So my next literary summit is Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time — more specifically, Volume 1, “Swann’s Way” translated by Lydia Davis.
Proust is no Hemingway. He uses 10 words where one might suffice; but his asides are what make it entertaining. And part of what makes his experiment interesting is that it’s all about the shrinking and expanding nature of time — how memory, sleep, stories and life itself are not linear events but a circuitous journey, like Moses wandering in the wilderness.
The difficulty in reading Proust, I think, can be expecting too much, especially now that his massive novel is considered “indispensable” and “crucial” as Peter Brooks puts it in the book jacket blurb. In my previous attempts at reading “Swann’s Way” I ended up abandoning it after 50 pages because his sentences are so rambling that his thoughts seem sloppy, jumbled and self-centered.
The publishers who rejected the initial draft of Swann’s Way seemed to agree. One of them wrote back to Proust, “I don’t see why a man should take thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before he goes to sleep.” (quoted in the introduction by Lydia Davis). His penchant for taking the long way around is the typical complaint.
But Proust’s style is exacting, precise, if deliberate. He may talk around the subject — whether the subject is falling asleep, gossiping or gaining his mother’s attention — but I get the impression that he’s going somewhere with it. And he is undeniably a navel-gazer, (the patron saints of confessional bloggers?), but at least at this point he seems to come by it honestly.
Plus, I have a sympathy for the narrator because when I’m telling stories among friends or family, I’ll find myself backing up to introduce choice bits of peripheral information in hopes that the story will make more sense. Often, I take too long to get to the punchline and it flops.
I’m keeping an open mind this time around. If it takes the guy 18 pages to get to a point, maybe it’s worth waiting for. So far, having read through the opening section “Combray,” I’m enjoying his grandparents and great aunts the most. Their bickering and struggling with each other and with Swann are comical — like when he describes how his grandfather has to struggle to get his sisters-in-law to listen to him:
“he had to resort to those bodily signals used by alienists with certain lunatics suffering from distraction: striking a glass repeatedly with the blade of a knife while speaking to them sharply and looking them suddenly in the ey, violent methods which these psychiatrists often bring with them into ordinary relations with healthy people, either from professional habit or because they believe everyone is a little crazy.” (22)
By the way, I do like the translation by Davis. She keeps some of the real zingers that Proust has in the French, but she also keeps the flow of the sentence going. And the notes have been helpful (and not overkill) so far.
Grab a copy and weigh in!
