I am being stymied in my efforts to get a hardback of my next volume of Proust. I even had a kindly person at Penguin send me the ISBN to help in my book searching. Number 9780713996081, where are you? It appears that everyone that got a hardback copy of the latest translation of The Prisoner and the Fugitive is holding on to it tightly. Seriously, the only place that's given me even a whiff of a hope of getting a copy is some bookstore in Turkey (go figure). Meanwhile, my addled brain has devoted rather a lot of time looking at sites about Proust. I am especially fascinated by the various characters said to inspire his characters. The seductive, secretive lady who convinces a well-placed man to marry her and ruins his social standing, setting herself up for a life in which she can never be invited to the same parties her husband is? Laure Hayman. The gorgeous duchess whose parties our narrator long dreamed of, and yet who turns out (in my mind) to love only herself? The Comtesse Greffulhe, whose husband cares not for art at all and is the perfect snob and looks exactly as I pictured him. (I also did some research on some Proustian places in Paris, so that I might visit them while we are there and have a remembrance of things passed, as it were. We'll see which we have the time to see, or if we'll just be talking about looking for the time we lost while we were there, doing other things.)
I've also put in a request for my boss and his boss to get funded to go to the conference in May. Keep your fingers crossed for me.
- Mood:delirious
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I found you with Google, where I have a "daemon" who searches the web for Proust references.
Loved the links, and spent way too much time perusing them. Great collection, and I almost wept when I saw the model for poor, handsome St. Loup. How perfect!
On my third and doubtless last cover-to-cover reading of Proust, I'm finding humor and all sorts of interesting things that eluded me the first times. I have no link to academia and blow away in my little suburb (Foxborough) south of Boston. Hope you get to Paris!
Cheers!
Odette
This is my first time through the book and I was actually inspired to read it by the references to it in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. The killer was the quote that "middle age is admitting you'll never read Remembrance," and since I was about to turn 40 I took it up as a challenge. You should read HER book, it's a paean to her relationship with her dad growing up and really delightful. (They had a very strained relationship but managed to communicate a lot through their mutual love of literature.) And I assume you've read Alain de Bottom's How Proust Can Change Your Life?
I'm not coming at this from an academic point of view either, I'm just reading it because it's really enjoyable. All of my friends (mostly geeky types) here were reading the final Harry Potter book this summer, and ... I just couldn't do it! Three chapters of Rowling was like going back to eating McDonald's hamburgers after two years of nice steaks, all greasy and processed. Proust has really made me lose my patience for bad writing, not that I wasn't going in that direction in the first place. I'm actually very much enjoying reading other people's discussions about reading Proust, especially non-academics, because it's such a different thing when you CHOOSE to read it versus when you're FORCED. A book came out this summer called something like "how to fake reading books you haven't bothered with" and the author said that Proust had driven millions of French students to have nervous breakdowns. I was appalled!
And isn't Mr. St. Loup perfect? I also thought the Duc de Guermantes looked exactly like his role model - stuffy and stuck on himself, easily able to be cruel to a beautiful wife.
Do you have a favorite translation? Ever thought of doing it in French? (Or are you?)
Okay, I have to pack for Egypt, talk to you again in a week!