On Reading In Search of Lost Time: Some inadequate thoughts on the read of a lifetime
In Search of Lost Time comes in at 4,211 pages, a fact that I include at the start of the review because it’s the thing most readers know about it. It’s long! Well, they probably know the thing about the madeleine, which recurs much later on an uneven step, so I get why literary history goes with the Madeleine. Well, that and the fact that you can get the big Madeleine memory reveal in the early portion of Swann’s Way, which is probably about as far as most people make it.
And I have to say, I get it! My mentor, a famous in the way writers can be famous kind of way, told me that I should just pick up a few pages of Proust and read them. He said you could understand the project and the style by reading those twenty pages. Proust’s style pretty much means long sentences coupled with frequent and lengthy use of similie’s coupled with long explanations of human nature in all its beauty and foibles. If long passages of dialogue from the French aristocracy in all its idiocy followed by a lengthy treatise on the why of our behaviors, Proust is very much your bag.
Okay, so that’s how you whittle our your readers. I have to say up front that I wound up as a Proust liker as opposed to a Proust lover. I found a lot of the passages kind of a slog to get through in a way I didn’t when I was reading other long books like War and Peace, MiddleMarch or The Brothers Karamazov. I was at a reading recently and someone described Proust as “not caring or thinking about the fact that he’d have a reader.”
There is some truth to that criticism. Though many of the descriptive passages are lovely, (I’m eliding the whole translation thing. Needless to say there is a whole other argument about which translation you should read that includes a fight between two writers I adore, Andre Aciman and Lydia Davis that resulted in her writing a short story about him. Oh! And a new translation by Charlotte Mandell who has been doing yeoman’s work in bringing Mathias Enard to American readers) you really have to be interested in the day to day life of a French teen in Balbec to stay engaged throughout. And I found myself drifting in and out. Some passages brought on the starkest recognition of moments I’ve had in my own life—of obsession with love, of the way a cathedral against a skyline can make you feel as though you must write, the sudden realization of the onset of age or that people you admire from afar often turn out to be rather hollow or common from up close. It’s all there!
My advice for writers is that they should at least read the opening section. Proust is an important literary forebear, and I swear you can get off your damn phone and read that first section. If you’re a reader this is the sort of milestone book in a lifetime, which is why I read it. It’s not even the hardest read I’ve had this year. That goes to Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.
Anyhow, what can you say about a book that’s 4,000 pages? Probably everything or not much at all. The book is trying to encompass all of life and your mileage for that may vary. Mine did. Though I found the final book, Time Regained, to be wonderful and was rapt for the pause in the forward movement of the novel so Proust could describe his method for devising the book, wrangling time, as well as his aesthetic theory of art. (These are the sorts of asides that are taken up frequently in the My Struggle series by Karl Ove Knausgard, the series that most closely resembles the Proustian project of anything else I’ve read.)
Should I read Proust? This question came to me from a few different places. Yes? No? Just try the first book? I know I’ll have disappointed some Proustians with this review, but I’ll also be thinking about the book for the rest of my life, which I can only say of a few other reads.
