December 26, 2005

Proust, Chapter 2

Time for the Sunday reading again, and I am so full of satisfaction that I have to repeat myself. For those of you who are new to this blog, I wrote a few months ago about my Sunday – horse-free – pastime at the cultural center where Marcel Proust is the main attraction on Sunday afternoons. We’re well into the third book of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The fare is simple: a 10-15 minute recital by a top-notch musician and then the reading of a few chapters from Proust by a new reader every week.



The novel is autobiographical and told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style. It includes collected pieces from his childhood, details, and fetishes of upper-class lifestyle, gossip, memories, and recollections of the world Proust never quite managed to join in late nineteenth and beginning twentieth century France. The leading motif in the book is of a past that has true reality for man. It is about the small intricacies and nothings of high-class society, with small intrigues, great ambitions and nebulous outcomes. It is a novel that takes time because it is about time. Memory and time are principal themes in the over 3000 page novel, and the situations, the characters, the surroundings are so basically human that you find yourself smiling and silently nodding in recognition as the characters evolve in the one social situation after the other. The upper class milieu is just an image of all of our human lusts, desires, shortcomings, fears and vanities.

I read another “extensive” book on the plane to the States a week or so ago. Praised by critics and acquaintances alike - Dan Brown’s: Angels and Demons. Excuse my English. It was crap. 619 pages of superficial, short episodes with no depth of character. Technical mistakes that a junior high school student wouldn’t make in an essay, and an irritating beating of the breast by the author for having done some basic research on paintings, buildings and people from historical periods, research that any author with self-respect would do to bolster a story. A word of humble advice. Get a copy of Proust's novel from your public library. Take a deep breath. Slow down a little and start reading. Or better yet: pair up – at home with your partner or with a friend - and read it aloud to one another. It will open up a new world.


For those of you wanting to give Proust a try, the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past can be found here. Try also Temps Perdu, a good site for Proust texts, for learning about the author and for more about his books.