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The Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust
Kristjana Gunnars Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction Combines the genres of fiction and memoir -- a narrative strategy for which Gunnars has become widely respected. Focusing on a woman whose life has become a curious mix of reality and fiction, the novel responds to the issue of language and one's place in culture, provoking the essential question of what role literature plays in our lives.
- GenresFiction
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 5, 2010
This is one of my favorite books of all time. Very postmodern, it defies the idea of genre and deconstructs the idea of the novel. Memoirs, essay, and theory are held together by a wisp of story line about a Canadian woman, a writer and scholar, who reminisces about a year spent in a relationship in Trier, Germany, reading Proust. The garden as trope. . .
"But if you care about a book, you will be "reading" it in a very different way . . . the book as best friend . . . The book that holds the world together." 113-114
"The writer just needs to write, and the reader, if she is a good reader, will find herself in it." 116
"But if you care about a book, you will be "reading" it in a very different way . . . the book as best friend . . . The book that holds the world together." 113-114
"The writer just needs to write, and the reader, if she is a good reader, will find herself in it." 116
August 26, 2013
The author, a Icelandic-Canadian scholar and writer, Kristjana Gunnars wrote Night Train to Nykobing, a short novel that I read some time ago and loved for its lean, poetic prose, at once precise and elusive. She is ridiculously talented, a novelist, scholar, poet, translator, and painter. This slender novel takes place in 1992 in Germany during an academic research visit but what the narrator remembers of this recent trip is a rose garden where she read Proust and mused on her relationship with her lover, which is ending.
“The man with whom I often argued, frequently laughed, and now was pointless and lazy with, who was my lover then. We came away from Germany because there wasn’t enough of the carnivalesque in our lives there. He was a diplomat: for him Germany was all diplomacy. For me Germany was all serious study. It was all tomes of books in libraries.”
The novel is a meditation on love, loss, work, and the world of ideas—identity, criticism, gender. On love (and from the paragraph directly following the one the previous quote was taken from): “Our steps became slower and slower. We could hear a fly buzz. A bicycle bump over some cobblestones. A geranium stood crooked in a window terrace. We were conscious how lovers pain one another. The possibility that we have inflicted pain on each other because we are lovers. That is what lovers do.”
Gunnars peppers her narrative with quotes from literature and criticism but the effect is a kind of dialogue, as you’d expect an academic might have with the books she is reading. In other words, in character but unpretentious. The narrator wonders if love only exists in novels. She wrestles with the falseness of fiction, false because it has endings and life does not (other than death).
The novel unfolds in a mosaic of small vignettes, images, musings, quotations, and responses. Many have the beauty or power of a prose poem. “I thought it is impossible to know what might be gained by staying or leaving. Before he left, on our last night in Frankfurt, my lover looked at me and I saw the uncertainty there. His dark eyes were neither sad nor happy, furious nor relieved. They were all those at once. He just sat and looked at me for a long time. The city quieted down outside the window behind him. The noise of automobiles and airplanes lessened. I was trying to read his face as though it were a book. It had been a good evening. We were close. The tension usually there, an expression I was used to, was gone. I thought of the books I had been reading one last time. My lover’s face. A line by Marcel Proust: ‘If there had been any happiness in it, it could not last.’” The interactive life of the mind and of the body, of reason and emotion, of abstract ideas and physical reality play out in the rose garden while reading Monsieur Proust to the great pleasure of the reader.
“The man with whom I often argued, frequently laughed, and now was pointless and lazy with, who was my lover then. We came away from Germany because there wasn’t enough of the carnivalesque in our lives there. He was a diplomat: for him Germany was all diplomacy. For me Germany was all serious study. It was all tomes of books in libraries.”
The novel is a meditation on love, loss, work, and the world of ideas—identity, criticism, gender. On love (and from the paragraph directly following the one the previous quote was taken from): “Our steps became slower and slower. We could hear a fly buzz. A bicycle bump over some cobblestones. A geranium stood crooked in a window terrace. We were conscious how lovers pain one another. The possibility that we have inflicted pain on each other because we are lovers. That is what lovers do.”
Gunnars peppers her narrative with quotes from literature and criticism but the effect is a kind of dialogue, as you’d expect an academic might have with the books she is reading. In other words, in character but unpretentious. The narrator wonders if love only exists in novels. She wrestles with the falseness of fiction, false because it has endings and life does not (other than death).
The novel unfolds in a mosaic of small vignettes, images, musings, quotations, and responses. Many have the beauty or power of a prose poem. “I thought it is impossible to know what might be gained by staying or leaving. Before he left, on our last night in Frankfurt, my lover looked at me and I saw the uncertainty there. His dark eyes were neither sad nor happy, furious nor relieved. They were all those at once. He just sat and looked at me for a long time. The city quieted down outside the window behind him. The noise of automobiles and airplanes lessened. I was trying to read his face as though it were a book. It had been a good evening. We were close. The tension usually there, an expression I was used to, was gone. I thought of the books I had been reading one last time. My lover’s face. A line by Marcel Proust: ‘If there had been any happiness in it, it could not last.’” The interactive life of the mind and of the body, of reason and emotion, of abstract ideas and physical reality play out in the rose garden while reading Monsieur Proust to the great pleasure of the reader.
May 21, 2024
This doesn’t read so much as a book to me but rather a conversation in fragments in a dreamscape. I spent most of my reading reflecting on myself with the narration as a mirror, which I feel a bit guilty about, but I think Gunnars would understand as she also admits to being a fickle unfaithful reader. However, she says this in relation to Proust, who practically welcomes misinterpretation. And I’ve never been able to stomach Proust.
I wish I could talk to Kristjana Gunnars about everything. I both want to live out her exact written experience in Germany, and stay where I am forever and never wander. I wish I had a free summer and a little rose garden where I could read Proust all day and ignore everyone.
2nd reading review: Kristjana Gunnars’ writing lives in me..
I wish I could talk to Kristjana Gunnars about everything. I both want to live out her exact written experience in Germany, and stay where I am forever and never wander. I wish I had a free summer and a little rose garden where I could read Proust all day and ignore everyone.
2nd reading review: Kristjana Gunnars’ writing lives in me..
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews