Reading Proust South of Foxborough

Providence, RI is just a hop, skip and a jump from Foxborough, and I see a new Proust blogger has set up shop there.  Welcome to the wide world of blogging Proust.  I added "Proust in Providence" to the Proust blogs on the home page of this blog. 

I am making modest headway in Cities of the Plain, and falling behind in other reading.  Ten days of house guests--hard to feed house guests, and almost caught up and then a deathbed watch for a good friend.   Wrenching experience. 

Again playing catch up before I trek to New York for an annual writer's meeting, i.e. Edgar's Week, named after E.A. Poe (ho! ho! ho!).  I'm going to the symposium to find out the state of the genre.  Yes.  I confess.  I not a literary writer like Marcel, but a get-no-respect genre writer, mysteries and suspense, don't cha know?   My next novel will be an ordinary one, not crime fiction, which frees me in many respects, but of course I'll keep in mind the good lessons I've learned about conflict and moving the story along.  

Unknown wild flowers blooming in the garden.  Garlic is huge!  Yum.  We had beaucoup pineapples to eat over Easter, but we did not make the weird pineapple salad that Marcel ate.   Tonight I'm cooking shrimp scampi, ratatouille, and an orange-mascarpone-pistachio tart with a mezze platter for appetizers.  Mostly Mediterranean. 

I hope to come to a calmer spot in life soon, where Proust can again be savored.  In the meantime, onward. 

Odette, the other one 

Reading Proust Again

Ah, some stresses in my life have sent me back into the pages of Proust, because I can always fall asleep while reading him.  Making way thru the endless party of the Princess de Guermantes.  This party is actually more interesting than most of the ones in The Guermantes Way.  Charlus always livens up the page, and St. Loup has just made an appearance and he is an appealing character.  His relationship with Rachel in some ways echoed Swann and Odette, although St. Loup hasn't married her.  Swann is apparently dying, and the reader finds more drama and conflict than in the previous pages.


Onward. 


The other Odette