Tag: Marcel Proust
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Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp
Review: What a little jewel this is. Just a lucky find on Amazon based on my previous browsing. From memory, without access to the books, this remarkable Polish officer delivered a series of erudite and passionate lectures on Proust and his great novel. While locked up in a Soviet P.O.W. camp that was deplorably bad… Read more
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Pleasures and Days
Review: A little gem of a book. All of Proust’s juvenilia, all written before he was 23. All of it excellent. The first story he is definitely working Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich but with a more Proustian feel. The little vignette pieces are glorious. Moonlight walks through beech woods, you can really see the… Read more
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Time Regained (Volume 6)
Review: Out of all the volumes, this was the easiest to read. But not easy reading by any means. And World War I was happening in it, so there was some action, something beyond the interminable drawing rooms and endless reflecting and analyzing and… I did it! Done! 4300 pages and it’s “in the books”!… Read more
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The Captive and the Fugitive (Volume 5)
Review: Proust. Sometimes he writes himself into a corner and then laboriously extricates himself. Leaving the reader puzzling over quadruple negatives and peculiar phrasing. Protagonist finally revealed as “Marcel”. He is still a bone idle pussy, but as always the descriptions of light and sunshine and landscapes and architecture are exquisite. Overall rating: How I… Read more
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Sodom and Gomorrah
Review: Good. Proust always is. But it’s pretty clear that: Characters in this volume are fairly cut and paste: Maybe it’s the translation, but some of the phrasing is so, so convoluted I had to struggle to see what his meaning actually was. Great, but needed a good editor to cut out some stuff and… Read more