a closeted gay man? The strange thing that happens as the book goes on, though, is that quite unbeknownst to Charlus, his closet starts disappearing around him. Just as Senator Craig's closet seems to be falling apart all around him, whether he wants it to or not.
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  Mary W. Walters

  1 year ago

  Nice analysis, although I think that you should insert a spoiler alert in there. It might be the first-ever spoiler alert for In Search of Lost Time and go down in history itself as a result. (The idea of doing that appeals to my peculiar sense of humour, anyway. Somewhat akin to throwing down War and Peace around page 500 while saying in disgust, “I’ve already read this book.”)
  
  It’s seems as though the society Proust is writing about is more accepting of its gay members than I would have thought they’d have been in that era — accommodating them, although certainly not embracing them. I’m sure I read something in there about a hostess re-assigning bedrooms when she became aware of the preferences of her guests. Of course, it was Paris: I doubt that novel could have been set in London or Toronto or Washington in that era. And they were not entirely accepting, of course — I found most of the plot of Brokeback Mountain embedded around page 30 of Vol. IV.
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  Dan Leo

  1 year ago

  Whoah, I did slip in a slight spoiler! But I think most readers could see something coming.
  
  I wouldn't know, (and this is probably speaking in such general terms as to be automatically meaningless) but I wonder if the upper classes tend traditionally to be forgiving of sexual peccadilloes, provided of course that it is the upper classes committing the peccadilloes.
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  Beck

  3 weeks ago

  good post..
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  myths787

  3 days ago

  How Proust Can Change Your Life is one of the best-seller. It is so interesting going through it.
  Very nice post.
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