It wasn't specifically a Lockdown Project but it's ideal as such and seems like it. For over 35 years I've intended to have another go at it and now, with no new books due here, I'm in Week 6. I didn't note exactly which day I started. I'm on page 500 of the 1186 of vol. 2 out of 3 of the Penguin Remembrance in the translation by Terence Kilmartin. Nearly halfway and enjoying it massively.I always nominate Bach as the Greatest Composer, either comfortably or by a long way, and A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is at least as convincingly the Greatest Novel. The Novel seems to have been at its highest point in the early C20th, with Joyce and Virginia Woolf following at a respectful distance. I never thought I'd say that about James Joyce but Dubliners isn't a novel so it wins a different heat.
I am now beyond the point I reached on my abandoned effort in the 1980's. What I remembered of it was the long sentences, the infatuations and the Dreyfuss Affair. It's all of that but I hadn't thought it quite so brilliantly funny. And I'm better acquainted with Dreyfuss since Michael Rosen's book on Zola's part in it than I was previously, with only a largely forgotten notion of having heard of it at school. It also seems that Kilmartin's translation is almost as great an achievement as the novel itself.
While there must be some ironic distance between Proust and his character, Marcel, it is from Marcel's observations of the strata of the social life in Paris and elsewhere that so many of my memorable citations have been noted.
(Of course, I realize that anybody erudite enough to be reading this website will have read Proust as a toddler but I'm catching up.)
Not only Swann in the first section but Marcel echoing after, are readily infatuated, causing the torrential outpouring of rapture and rhapsody but it subsides as soon as their affections move elsewhere. Many of my notes are memnorable lines or passages for their use of extended metaphor but it can also be simply droll but, for thev most part, one recognizes quite how well he's noted something you knew already,
I don't know quite what went wrong, stammered the barrister who, like most liars, imagined that other people do not take the trouble to investigate an unimportant detail
I've been there a hundred times, listening to the most unlikely stories but my list covers two old envelopes and now both sides of a folded piece of A4. Few books, when I make such notes for reviewing purposes, need more than the one envelope.
The novel doesn't have a plot as such but follows Marcel through a panoramic survey of aristocratic society and I gather that he is to become a writer and the novel is the book he writes in that meta-fictional way that we may have heard before in novels that have been written since but the well-read will be ahead of me and know that. If you haven't got round to it yet, I'm obviously recommending it as highly as any book I've ever read. I'm sure you won't regret it.
With a combination of semi-retirement and lockdown, I'm on course to read it in three months. Then I have three commentaries on it to look at to find out what I hadn't realized for myself.
