Slogging through Proust's "In Search Of Lost Time," a/k/a "Remembrance of Things Past"

By Jack Brummet

I am beginning the final volume (7) of Proust's Remembrance Of Things Past. 3,031 pages, and 1,267,069 words. It's has been beautiful and infuriating and puzzling at times. I'm glad I did this with our book club because I would have probably weaseled out otherwise. it is also pretty interesting to be in a book club with three philosophy professors, a lawyer, two cool and smart professional women - one of who is a philosopher too-and one knucklehead, yours truly. So, this sentence from book five is pretty typical, and illustrative of why this book is such a slog. It gets way more dense, but never more Hemingwayesque. I've found I need to read three other books between each Proust volume (with at least one of those being some trashy genre fiction) to cleanse the palate.

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Getting through Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time

By Jack Brummet
20th Century Fiction Ed.

I just finished Swann's Way, Book One of Seven in Marcel Proust's novel In Search Of Lost Time a/k/a Remembrance of Things Past (about to page 550 or so of a 3,600 page book). I don't think I've spent two weeks reading a book before except maybe Lord of the Rings or Ulysses. I haven't read a book in a long time that aroused joy and frustration in me like this. Swann's Way has vast passages of brilliant, machine-gun prose and incandescent writing, focused on memory, time, obsession, and brilliant psychological analysis.

As a kid who grew up poor, I have some of the same problems reading this as I had with, say, Jane Austen or other writers who focus on the dapper and lovely lives of the upper classes. I had a pretty visceral reaction to some of this. But for the most part the book is so densely poetic with some of the most beautiful descriptive prose I've read in my life, that I give it a pass. It made me realize why I prefer Charles Dickens or Dreiser Hemingway or Joyce or even Rabelais to the more mannered novels of the upper crust. But then--why do I love Shakespeare so much when he also mostly wrote about the upper crust and whose best works are almost all focused on Kings and the nobility? 

painting of Marcel Proust by J.E. Blanche

I am meeting with a group of people soon and we are going to be a sort of ad hoc book club that focuses on Proust's great novel. This should be very interesting. We'll be meeting at Café Presse, so even if it fizzles (I don't think it will), hey, good eats and good Bordeaux.

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