Monday, February 20, 2006

Proust

I just finished reading some Proust. Yeah. I don't know what I was thinking. It was just that I'd been eyeing the new Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Swann's Way, the first volume of his opus In Search of Lost Time for a couple of months and just finally had to take the plunge. The blurb and the first page made it sound a bit more accessible than I had always imagined Proust and I kinda felt like I should read it, ya know?

Anyway, I cannot say I particularly enjoyed it. It is just so tedious, so overstuffed. At times, I could hardly focus on the words for all of the words (that totally doesn't make sense, but it's the best I can do). He seems to be trying to get at stuff (Time, Memory, Truth, and other capital-letter Ideas) by sheer volume of letters. It's either very annoying or very entertaining, but mostly very annoying, depending on the particular anecdote being related at the time. There isn't really much of a story or a plot; I can't say I particularly liked any of the characters, either. Yet, I really want to know what happens next, how it all turns out, so I'll be looking at the next volume soon. I guess that means it's good in some way. Not much of a recommendation, though.

1 comment:

jeremy said...

When I read Proust, the first footnote I came to mentioned someone wearing their hair in the style of Bressant. The annotation revealed that Bressant was famous for wearing his hair short in the front and long in the back. Proust talks about mullets. That was good enough to sustain me through the tedium of verbiage.