By Dennis Abrams
Today we begin our one-year journey through the entirety of Marcel Proust’s 20th-century masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, which will be taking place on our companion website, The Cork-lined Room. We anticipate that at a pace of 10 to 15 pages per day, excepting weekends, we should be finished in a year. The first posting about the text of the first volume, Swann’s Way, will be online tomorrow. But the conversation has already begun and articles have covered:
The top ten reasons to read Proust: #1 Reading In Search of Lost Time means that at last you’ll be reading the greatest novel ever written. Virginia Woolf said, “My greatest adventure was undoubtedly Proust. What is there left to write after that?” Who are you to argue with Virginia Woolf?
Which Translation Will We Read? Answer: Lydia Davis translation of Swann’s Way, published by Penguin. The remaining volumes will be those from the Modern Library’s Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright translation.
Supplemental Texts, with recommendations of more than two dozen books that may help illuminate your path and guide you along your journey, such as Jean-Yves Tadie’s indispensable 800-page biography Marcel Proust: A Life; Proust by Samuel Beckett (John Calder), a book which Roger Shattuck—author of Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time—calls “seventy of the most probing and succinct pages ever written on Proust’s work;” and Monsieur Proust by Celeste Albaret (New York Review Books), an intimate look at the author by a woman who knew him better than no other: his housekeeper.
A short chronology of Proust’s life, which contains numerous surprising episodes to be examined in detail as we proceed through the text, including his stint of military service (!) and a loaded pistol duel with novelist Jean Lorrain (!!).
Since we announced the project nearly two weeks ago, scores of people have signed-up to participate. If you’re interested and haven’t yet emailed to let us know you’re like to be involved, please do—you’ll be in good company: Some of the readers you’ll be in conversation with include editors, translators, agents and Proust enthusiasts, and other curious readers, from around the world.
WRITE: To site curator Dennis Abrams if you wish to participate.
LOG ON: To The Cork Lined Room.
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Harold Carlton
9 months ago
This will be my second reading, long overdue. I first read Proust over forty years ago and have intended to re-read ever since. This is a wonderful idea and will spur me on.
artmama
9 months ago
Today I met a sentence. This sentence is over 700 words in length. It seems to relate the narrator’s impressions of rooms in which he has slept. I’m going to read it again, now.
Barbara Gavin
9 months ago
Read about 35 pages over the weekend.
Easy to get swept up in the descriptions…like waiting for his mother to kiss him goodnight.
I wondered how long this might take at 15 pages a day. A year – hmmm.
Harold Carlton
9 months ago
After the first dozen pages, in which sleep and drifting in and out of consciousness are so wonderfully described, I can only think (after the beauty of the writing) of the connection (long disputed) between Proust and Freud.
These long, long sentences……are they not the stream of consciousness which continues indefinitely in our head without thought of full stops and with only a few dots to keep them connected?
I am not sure they are even ’sentences’.
Just as some Beat writers like Kerouac wrote novels on one long roll of paper, sometimes without punctuation, I wonder if Proust wasn’t the instigator of this and might have written (if he’d written in the 50s) without any punctuation at all?
Harold Carlton
8 months ago
Re-reading this perhaps forty years after first reading, I am struck by Proust’s daring. In introducing the themes of his novel so quickly, the little boy plotting to get a kiss from his mother as intently and romantically as if she were a lover, the mysterious personality of Swann, the madeleine as time machine, etc etc.
Proust seems in these first thirty pages to want nothing less than to present “Life” to us, as he remembered it and experienced it in ALL its facets, smells, tastes, tricks of light, social nuances….. it is just so ambitious, it takes your breath away.
Did he consider the reader?
I don’t think he did. I think he wrote EXACTLY what he wanted to write.
I’m afraid I do see, in spite of the wonderful writing, why so many potential readers do not get much farther than this…. it borders on self-indulgence, and if one was not conscious of the wonders to come, would one stick with it?
Was he fully aware of the Oedipus Complex? He must have been,yet there is no knowing or cynical comment….the boy’s neurosis is presented baldly and innocently, almost as if it were perfectly normal to so crave a mother’s kiss that a small boy would send secret letters to her as she dined, and pine all evening for another sight of her.