What are you reading now - and then

[Winkle]

[Lovecox]

A Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. Just a little light reading.

[danthepoetman]

A Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. Just a little light reading.

One of the most fascinating book(s) I’ve ever read that was simultaneously so immensely boring… I still have a hard time not having nightmares about the 25 straight pages descriptions of flowers, for instance. Yet, in many instances about the constitution of self, memory and identity, much better than Freud ever could be…

[trish]

I read Swan's Way but never went through the rest of series and from what I can remember Proust loves single sentences that run on for pages and pages so that in fact whenever I now encounter a run-on sentence it reminds of those crisp days in fall when I sat out under the brilliant oranges and blushing reds reading my brand new copy of Swan's Way, the smell of the fresh pages mingling with the sour scents of the mowed grasses and urine of last night's passing drunks....

[Prospero]

For weeks and weeks i meandered on about why my mother would not come and kiss me good night, or if she would, as i lay i my bed, tossing and turning, thinking about my mother (and on for another 67 pages).

[Stavros]

It took me three months to read Proust, one of the memorable literary experiences of my adult life. I think that Proust has one of those styles of writing that, like Joyce, Conrad and the other modernists, has its own internal logic. If you cannot develop a relationship to that kind of writing, its quality and purpose will pass you by. There is a lot of storytelling in Proust but it is dictated by the author's obsessions, with words, with feelings, with tastes, with colours, and with music. I can understand why people fnd it difficult in the same way that some people do not find it easy to sit through a film by Antonioni, Tarkovsky or Bela Tarr. What Proust also produced is a social document in which class is the pivot on which so much of the book's relationships turn and is, in this way a First World War book, as that War is often used to mark a shift in world politics, signified by the collapse of Empire. It is also a book written by a Jew about a society in which Jews are not completely accepted, which is also how Marcel depicts homosexuality -there is plenty of it about, but nobody admits to it, just as that crushing moment during the Dreyfus affair when suddenly, Swann being a Jew becomes a vocalised problem that would otherwise never have been mentioned, because he was a friend of the Prince of Wales; the horror and the embarrassment is in the sudden absence of decorum, but one that exposes the attitudes of class that permeate this book. There is a deep sense in the late volumes, of the world that Marcel was born into having crashed and burned on the battlefields of Europe. It may seem odd that an elegy to snobbery could have such power, but that is the magic of Proust's writing. He also had an insight into music, as Pierre Boulez once realised after reading the passage on Wagner in The Captive (La Prisonniere) on the way the shepherd's lament at the opening of Act III of Tristan becomes the joyful fanfare at the end when Isolde arrives. There are also precise uses of colour throughout the book. But I admit, as with Joyce, reading Proust requires a degree of dedication many readers are not prepared to give.

[Cecil Rhodes]

I am reading the november 2012 issue of BIG UNS Magazine

[danthepoetman]

I read Swan's Way but never went through the rest of series and from what I can remember Proust loves single sentences that run on for pages and pages so that in fact whenever I now encounter a run-on sentence it reminds of those crisp days in fall when I sat out under the brilliant oranges and blushing reds reading my brand new copy of Swan's Way, the smell of the fresh pages mingling with the sour scents of the mowed grasses and urine of last night's passing drunks....

For weeks and weeks i meandered on about why my mother would not come and kiss me good night, or if she would, as i lay i my bed, tossing and turning, thinking about my mother (and on for another 67 pages).

Trish, Prospero, I love this. You're both so clever! lol lol!
Stavros, brilliant anlysis as usual! No one ever seem to thank you for these. I do.

[Prospero]

Thanks Dan. Stavros's analysis is truly very perceptive and persuasive. It's my plan to embark on it again soon. I set off on that journey years ago - and after long hours got past Swan's Way (with its brilliant evocation of obsession) only to see the prospect of the same sort of story... an the realisation that there were several more volumes. Life seemed too short then. It is even shorter now, but Proust is still THE mountain to climb. Everyone I know who has got through it says there are a lot of laughs to be had enroute to the Medelaine Biscuit.

[Stavros]

Prospero, a madeleine is not a biscuit! It is a cake. He dips it into some tea and it provokes what becomes known as an involuntary memory -the memory that leads Marcel through the subsequent volumes. There is another one two-thirds of the way through when he slips on a paving stone in Venice and it provokes memories of his dead grandmother, but more importantly enables him to resurrect his belief in art that in the intervening years he felt had lost, mostly through an obsessional love for Albertine, who dominates the later volumes as Gilberte and her her mother Odette dominated the earlier volumes: thus, at the beginning, the Madeleine releases the power, the possibility of art, but in the intervening years he loses focus, so that it is only at the end of the book when he realises that time passing will also take his life with it, that his dedication to art becomes both possible and practical -in effect, the writing of the book that will become in A La Recherche du temps perdu, begins at the end: it becomes like Finnegan's Wake, a circular book that encourages you to end the last page by turning to the first. Or it could be that it will be another book...

However, you must be willing to accept that Proust plays with language as well as painting with it, and does not concentrate description into a sentence, he is the polar opposite of Borges, who can suggest great things in small words -that mirror troubling the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona street...for what it's worth, I have never read War and Peace, but would still like to have a go at it.