-
Welcome
to BookAndReader! We LOVE books and hope you'll join us in sharing your favorites and experiences along with your love of reading with our community. Registering for our site is free and easy, just CLICK HERE!
Already a member and forgot your password? Click here.
Marcel Proust
- Thread starter Ms.
- Start date
Peder
Well-Known Member
Ms.
There are writings about Proust that you might find interesting by way of warm up. Learning among other things the physical way he constructed his manuscript, by starting out with a basic notebook, and then pasting in later additions to be interleaved, and then pasting further further additions to be interleaved onto these, and so on. I suspect they might provide a good background for why the texture of the book is as it is, as well as for the story. But I have only dipped into that biographical literature, and only after I finished.
As for his own writing, I simply started with volume one, line one, word one of Remembrance and went straight on through all six volumes, one summer, reading slowly and being fascinated all the way.
Good luck on what I hope is a happy adventure for you.
You will get total immersion in a different lifetime.
Peder
There are writings about Proust that you might find interesting by way of warm up. Learning among other things the physical way he constructed his manuscript, by starting out with a basic notebook, and then pasting in later additions to be interleaved, and then pasting further further additions to be interleaved onto these, and so on. I suspect they might provide a good background for why the texture of the book is as it is, as well as for the story. But I have only dipped into that biographical literature, and only after I finished.
As for his own writing, I simply started with volume one, line one, word one of Remembrance and went straight on through all six volumes, one summer, reading slowly and being fascinated all the way.
Good luck on what I hope is a happy adventure for you.
You will get total immersion in a different lifetime.
Peder
Kenny Shovel
Active Member
WoundedThorns
New Member
i always think of gilmore girls when i hear proust. theres one episode where he's mentioned a few times
Hello!
I don’t know if there exists already a thread about Proust.
Nevertheless, I hope that there are some people who would like to talk about this genius of France and his work.
I have the “problem” that it doesn’t matter, what the people in my surroundings are talking about, I could always talk about Proust. It’s not, because I’m changing the topic – it seems that Proust is fitting to every subject, in every situation.
If this goes one, while reading the “Recherche” I’m afraid, that my friends could get the impression that I’m some kind of a “freak”?!
Therefore it may helps to start a discussion that concentrates on Proust himself and his work, so that I don’t have to “torture” other people, who are not interested.
I would be pleased if you let me know your opinion. What do you like, what do you hate? Maybe you think he is boring? (some passages about places or clothes could become a little bit strenuous).
Greetings
I don’t know if there exists already a thread about Proust.
Nevertheless, I hope that there are some people who would like to talk about this genius of France and his work.
I have the “problem” that it doesn’t matter, what the people in my surroundings are talking about, I could always talk about Proust. It’s not, because I’m changing the topic – it seems that Proust is fitting to every subject, in every situation.
If this goes one, while reading the “Recherche” I’m afraid, that my friends could get the impression that I’m some kind of a “freak”?!
Therefore it may helps to start a discussion that concentrates on Proust himself and his work, so that I don’t have to “torture” other people, who are not interested.
I would be pleased if you let me know your opinion. What do you like, what do you hate? Maybe you think he is boring? (some passages about places or clothes could become a little bit strenuous).
Greetings
Notibuti
New Member
Proust is scary and intimidating the way King Kong foaming in the mouth whilst inspecting you is...
I have always wanted to read him but memories of a 7 volume (7!!) edition (beautifully bound, no less) of In Search of Lost Time keep looming in my head...
Could you recommend a good book to start with and a good translator that I can look out for?
I have always wanted to read him but memories of a 7 volume (7!!) edition (beautifully bound, no less) of In Search of Lost Time keep looming in my head...
Could you recommend a good book to start with and a good translator that I can look out for?
collegelife101
New Member
I'm currently reading Swann's Way and I'm maybe 115 pages in. It's truly beautiful and unique. I've also read Bunin in Russian, but I find him somewhat forced while Proust remains elegant even in translation (although I can read the French somewhat).
collegelife101
New Member
The newest Penguin edition, translated by Lydia Davis, is the one I'm currently reading. There are many discussions concerning the different editions and translations of the book, and the Modern Library translation also seems to be very popular, but the Penguin edition is a complete reworking and possibly the best translation so far.
It's a beautiful book and it's length shouldn't be a consideration when you are deciding whether or not to read this first volume.
silverseason
New Member
Am I alone in finding Proust a bit of a bore? He goes on so long and is so full of himself.
I like the project of long books or series of books. After long putting it off, I finally immersed myself on War and Peace a few years ago and was sorry when it ended. So I started Proust with high hopes. I read the first volume, took a couple of months off, went on with the next and so forth. Of the three I've read so far, I liked Swan's Way the best.
My book group spent several sessions on volume three, The Guermantes Way. We liked the humor and social irony in the book but wondered if we really needed 100 pages of aristocratic nonsense. Couldn't a 10-page sample have conveyed it just as well?
I like the project of long books or series of books. After long putting it off, I finally immersed myself on War and Peace a few years ago and was sorry when it ended. So I started Proust with high hopes. I read the first volume, took a couple of months off, went on with the next and so forth. Of the three I've read so far, I liked Swan's Way the best.
My book group spent several sessions on volume three, The Guermantes Way. We liked the humor and social irony in the book but wondered if we really needed 100 pages of aristocratic nonsense. Couldn't a 10-page sample have conveyed it just as well?
chuephödli
Member
You are not alone.
RonPrice
New Member
Some Personal Reflections on Proust
THE VASE
“An hour is not merely an hour,” wrote the French novelist Marcel Proust, “it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.”1 This sentence conveys much of the tone and the texture, the spirit and the form, the medium and the message that is the backdrop for much of what I write. In my case, though, it is not so much scents and sounds that fill the vase of my writing, but a wealth and welter of ideas, concepts, visions and views. They do not possess any scent and they are silent, but they speak to and of my inner life and fill it to overflowing. That vase which Proust refers to and the one that is my own life is often full to overflowing, but the eye can not see nor the heart understand all that I would put in it and it is difficult to put that vase on display for others to enjoy for it is not made of glass and its contents are not some attractive arrangement of flowers for others to enjoy.
It took Proust many years to work out the subject of his famous novel Remembrance of Things Past. Eventually he realized it was “his own struggle to write.” In his late thirties he also realized by sensible and insensible degrees that he was “ready to settle down to a fairly long piece of work” and this he did until his death at the age of fifty in 1922. For the last dozen years of his life, then, from 1909 to 1922, a 3000 page novel rolled off the literary, the autobiographical framework he had drafted in 1908-1909.
Whether others experience the meaning and the pleasures of my silent world, my unnumbered projects, the micro-climates in which I write, my vase as it were, is something over which I feel, I think, I have little control, if any control at all. I, like Proust, have settled down to a fairly long piece of writing. It has rolled off my literary, my autobiographical, press after drafting a framework by sensible and insensible degrees at the turn of the millennium, 1999 to 2003, at this climacteric of history. It is an account of the immensity and wonder of my life and times, my religion and my society and what well may turn out to be the greatest and the most awful scene in the history of humankind. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Marcel Proust in “Why Proust? And why now?” Dinitia Smith, New York Times, 13 April 2000.
My work, too, Marcel, found
its home in sudden gustos of
memory when there was some
inhaling of the moment, at times
unprompted, at times prompted,
awakening of my past, the past,
triggered by things illogical and
unforeseen, just some shaping of
a day, a year, a time or half a time,
more than representation---as if
some living thing, some picture in
my brain was found on the wall of
my life not just mnemonic sign, but
visual cortex stung into words on a
page, read somewhere, recreated for
my settled-down life, its long period
of work to tell some of the story---
however idiosyncratic, however much
personally framed, however egocentric,
indeed, narcissistic, ill-constructed and
narcissistic, stitched together a past that
is still alive within me and us and which
I have carried within me all these years.
Sometimes the memories are graphic, some
half forgotten things, experiences over several
epochs of time during which a heterodox,
a seemingly negligible offshoot of that
Shaykhi school of the Ithna-Ashariyyih sect
of Shiite Islam continued its transformation
into a world religion, extending its light to
the far corners of the earth while both my life
and this Faith resolved themselves into a series
of internal and external crises of varying severity,
devastating in their immediate effects but each
releasing a divine power, a celestial grace
which I would never understand but which
crystallised and shaped my creative energies,
my life, especially during these latter years
into restored sensory impressions like some
fruits and blossoms of a consecrated joy far
from those numbing and dulling habits and
forces which beleaguer us all amidst those
awkward and tangled realities of our lives.
Ron Price
3 December 2008:whistling:
THE VASE
“An hour is not merely an hour,” wrote the French novelist Marcel Proust, “it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.”1 This sentence conveys much of the tone and the texture, the spirit and the form, the medium and the message that is the backdrop for much of what I write. In my case, though, it is not so much scents and sounds that fill the vase of my writing, but a wealth and welter of ideas, concepts, visions and views. They do not possess any scent and they are silent, but they speak to and of my inner life and fill it to overflowing. That vase which Proust refers to and the one that is my own life is often full to overflowing, but the eye can not see nor the heart understand all that I would put in it and it is difficult to put that vase on display for others to enjoy for it is not made of glass and its contents are not some attractive arrangement of flowers for others to enjoy.
It took Proust many years to work out the subject of his famous novel Remembrance of Things Past. Eventually he realized it was “his own struggle to write.” In his late thirties he also realized by sensible and insensible degrees that he was “ready to settle down to a fairly long piece of work” and this he did until his death at the age of fifty in 1922. For the last dozen years of his life, then, from 1909 to 1922, a 3000 page novel rolled off the literary, the autobiographical framework he had drafted in 1908-1909.
Whether others experience the meaning and the pleasures of my silent world, my unnumbered projects, the micro-climates in which I write, my vase as it were, is something over which I feel, I think, I have little control, if any control at all. I, like Proust, have settled down to a fairly long piece of writing. It has rolled off my literary, my autobiographical, press after drafting a framework by sensible and insensible degrees at the turn of the millennium, 1999 to 2003, at this climacteric of history. It is an account of the immensity and wonder of my life and times, my religion and my society and what well may turn out to be the greatest and the most awful scene in the history of humankind. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Marcel Proust in “Why Proust? And why now?” Dinitia Smith, New York Times, 13 April 2000.
My work, too, Marcel, found
its home in sudden gustos of
memory when there was some
inhaling of the moment, at times
unprompted, at times prompted,
awakening of my past, the past,
triggered by things illogical and
unforeseen, just some shaping of
a day, a year, a time or half a time,
more than representation---as if
some living thing, some picture in
my brain was found on the wall of
my life not just mnemonic sign, but
visual cortex stung into words on a
page, read somewhere, recreated for
my settled-down life, its long period
of work to tell some of the story---
however idiosyncratic, however much
personally framed, however egocentric,
indeed, narcissistic, ill-constructed and
narcissistic, stitched together a past that
is still alive within me and us and which
I have carried within me all these years.
Sometimes the memories are graphic, some
half forgotten things, experiences over several
epochs of time during which a heterodox,
a seemingly negligible offshoot of that
Shaykhi school of the Ithna-Ashariyyih sect
of Shiite Islam continued its transformation
into a world religion, extending its light to
the far corners of the earth while both my life
and this Faith resolved themselves into a series
of internal and external crises of varying severity,
devastating in their immediate effects but each
releasing a divine power, a celestial grace
which I would never understand but which
crystallised and shaped my creative energies,
my life, especially during these latter years
into restored sensory impressions like some
fruits and blossoms of a consecrated joy far
from those numbing and dulling habits and
forces which beleaguer us all amidst those
awkward and tangled realities of our lives.
Ron Price
3 December 2008:whistling:
