the real beauty of Proust for me is when it all coalesces, somehow, somehow, in the final volume. one of the few long books that deserves its total length. indeed i always wish it was longer...
In my mid-twenties, I read Proust. I set aside a year to do it. In my early twenties, I had made a list of everything I thought I should read to become well read. For some reason I couldn't face War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov, but Proust felt alluring.
Looking back, I remember moments, impressions and feelings, not so many details. Luminous, fleeting flows. I remember being bored by sections of it, but in a way that felt strangely productive, as though the book was stretching some neglected faculty of attention. By the end, I felt my reading imagination had become more elastic. Proust had probably altered something in how I read.
Most of all, I remember the ending hitting me like a revelation and feeling very emotionally moved by it. It felt less like the conclusion of a novel than the disclosure of a way of seeing life.
Afterwards I read a short biography of him. What stayed with me was the image of his final years. Shut away in his room, racing to finish the work before he died. A novel about memory and time and therefore, in some sense, about everything.
I'll try to reread it one day. Perhaps just the first volume and the last. I'm not sure I have enough of the thing he was writing about to read all of it again - time.
Reading Proust in French is definitely one of my bucket list projects. (I have read the recent Penguin translations by Davis and others, as well as the Kilmartin ones (revised from Moncrieff's) for the first two volumes). Two reactions that I remember having that I thought might be amusing to share are admittedly rather low-brow (compared to the other erudite comments to this piece I have read):
(1) I'm sure I'm just projecting my 21st century expectations/standards, but I found it very difficult to have a concrete mental image of the narrator in his younger years--he is undergoing some kind of sexual awakening with his encounters with Gilberte and Albertine and her cohorts, so I am picturing someone in his early adolescence, yet because he is such a mama's boy (grandmother's boy?) he comes across more like a six- or seven-year-old at the same time. The introspective tone of the mature narrator probably adds unwittingly to the cognitive dissonance.
(2) I feel that Proust is in a way a bit disingenuous in creating this narrator character that is so similar to him in all these respects (based on what I know of Proust's life), EXCEPT that he is unwilling to make the character gay (or an "invert" in his parlance, as translated). Which is obviously a valid authorial choice, but Proust clearly wants to explore the dynamics of relationships in the gay world--the interesting complications that arise when your romantic interest could also be your rival, etc., so to accomplish this he has to create this somewhat unrealistic scenario (to me at least--maybe it's my own limitations) where he gets to party with all these bisexual young women, at least several of whom are supposedly romantically interested in this hypochondriacal mama's boy. Again, maybe I'm just projecting my own 21st century expectations, but there are times when I was figuratively rolling my eyes quite a bit.
Fine essay, Henry, thank you. Proust is one of those authors who offer a slow but near-permanent enchantment for readers patient enough to submit to its cadence and flow and eddies and resurfacings.
Therein lies the beauty of the long book (in Proust’s case, many books) as well as the hesitation to commit one’s mind so fully to what will be a total invasion and occupation. 😂
Another enchanter and fine poet of trains is Vladimir Nabokov (great chapter in Speak, Memory); and the process you cite of patiently reading Proust in French mirrors my own slow study and translation of Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which made for a magical summer when I was 22 and dreamed in Spanish — but like your own interrupted project — got called off by a return to work and school and the fall.
Even if I don’t get back to it, it was a fine ride and still remember and am nourished by it decades later. All the best, Ted Cleary
the real beauty of Proust for me is when it all coalesces, somehow, somehow, in the final volume. one of the few long books that deserves its total length. indeed i always wish it was longer...
In my mid-twenties, I read Proust. I set aside a year to do it. In my early twenties, I had made a list of everything I thought I should read to become well read. For some reason I couldn't face War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov, but Proust felt alluring.
Looking back, I remember moments, impressions and feelings, not so many details. Luminous, fleeting flows. I remember being bored by sections of it, but in a way that felt strangely productive, as though the book was stretching some neglected faculty of attention. By the end, I felt my reading imagination had become more elastic. Proust had probably altered something in how I read.
Most of all, I remember the ending hitting me like a revelation and feeling very emotionally moved by it. It felt less like the conclusion of a novel than the disclosure of a way of seeing life.
Afterwards I read a short biography of him. What stayed with me was the image of his final years. Shut away in his room, racing to finish the work before he died. A novel about memory and time and therefore, in some sense, about everything.
I'll try to reread it one day. Perhaps just the first volume and the last. I'm not sure I have enough of the thing he was writing about to read all of it again - time.
by the way, his surname is "Scott Moncrieff", in the scottish tradition of non-hyphenated surnames
Beautiful essay. Thank you
Reading Proust in French is definitely one of my bucket list projects. (I have read the recent Penguin translations by Davis and others, as well as the Kilmartin ones (revised from Moncrieff's) for the first two volumes). Two reactions that I remember having that I thought might be amusing to share are admittedly rather low-brow (compared to the other erudite comments to this piece I have read):
(1) I'm sure I'm just projecting my 21st century expectations/standards, but I found it very difficult to have a concrete mental image of the narrator in his younger years--he is undergoing some kind of sexual awakening with his encounters with Gilberte and Albertine and her cohorts, so I am picturing someone in his early adolescence, yet because he is such a mama's boy (grandmother's boy?) he comes across more like a six- or seven-year-old at the same time. The introspective tone of the mature narrator probably adds unwittingly to the cognitive dissonance.
(2) I feel that Proust is in a way a bit disingenuous in creating this narrator character that is so similar to him in all these respects (based on what I know of Proust's life), EXCEPT that he is unwilling to make the character gay (or an "invert" in his parlance, as translated). Which is obviously a valid authorial choice, but Proust clearly wants to explore the dynamics of relationships in the gay world--the interesting complications that arise when your romantic interest could also be your rival, etc., so to accomplish this he has to create this somewhat unrealistic scenario (to me at least--maybe it's my own limitations) where he gets to party with all these bisexual young women, at least several of whom are supposedly romantically interested in this hypochondriacal mama's boy. Again, maybe I'm just projecting my own 21st century expectations, but there are times when I was figuratively rolling my eyes quite a bit.
Fine essay, Henry, thank you. Proust is one of those authors who offer a slow but near-permanent enchantment for readers patient enough to submit to its cadence and flow and eddies and resurfacings.
Therein lies the beauty of the long book (in Proust’s case, many books) as well as the hesitation to commit one’s mind so fully to what will be a total invasion and occupation. 😂
Another enchanter and fine poet of trains is Vladimir Nabokov (great chapter in Speak, Memory); and the process you cite of patiently reading Proust in French mirrors my own slow study and translation of Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which made for a magical summer when I was 22 and dreamed in Spanish — but like your own interrupted project — got called off by a return to work and school and the fall.
Even if I don’t get back to it, it was a fine ride and still remember and am nourished by it decades later. All the best, Ted Cleary
Proust is uniquely positioned as a synthesizer who:
Takes the English empiricist trust in sensation as his method.
Takes the German philosophical seriousness about time and consciousness as his problem.
Takes the Russian emotional and psychological depth as his register
and produces something that functions like religious consolation entirely through secular aesthetic means.
No other writer sits quite at that intersection. That might be the most precise account of what makes the Recherche singular.
So, in the end, for those who have never read Proust, the translation you recommend for the absolute beginner is....?
I’m wondering if it’s easier to read Proust than Oliver— Robin (not Swan)