Lost time

Combray: Proust's home town

À la recherche du temps perdu.  In recent years, this overall title of Proust's series of seven quasi-autobiographical novels has been generally translated as In Search of Lost Time.  Appropriate, I've always felt.  Over the years, my impression has been that this is a masterpiece to be admired, to be quoted, to be the subject of allusion -- but not, God forbid, to be read.  

Lost time.  Life is too short.  My remaining years are now too few; they were too few when I was 35!  Too much time is lost in too many ways, without my reading the never-ending reminiscences of a neurotic man who worries his memories of the past to death, like a dog with a bone.  I never really understood exactly what Proust was attempting to accomplish in his masterpiece -- I still don't, really -- and I wasn't all that interested in finding out.

Then, twenty or so years ago, I spent one early morning after another, before anyone else awoke, sitting on a patio in Maui reading the four books of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.  Beautiful, strange, thought-provoking books.  Somewhere I heard them described as "Proustian."  Hmm.  But I still wasn't tempted.

Later, in 2009, I read André Aciman's earliest novel, Call Me by Your Name (released this month as a movie), and learned that Aciman was a noted scholar of Proust.  His writing style and his obsessions intrigued me, and over the years I've read yet another of Aciman's noveIs, and his memoir of growing up in Egypt, and a couple of collections of his essays.  There's a thread that runs through all his works -- a focus on how we perceive time and how we construct, perceive,and reconstruct memory.  His work is also called Proustian.

Today was the last straw.  I was reading an essay by David Foster Wallace -- whom nobody would ever classify as a Proustian writer -- describing his experiences as a teenager playing tennis in Illinois.  He described the flatness of southern Illinois as one crosses it by automobile thusly:

...you could see any town you were aimed at the very moment it came around the earth's curve, and the only part of Proust that really moved me in college was the early description of the kid's geometric relation to the distant church spire at Combray.

Wallace, not surprisingly, didn't sound like a fan of Proust -- but he was familiar with Proust.  He had read Proust.  He knew Proust well enough to use an episode from Proust to make a point.

Before dinner, I realized I had nothing planned for the evening.  I could fritter away my time on Facebook, or in looking up odd items on-line.  Or I could dip my toe in the Proustian waters.  The first novel in the seven-volume series -- Swann's Way -- was available on Kindle for 99 cents.  I couldn't afford not to buy it, and so I did.

I've now read the first ten percent of Swann's Way -- a novel of over 500 pages.  The adult narrator is describing his memories as a young boy, maybe nine or ten years old -- a boy who, like Proust, is significantly named "Marcel."  What's happened in this first ten percent?  Essentially, Marcel has been distraught because he was put to bed without having a chance to kiss his mother good night.  And because there's a party downstairs, she won't be coming up to his room to kiss him good night in bed.  When I say "distraught," I mean that he is sobbing and on the verge of a total breakdown.  He finally entices her to his room, but is unable to enjoy his triumph because he knows he has irritated and gravely disappointed his mother -- his parents have been trying to get him to "grow up," to stop being such a "mother's boy."

And that's pretty much it. 

A book can be like a hike.  Some hikes have a goal so enticing that you'll endure any hardship to hike all the way to the end.  Other hikes also have a goal, but it's the hike itself you enjoy.  You are sampling the scenery and the trail; if you get bored or short of time, there's no shame in returning home short of the goal.  My decision to sample Proust is closer to the second kind of hiking.  I do hope to read Swann's Way all the way to the end -- but if I get sufficiently bored I won't hesitate to toss it aside and go on to something else.  We'll see.

I suspect that if I do complete Swann's Way, I'll be satisfied.  I won't need to read the six succeeding volumes.  Summiting Mt. Rainier didn't force me to go on to tackle Denali and Everest.  And I didn't.