Dave’s Comments (group member since May 24, 2014)

Dave’s comments from the Reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time in 2014 group.

Welcome to the club!

I've read The Magus several time, at some point he went back and rewrote the ending. I liked the first ending. When we were in England a couple of years we were in Lyme Regis and I went in a bookstore and discovered the proprietor had been encouraged by Fowles to open the store and came every Thursday to sit by the cash register and shoot the breeze. I bought another copy of The Magus, but made sure it was an edition that had the original ending.

Henry Miller was an indulgence of my college days.

This is not a spoiler and refers to nothing specifically but will be useful thinking about after the book is finished. Take time to generally compare/ contrast the course and nature of the Narrator's relationship with Albertine to his relationship with Gilberte and Swann's relationship with Odette.

Your becoming quite the Proustian mimic Renato! ha, ha.

Whats the problem when she reappears?

No problem Renato, at a thousand and one nights thats only two pages a day for about three years. You just need a Scheherazade to read it to you if you don't already know her.

As for long term reading, my plan was to read "Don Quixote". I have a good translation but I'm dithering about getting into it. My reader's radar tells me to stay in the 20th century for now so Celine may be next. I read the first "Movement" of Dance to the Movement of Time many years ago. I didn't stick with it but since I've read Proust, it may make a more lasting impression. I also want to read John Cowper Powys, have you read John Fowles books Jonathan? The Magus is my altime favorite book. I mentioned it some time back to Renato.

Something I pocked up on at about this point, the narrator never attends funerals, marriages, or christenings for that matter. Social interaction only occurs at dinners or receptions or plays/concerts. All deaths (except grandmother) occur offstage. Again, something I wonder if the detailed biographies have anything to say about this "absence". Also almost nothing about the Narrator's education.

This is the level of paranoia Proust had reduced me to (not unlike the Narrator which also troubled me - I was turning into a "Marcelwolf"!!!!)
a) how do we know what "that woman" said to Saint Loup. Maybe he just made her up. He was "suspect" because he had not explained his surprise on seeing Albertine's picture.
b) Aime was suspect because we found out in Balbec II that he "stayed overnight" with men and women at the hotel to suppliment his family's income. Obviously someone who will do what is necessary to "please the customer." He clearly knew what the "correct" answer was on both trips. His involvement with the laundress complicated matters but not for the better in my view.
c) and then the Narrator remembers Aunt Leonie's gossip about the Balbec bathhouse attendant -that she was a lier etc. so even if Aime reported that conversation accurately it was "under suspicion.

As for Albertine's letters, seemed to me they were calculated to "mess with his head." The Aunt's letter announcing her death I dismissed as a fraud. Why did he not send flowers?, why did he not visit her grave? All the questions I wondered about. None of this reflects one way or the other in what goes on in the book, I'm just giving you "where I was at at this point in the story. Most, if not all is reflected in my comments at the end of the volume.

Great review Jonathan, I am intrigued and will give him a try.

Meanwhile, is this French author that won the Nobel Prize this year been translated in the UK or Brazil? Almost nothing here yet.

Have either of you read "Dance to the Music of Time". If so what did you think?

Thanks for the info, I'll keep you posted. Journey to the End of Night has been in my library and on my read list as long as Proust.

Dave wrote: "Do you think the info provided by Saint Loup, Aime (about both letters) and the various letters from Albertine and her Aunt? Irregardless of what the Narrator thinks at this point, I'm interested i..."

I was wondering your thoughts on this because for every messenger and every message I found reason to be skeptical of either the veracity or motive (sometimes both). I also got caught up in the frequent repetition of the phrase "Albertine was dead" either as a statement or in a longer sentence. Then that morphs into alternating with the phrase "Albertine was alive" - not a direct statement about her vitality, but interwoven with parts of sentences or hypotheticals. All this made me very skeptical, I just wondered if anyone else felt that way.

Old books are fun! I got the last three of the used "Proust" books; Andre Maurois' biography, "The Proustian Community" by Seth Wolitz and "Proust's Narrative Techniques" by B G Rodgers. This last book I believe is what I have so restlessly been looking for since I finished the first read in July. As the title suggests, it provides a detail analysis of the techniques used to write the book and offers reasonable hypothesis of why he chose to write the book as he did. It was expensive (at least for me) but I'm glad I bought it.

Dave wrote: "Hindus has a larger book "Proust's Vision" that is reasonably priced used but has no description on Amazon. As Jonathan noted he wrote about Celine and others."

Based on your reference to Celine Jonathan, I bought "Rigadoon". I should have looked closer, it is volume three of a trilogy. Have you read the trilogy? Are his books difficult to read?

For those of you who are going to dig into the biographies later, it would be interesting to know if this "brush with the law" was similar to something in Proust's life.

Concerning the Sûreté, I didn't pay much attention until they came back and put him under surveillance (I forget the exact term, maybe they were just keeping tabs on him) but then I went back and reread that part. Some of the things that I thought about: a) Mrs Verdurin's final point to Morel to warn him off Charlus was that Charlus was being watched by the police. b) At some point the Narrator thinks to himself that he didn't see anything wrong with hiring "young girls"(I'm not going to look up the quote, but I was not favorably impressed).

I didn't think further about it but I don't think anything, however small, is "just there", so I concluded it was a disclosure to color my impression of the Narrator.

Do you think the info provided by Saint Loup, Aime (about both letters) and the various letters from Albertine and her Aunt? Irregardless of what the Narrator thinks at this point, I'm interested in what you think has been disclosed and why?

Ok, what I was going to comment on is back near the beginning of the volume. What did you think of the Narrator's involvement with the Sûreté?

When I was in the Navy I had to take lie detector tests a few times for counter espionage. One of the standard questions was "Have you ever thought of killing someone?" Almost everyone lies and says "no" although almost everyone has had such a casual thought. When you lie on the question then they ask you the "real" question "Do you have something to hide"? I never realized Proust invented the lie detector test.

Jonathan wrote: "Whilst skimming through the Penguin synopsis to try to find something I just noticed that in the paragraph before we hear about the telegram announcing Albertine's death, the narrator contemplates ..."

I was reminded of this section when rereading Swann's Way. Aunt Leonie's fantasy of the house burning down and the whole family killed except her. How all friends and townsfolk would admire her noble suffering and her piety in remembering those killed in her prayers.