It isn't really a lockdown/pestilence project, only by proxy.I haven't got anything new to read. The new Sean O'Brien is delayed, I see, so it will be an autumn of my favourite living poets with August Kleinzahler due then, too. In the meantime, continuing the French theme from Montaigne and Camus, Proust was to be a retirement project but with partial retirement due soon, I thought I'd have a look.
I abandoned about 300 pages into Vol 2 of 3 in this Penguin edition in the early 1980's. Since then I've eyed it with some foreboding when looking through the library shelves, wary of its long sentences and extensive list of characters. From the Monty Python 'Summarize Proust' sketch to its awesome highbrow reputation, I've tended to prefer short novels.
I need not have worried. It is a complete and utter wonder. As long as the last 2800 pages are anything like the first 200. It will only take a few months at the rate I was reading it over the weekend, and it will be the paragon of reading enjoyment.
I'm already wondering if another go at Ulysses might be next. The point being that once one stops being afraid of these sacred colossi, they are, more than anything else, comic. Like Ulysses and Don Quixote, literature is best when it's ironic and funny. Proust is as funny as Diary of a Nobody but with far more rapture at the very fact of existence, and incandescent with life. It is that sort of writing that captures feelings and experience so accurately that it recreates in the reader very much the same flood of memory as the cake dipped in tea does for Marcel. It flows so gorgeously that it hardly matters that two facing pages have no paragraph indentations at all. I'd get a copy in French to see what it's like in the original except that Terence Kilmartin is tremendous in English and I don't want to put the post lady to that much trouble.
The first 200 pages have generated nearly one side of an envelope's worth of page references, at which rate it will be 15 envelopes but maybe I'll slow down as it becomes less about the wonder of childhood, although I remember from 35 years ago that Swann in Love is dense with ardent prose, too.
I've never had a favourite novel. My George Eliot year was a great succes; it's always been the accessible Joyce; one has one's Salinger fixation; Hardy has to be on any shortlist; Julian Barnes, Camus. But by the summer, it could be À la recherche du temps perdu. At this rate, I'd be surprised if it wasn't. But it is, thus, likely to be quiet here.
