My Proust Page

I have a very nice Folio Society edition of Proust's In Search of Lost Time(AKA Remembrance of Things Past, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, etc.) It's in six elegant volumes, cloth bound in two shades of blue, illustrated with photographs from the period. One year when I hadn't renewed my Society membership -- which is one of the little, or maybe not-so-little, luxuries I have been allowing myself now that we are no longer quite the poorest of church mice -- they offered it cheap as an incentive to renew, and I took them up on it. (This is always worth doing with Folio: play hard to get for a few months and they make you better and better offers to get you to rejoin.)

From time to time, I think I'll actually read it, instead of just looking at it on the shelves. So far I've only got through Volume 1, Swann's Way, and this spring I thought I'd have another shot at Within a Budding Grove, Volume 2.

Alison told me a joke she'd heard on the radio. Someone was describing how her husband was reading Proust; the trouble was, when he said, 'Just let me finish this sentence,' she knew it would take half an hour. It really is like that. You can get used to it in a way and start to enjoy the leisurely pace. What I found much harder was the whole culture. The people in the story are just a load of useless, wealthy wasters. It's worse than Jane Austen, 'cause there at least you've got the Englishness and the wit. But honestly! Swann marries a courtesan and no one will receive him in polite society any more and so he and his wife go through agonies of trying to invite and get invitations from the right people -- starting with minor government officials -- in the hope of getting back in.

Who GIVES a damn?

I made it to about page 100, when the Folio Society set of John Buchan's Richard Hannay novels arrived. Call me low-brow, if you want, but that's what I CALL a good read!

Maybe one of these years I will find out what happened to Swann and all the rest, including M. In the mean time, anyone who has made it and lived to tell the tale, send me a summary! The Monty Python version doesn't quite hit the spot ...

Maybe I should have read A. N. Wilson's article on how to read Proust: he proposes a kind of Alpha Course in it.