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THE UNREADABLE BOOK CLUB
By Steven Schneider
Introduction
Obviously tongue in cheek, the Unreadable Book Club began with the observation that there are a number of books that most people know by reputation but probably haven’t read unless forced to in some high school or college English or Literature class. These books, though unread, have the interesting quality of being familiar enough in some respects to be the butt of jokes understood by most of the population. We all know that War and Peace is really long and perhaps boring because of this, and so we understand that a joke by Woody Allen is funny even if we haven’t read the book: “I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace. It’s about Russia.” Badda Bing!

Even so, the people that have decided that these books have great value, other than to torture high school students, must be sort of like us, right? A so-called Great Book is merely a book that speaks to some of us over the centuries in a familiar language of human emotion and intellect that we may have thought was ours alone. At a certain time in our lives this connection can become an unparalleled siren call out of our family of origin into the depth and breadth of humanity.

You alone will know if a book touches you deeply, but you might need a guide to even recognize the possibility that this can be true. These lessons then are not meant to comprehensive or authoritative, but merely to share my own experience of this phenomenon, assuming again that my audience may share my appreciation.

In my own experience, before Les Miz was even imagined on Broadway (in the 70’s) I was required to read Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo, another massive book about France, Napoleon, War, Revolution and Love. I liked it so much that I read it three times before I was 20. Mostly it impressed me in the way people so far removed from me in time, circumstance and geography had feelings and passions that I could understand. After all, what is more familiar to a teenager than unrequited love, obsession, unreasoning idealism and despair?

If you follow along here, you may not be touched, but will at least understand more jokes about War and Peace without having read it.

Unreadable Book Club

Marcel Proust
Part I

Remembrance of Things Past

.Noel Coward – “What a tiresome, affected ass he must have been, but what extraordinary, meticulous perception.”



“As he will discover over and over in love, what is imagined and yearned for is more exciting than what is possessed; anticipation is a more pleasant state than occupation. Almost all the love affairs in Proust are variations on Groucho Marx’s insight that any club that wants you is not a club you want to join.” The Year of Reading Proust, Phyllis Rose


Cartoon Caption: “Proust buys a memory foam mattress but is disappointed.”


And in that vein, wink, wink nudge, nudge, say no more, Monty Python’s sketch: The All-England Summarize Proust Competition. “As you may remember, each contestant has to give a brief summary of Proust’s ‘A La Recherge du Temps Perdu’, once in a swimsuit and once in evening dress,”

What’s next, a cross dressing Benny Hill chasing Proust and other wan, sickly young authors in jerky cartoonish motion through fields of posies? Oh, someone did that already? Kidding.

Proust; somehow there are one or two things that have stuck in the popular conscious about Proust. He was a bubble boy, allergic to everything, stayed in his cork lined room in Paris, curtains drawn while patrons and fans supported him in his writing. Remembrance of Things Past is a title we have heard, though the current translation is In Search of Lost Time. It’s long, and it’s French. There’s something about a pastry.

We might have even heard that the book arises out of the taste of a petite madeleine. This is a French pastry, but let’s just say we bite into a donut that we loved above all others as a child, and a cascade of memories associated with that time, that child, that taste come pouring out.

"No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.

"Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, is trying to follow it into my conscious mind. And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. . . And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. . . so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea."


Proust is hard to read, and hard to give one’s attention to. My granddaughter gave me some advice about my own writing when she was 15, to the effect of ‘Something has to happen every so often or you lose your audience, teenagers have a short attention span.” It’s a bit like a perfect no-hitter baseball game, it’s only perfect and transcendent when nothing happens. But, even adults have trouble with this problem. Certainly, if you are expecting a thrill a minute predictable screenplay in the making, you will never get to the madeleine.

But teenagers are also famously obsessive, angst ridden and oh so tedious when it comes to love. Endless bad poetry has been written and circular narratives spun in the service of tragic first loves as experienced or as remembered at the end of life. So, it is a worthy subject, and one that eventually will speak to you in the first person as you recognize it, ”That happened to me!” So much of our love lives play out in imagination and memory, and so little of it is articulated at the time, that it is almost comforting to have evidence of the wholly interior life of others. Without that, we have no proof that we, singularly, are not the only intelligent mind in the universe.


Even websites and blogs devoted to Proust can be tedious and boring. But, trust me, there is something there. And the length of it is no detraction as fans of Game of Thrones will attest. And, Monty Python notwithstanding, if you did go to the website www.readingproust.com, you would see a bare bones synopsis of the plot.

In the first book, the largest section, Swann in Love, is summarized:

"(T)he big news of this first volume is the love of Charles Swann for the courtesan Odette de Crécy, a story that takes place before Marcel’s birth. This section . . . is best summarized in Swann’s closing words: “To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!”

That’s 204 pages in the Penguin edition. Having read that book, I can attest to the fact that Swann was a complete boob who should have been made to watch the movie: (S)he’s Just Not That Into You, because that’s the real answer; Get over it buddy, stop and smell the roses, love the one you’re with!

Most of the book is concerned with Swann’s imagination about Odette, what she is doing without him, how to leave town as if he didn’t care but at the same time make sure she knows it. Christ, I did that when I was 20! So you get the idea that Swann will wind down and move on, sadder but wiser.


Au contraire mon frère! The narrator spots a little red haired girl in the woods and falls for her like Charley Brown. In the second book, called, and I am not making this up, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, somehow prudishly yet more explicitly translated as In a Budding Grove. Oh, I get it, it’s one of those coming of age, rite of passage, first love, first sex kind of thing. The Little Red Haired Girl turns out to be Gilberte, the daughter of Swann and Odette. Now, the website says this was revealed when he first saw her in the woods but I did not catch it, because the good parts are, I’m sorry, surrounded by boring parts, but that’s okay.

Anyway, I was blindsided by this. But, at the Champs Elysees where their governesses take them to play and socialize, he gets in good with her governess (‘What a nice young man.’) Then, he gets invited to spend a lot of time with Gilberte, whom his parents may or may not approve of because Swann married below his station.

But, remember this song? Children behave, that’s what they say when we’re together, Watch how you play. . . Little Marcel and Gilberte, indulge in a wrestling match which ends with Marcel having “spent my pleasure.” Christ, that happened to me when I was 14, albeit with less wrestling and a girl who must have paid attention in sex ed taking the wheel, so to speak.

Anyway, this certainly surprised Marcel but when Gilberte wanted to wrestle more, he states that suddenly, inexplicably, he’s no longer interested. Get used to it Bertie.

The thing is, even though it sounds simple, all of the stages of love and loss, as they unfold in our interior imaginings, are hit like a nail on the head, and this is remarkably without drama and angst, no sorrowful suicide attempts over love, etc. The thing about Proust is that he does move on, and sometimes gets what he wants anyway. So the previous hundred pages devoted to interior thoughts, is blown away by one moment of shared imaginings, and that one moment, when the goddess steps off of the pedestal, drives a lifetime of subsequent imaginings. Before and after that moment we really have no idea what could be going on in her head.

"We are aware of how much less disturbing these dreams of prompt but ever-deferred reunion are than a real encounter with her would be, with its likely resurgence of jealously, and so the knowledge that one is going to see her again could cause a recurrence of upsetting emotions. And what we keep postponing, day after day, is no longer an end to unbearable anguish of separation, but the dreaded renewal of futile feelings. How preferable the malleable image of her seems: instead of the real meeting which, in your solitude you can dramatize as a dream in which the girl who is not in love with you assures you that she is! This memory, which can become as sweet as possible, by being gradually flavored with what you most desire, is far better than the future encounter with a person whose words will be put into her mouth not by you, but by her foreseeable indifference and unforeseeable animosity."

In the history of literature, it plugs into the same stream of consciousness era as James Joyce but actually makes great detailed sense without hiding the ball. The ball might be tediously boring but the story telling is for the most part linear if impossibly detailed. Proust actually met Joyce once at a party and apparently didn’t like him much, while Joyce actually described the two of them, artistically, as peas in a pod: “James Joust and Marcel Proyce.” Now that’s a real knee slapper!

In later volumes, which I haven’t read, it turns out that gay and lesbian encounters are described with the same touching accuracy. Proust would never admit to being a homosexual, and as a general proposition, he was perhaps, bi-sexual. He didn’t really hide it either and so the straight narrator is perhaps Proust’s method of distancing himself from that issue. i.e. This happened to a friend of mine, not me.

What is remarkable, I think, is that he treats all of these encounters as normal in the sense that the same human emotions and delusions are involved.
All in all, the beauty of work is bound in how it can reach over a hundred years and somehow describe what you are feeling right now, or what you remember feeling in that one small moment when love became real to you.

And then there’s this gem that is always true:

"Because you are now in love with someone who will someday mean nothing to you, you refuse out of hand to meet someone who means nothing to you now, but whom you will one day come to love, someone who you might have loved sooner if you had agreed to an earlier meeting, who might have curtailed your present sufferings (before replacing them, of course, with others.)"

Not just ‘love the one you’re with’ but turn away from your obsession and see who is obsessing on you. And if you never got that girl of your dreams, and realized too late your mistake, this will create a lifetime of regret over the path not taken which, again of course, might have been worse. This is how we actually do live our interior lives.

What saves Proust is that his subject is at the center of every romance novel as well as Anna Karenina, from Superbad to Gone With the Wind. This just means that anyone can find something they recognize in his work, not that they should, or must. It is a very long book after all.

But, hey, this awakening of awareness of what it means to deeply understand or misunderstand the thoughts, feelings and presence of another human being is rarely given the importance it deserves. We are expected to move on, grow up, put aside childish things. But we don’t put them aside; we wallow in them and continue to experience them with the same intensity. So, when a writer mirrors that hidden passion back to us, it is life affirming.

For example, Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak, (a great book, leave the movie alone, read the book.) provides a description of how Zhivago felt when first meeting Lara, both children:

"When you, a shadow in a schoolgirl's uniform, stepped out of the darkness of the hotel room's depths, I, a boy who knew nothing about you, understood with all the torment of a force that answered yours; this slight skinny girl is charged to the utmost, as with electricity, with all conceivable femininity in the world, If you go near her or touch her with your finger, a spark will light up the room and either kill you on the spot or electrify you for your whole life with magnetically attractive, plaintive craving, and sorrow. I was all filled with wandering tears, all my insides glittered and wept. I felt a mortal pity for the boy I was, and still more pity for the girl you were. My whole being was astonished and asked: If it's so painful to love and absorb electricity, how much more painful is it to be a woman, to be the electricity, to inspire love."


Pretty heady stuff, and you want to believe that you felt that way as well. We all do. Dante had his Beatrice who he met as a child and obsessed over the rest of his life. Goethe had his Lotte, who inspired his own suicide attempt and through his first novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, inspired more attempts by his readers. Hans Christian Andersen died with a pouch around his neck containing a letter from an unrequited love of his youth.

Proust, on the other hand, approaches the same experience from a more gritty and pedestrian but no less enchanting perspective.

If you feel like reading Proust it is good to know that you have not made a seven volume commitment. If you read the only first section of the first volume, you will be able to make small talk about the petite madeleine incident and the sensual awakening of the boy in nature with an authority that will leave most of your contemporaries in the dust. And for you guys, such sensitivity periodically comes into style, make the most of it.

The truth is, even saying you have read and appreciate Proust, will allow you to appear to be a puzzling, sensitive yet flawed contrarian. Try that at the next Super Bowl party, just don’t go too far. At a party, nobody likes a wan, asthmatic, shut-in in a bad suit.