Personally, I haven't ever tried to summarize Proust but I did write an English paper in my senior year which must have done some summarizing--Proust and time, what a topic--at 21 I was obsessed with time, duree (yeah, I know the apostrophe is missing) and all this terribly pretentious literary stuff.
Life was interesting in those days. But back to Proust, whose birthday was yesterday, by the way. Happy Birthday, Marcel, wherever you are.
Here is a link to an interesting post that links to some summaries of Proust on another website. This all started with the Monty Python All England Summarize Proust Contest, which was one of their classics. God, was that program great. Spam, spam, spam, baked beans, egg, tomato and spam. We quote from it all the time.
Link: http://lilliputreview.blogspot.com/2008/07/wendell-berry-madam-marie-and-summarize.html
Maybe you should write your own summary.
Odette, no not that one!
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3 comments:
Hello,
I'm curious; what did you say about Proust and time?
I'm writing about James Merrill reading Proust, and I mostly live a life of terribly pretentious literary stuff.
Anyway, I was interested in what you thought.
Hmmm. Proust and time. What did I say? That was back when I too was living a life of terribly pretension literary stuff. Rather miss it actually. I was making comparison between Proust and Joyce and Lawrence Durrell, whose Alexander Quartet had just been published. Durrell took on space and time, all four dimensions in his book, at least according to him. Time in Proust? The book took the shape of the narrator's life in time, and I read a lot of Poulet and Wilson and even Poincare, for crying out loud. Joyce, in Ulysses, did something else with time, as the whole novel took place during one day. The dimension, time, was still rather novel to novelists, but looking back, except for Durrell, I'm not sure anyone really try to shape their novel with respect to dimension. Good question. Odette
I can summarize Proust in 9 words:
Boy has time
Boy loses time
Man regains time
:-)
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