First, I would like to make you aware of one crucial fact: this is not
a Book Blog.
Oh, this blog will be about many things, surely. Though I’m generally a very private person and attempt to keep details about my personal life off the internet as much as possible, this blog—much in the fashion of The Time of the Assassins, Henry Miller’s self-indulgent treatise on Rimbaud – will likely concern more of my life and private thoughts than I am usually comfortable with. It will discuss art and memory, the particulars of French pastry-baking. But mostly, it will discuss literature.
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| Volume one of seven in the new Penguin Classics's English translation |
However, this is not a Book Blog. It is a Blog about a Book. More specifically, it is a blog about Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the longest novel ever written and—in my humble opinion, at least—the best novel ever written.
There used to be a time, not so long ago—actually, several
months ago, right up until the moment when I received the first volume of À la recherche for Christmas and sat
down to read it, became engrossed for hours as the lights dimmed an snow blew
soft against the windowpanes—when I would have completely unable to have chosen
a “favorite novel.” I could have chosen a favorite book of poetry—Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer comes to mind, as
does a dusty old volume of T S Eliot’s best, “The Waste Land,” “The Love Song
of Alfred J. Prufrock,” “Hollow Men.” I could have chosen a favorite collection
of short stories, easily —Borges’s Ficciones,
O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find.
I could have chosen a favorite collection of letters—though it would have been
a difficult to decide to between Keats’s heart-wrenching correspondences with
Fanny Brawne and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. But a favorite novel?
I could have told you: I love this novel because it’s daring.
Or, I love this novel because it’s gritty and lyrical, and it confronts the
inherent brutality of life head-on. Or, I love this novel because of that
scene, you know the one, where he compares memories to pigeons, a thousand
pigeons fluttering, swooping upward, blocking out the sky? I could have told
you that and more. And the list of books would go on, and on, and on.
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| Proust died shortly after completing this novel; it is unimaginable what he might have achieved had he lived even a few years longer. |
But all of that’s changed. Now, I can use superlatives:
favorite, best. Someone once said—and I apologize for the vague “someone,” but
here my imperfect memory for quotes becomes terribly evident—that it is better
to know one book intimately than many books superficially; and I am telling
you, now, that if you choose to become familiar with only one book in your
lifetime—as many will, it seems—then you should choose this one. This is the roman à clef that defined the
genre; this the favorite book of countless celebrated authors, including Nabokov, Capote,
Greene; this is the book that made Virginia Woolf—never one for mental
stability—start crying and vow that she would never write again, because she
would never be able to write as Proust could. I sympathize; Proust can be a
little daunting. His sheer genius is impossible to live up to, and comparing
the sum of one’s own paltry efforts to his masterpiece is as ridiculous as a
modern-day physicist comparing his own theorems to Einstein’s—and just as
likely to cause despair.
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| A photograph of Proust, this time showcasing his famous moustache. Why is it that men with absurd facial hair always seem to write the best books? |
That said, almost no one reads À la recherche in its entirety. Mark Twain described classics as
“books which people praise and don’t read;” according to this definition,
Proust’s masterpiece might be the most highly-esteemed piece of “classic
literature” out there, trumped only by Ulysses.
It is long, circumlocutious, at times almost unbearably obsessive; its
page-long paragraphs, its twenty-line sentences, its chapter-length descriptions
of foliage exhaust. However, if you, like me, spurn the Tolkien-inspired dictum
that books are meant to comfort, if you search instead for a book that offers
something intangible, something more—a transcendence, an immateriality, a
definition of what it means, truly and simply, to be a human being—then read À la recherche du temps perdu.
This is not a Book Blog; this is a blog dedicated to À la recherche du temps perdu. In the
next nine posts, I will comment on the seven-volume novel and other topics
pertaining to it. In our modern age—especially in America, land of the DVRs and
Cineplexes and throwaway entertainment—it
is difficult to find anyone with an attention span long enough to tackle a
4,000-page book, anyone who would even care to try. Regardless, I am determined, in the fashion of many before me, to write my own love-letter to À la recherche , and to share it with the world.
Welcome.
