I read a volume of Proust every year. I think it might be even more of an artistic achievement taken all together, but hey, the people in 1910s France had to wait a bit in between volumes too, and Proust and his narrator become like old friends you’re catching up with after a little while apart. He’s practically a cousin of mine at this point; it’s nice to check in every year. This year I’m up through volume four of In Search of Lost Time, titled Sodom and Gomorrah and translated as Cities of the Plain by my squeamish buddies CK Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. If you haven’t read any Proust, here’s a quick summary of the first three volumes: Proust's novel ostensibly tells of the irrevocability of time lost, the forfeiture of innocence through experience, the reinstallment of extra-temporal values of time regained, ultimately the novel is both optimistic and set within the context of a humane religious experience, re-stating as it does the concept of intemporality. In the first volume, Swann, the family friend visits...1
Summary is practically useless; the narrator is recounting just about his entire life in vivid detail, as well as much as he can relate of social life in fin-du-siecle Paris, in addition to finely sifting through the difference between life experienced and life remembered, life expected and life actually lived, and places and people changing context over time. Nearly everything is mediated through the lens of recollection, the space between the way things happened, the way things are remembered, and the way they’re told. Adorno perhaps said it best: “[Proust] kept faith with the childhood potential for unimpaired experience and, with all the reflectiveness and awareness of an adult, perceived the world in as undeformed a manner as the day it was created, in fact developed a technique to resist the automization and mechanization of his own thought. He strives indefatigably for immediacy, for a second naiveté.”2
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