Happy Belated Birthday, Marcel

Alas!  I missed Proust's birthday. Too frantically busy trying to get my novel formatted, final proofs, final spell check, final edits, and some PR.  Crazy time. Heat wave, too.  

Found a good birthday post which I'm passing on to you. 

The Proust news of late has been ho-hum. Waiting for something rip-roaring to happen, although Proust and rip-roaring are not usually juxtaposed together.  

I'm still working my way through the Albertine book. One of thse days. In the meantime, I read other stuff, some good, some just O.K.  Do pick up the novel, HEFT.  It was really good. You'll like it. 

In the meantime, here's Proust: The Greatest Novelist of the 20th Century: Marcel Proust

Jacqueline Rose's Proust Writings

Guardian Article About Jacqueline Rose's Proust Writings   

Since I've been reading about the sleeping Albertine, I found Rose's remarks interesting, although I have not come to this passage yet.   This is the first time I've come across mention of her novel, Albertine, which is an interesting take on a Proust character (there are so many).  Could keep a story-teller engaged for years.  

Who is your favorite Proust character? 

Proust Bloggers Active Again

Here are a couple of Proust Blogs of interest this week.  I am using a new version of Blogger and feeling my way in.  Think I might like to return to the old.  Why does everyone fix things that aren't broken?

I am still working my way through Albertine living with the narrator in Paris.  Nothing new has happened.

The blogs, forthwith:  The Strangeness of Words

A Year of Reading Proust

I have been re-reading Proust for far longer than a year.  Over time, sort of like the novel.  Happy New Year to all.

Odette

Re-reading Proust in Paris

An Apple guru reads and re-reads and then reads some more?  Technical manuals?  Nope, Proust.  How cool is that?  And in the original French.  My college French never reached that level.   Camus?  Oui.  Proust?  Non.

This is an interesting essay for us Proust afficionados.   Take a look.  Thoughts on Reading Proust Again

The author is right.  Proust is not difficult.   Lots of characters, but after a few reads they're like old friends.  Long sentences and no dialog tags?  Check, but one gets used it this.  I am still reading about Albertine living in Marcel's family apartment in Paris and going out every afternoon to do what?  The narrator thinks the lady is up to no good.  He's probably right.

Albertine Sleeping

I just read the section of  Proust where he goes on for pages about watching Albertine sleep.  Very lyrical and touching, really.   Albertine is still mysterious to me, and also to the narrator.  But one can see her in Balbec with her jaunty cap and nose in the air on her bike.   Those girls who he found so fetching, and now one is asleep in his bed.  This is a wonderful passage. 

Reading a bit of Proust off and on before bedtime.  Albertine comes and goes.  He refuses to accompany her but he is suspicious of her errands.   He consults the Duchess for clothing ideas for his mistress.  What a crazy life.                        

Happy Thanksgiving to my readers who celebrate Thanksgiving, and if you don't, well, pause a minute and consider your blessings:  relatives, friends, hearth, work, hobbies, nature, sports, whatever gives you succor and pleasure.

Onward,

Grapeshot

Albertine Ensconced in Marcel's Family Apartment In Paris

So one is reading along and eveything is pretty much as usual . . . Mme. Verdurin and her parties and who's in and who's out and Marcel mentions Vintieul and Albertine mentions that she know his sister and her friend! 

If you read Proust you know that this is powerful and unwelcome news.  Marcel hightails it away from Balbec and back to not-so-gay-Paree faster than you can utter "Le petite phrase."   He's got to get Albertine away from those bad women. 

At last a little action, and I segue from The Cities of the Plain into The Captive.   Now the Duchesse de Guermantes is recommending clothes  for the young lady, and mama  and Francoise are tut-tutting, and Marcel doesn't go out.  What are things coming to?

Movement in fiction is a good thing.   Albertine is first described on her bicycle.  That Proust guy knew a thing or two, didn't he?    

Belle Epoque Jewelry from Proust "survivor"

Mon Dieu!  Such lovely pieces and what a great story.  The model for Elstir.  How I love the scene with Marcel and Albertine in Elstir's studio.

I particularly covet the gold cigarette case, the ladybug and the little box.  And don't the prices seem reasonable for such beautiful baubles?   Imagine someone from the Belle Epoque living into our times.  What a lot of history.  The changes we have undergone simple boggle the mind.  Oh my! 


Here is the lovely article with the photos.   Jewelry from the time of Proust  

Back to Balbec

Reading Proust again!  We are in The Cities of the Plain, and the narrator and Albertine are hanging out at the seashore, at first before the high season, and now during  high season.  The Verdurins have rented a house along the coast with a fab view of the ocean.  A train is taking "The Little Clan" to the Verdurin's Wednesday dinner party.  


I have to confess in all my Proust readings I do not recall the Verdurins renting a summer house in the Balbec neighborhood.  I'm really enjoying this part of the book, now that YET ANOTHER endless reception has come and gone. The Guermantes have become bores.  I'm sure the Verdurin's party will be much more interesting.  Mme. Verdurin is a real piece of work, a wonderful character, which is to say a character that is not very nice.  The milk of human kindness does not run in her veins.  I am hoping for some conflict and some fireworks and maybe someone will be expelled from The Little Clan.  


It was a long slow slog through The Guermante's Way to this point.  Albertine flirted like crazy with St. Loup.  I couldn't have liked it more.


The Other Odette, licking her chops at the thought of scandal, disgrace and some more hanky-panky.

Proust would approve

I am so close to the end of the Guermantes book, that I can almost taste it, smell it, definitely feel it. This week for sure I will finish. So long a slog. I could have walked across Spain in the time it has taken to read it. In the summer. Taking two seasons.

Speaking of smelled it, here is the story of a blogger who lost and regained her sense of smell. And the first smell that came back was . . . . but I'll let her tell her Proustian tale of smell regained. Thanks to an alert reader for the link

http://mollysmadeleine.blogspot.com/2005/12/unexpected-scent-of-chocolate.html

Thanks to one of my readers for the alert.

We were in Nantucket this week, an island I have visited since my youngest was in diapers. The island has changed and not changed, but the sunlight, the fog, the sweet smell of privet will always remind me where I am. The ferry coming back encountered "ocean swells," but not rough enough for a "Nantucket sleight ride." Google this phrase. It is Melvillian.

It's not at all like Balbec, but there are girls on bicycles and girls walking and money in the air and old boarding houses and restaurants and even artists who have been there since God was a boy. I think that in the old days, Proust would have felt at home there. No grand hotels, but a few classy resorts. Not a European experience, and not even an American experience, but the quintessential New England experience.

The other Odette

The Proust Questionnaire

Everyone and anyone answers the Proust Questionnaire which dates to, naturally, Proust but is always found in the pages of Vanity Fair. Of course it has spawned a lot of others answering the questions, but I don't often see a crime writer responding to the questionnaire.

Here goes: http://www.sohopress.com/blog

By the way, Wednesday evening Marcel's grandmother died, and a page or two later he is entertaining a newly plump Albertine in his room and Francoise bursts in on them. I couldn't have liked it more. Albertine, in the narrator's mind, has achieved a new louchness. Is it experience? Something else? He doesn't tell us, nor, of course does Albertine.

I am actually going to finish the book before the year is out. I am plump giddy.

The other Odette

Unchanging As The Sea

Do Proust's characters ever change? Certainly their social status goes up and down like a yoyo, but does character or personality ever change? I can't think of anyone who outgrows his jealousy, and the desire for status, secrecy, and all these most readable traits do not change.

Here is one blogger's view:

http://proustreading.blogspot.com/2008/10/prousts-unchanging-characters.html

The other Odette

Rainy Sundays: What would Albertine Do?

One of the French poets raptured about rainy Sundays, but I don't remember which one. Googling "rainy Sundays" brings forth a torrent (ha ha!) of web sites and many mentions of Baudelaire, but I couldn't find a quote.

Perhaps some of the readers know. We took a walk in the almost-rain and it was most refreshing. Next Sunday, forcast to be rainy, will find us on a sailboat race on Long Island Sound, an event I am facing with a certain trepidation.

Got my trusty boatshoes and a waterproof windbreaker. Proust, always bundled up in greatcoats and scarves, even in summer, would not be a happy camper. Odette's hair would get all mussed as would the Duchesse of Guermante's blond coif.

St. Loup would rather enjoy the afternoon, and maybe the athletic Albertine would also. Or would she sulk in the ship's cabin? What would Albertine do?

My nightstand becomes ever more disarranged with books, and some discipline needs to come into my life, but--what the hell?

Odette

Onscreen Scientist Summarizes Proust

Finally a most worthy post apropos Proust from "Onscreen Scientist," who has completed a second reading of Proust in French, and has also completed the work in English.

My hat is off to him, for several reasons. He is a physicist and a software writer. In another lifetime, I wrote software for a living, and with a few exceptions, this was not a literary crowd. I cannot think of any of my software colleagues who would have read Proust and my conjecture is that few of them would have even known who he was. Perhaps the scientist writes AI software or something besides grinding out business transactions ad nauseum ad infinitum.

I have known a few literary physics majors, most of the professors. I think physics teaches a certain curiosity about the world--well all science should do that except maybe creationism, which is of course not science but pseudo-science like astrology and phrenology and Madame Sostirus, cardreader and fortuneteller. I know people who actually believe this stuff.

But back to Proust. Onscreen Scientist offers a great summation of the book--a bit longer than those in the All England Summarize Proust Contest, and I think he is dead on about Albertine. One just cannot ever quite get a handle on her. She remains, for me, too, a tabula rasa.

Currently, I am wallowing in Mme. Villeparisis' endless party, and in two days I leave for Northern Nevada, a wonderful place for reading Proust but I only travel there with softcovers I can leave behind, and of course, that would not be Proust.

So click ye forth and read Onscreen Scientist's Proust post, and then hie ye to Proust himself, the great one. I was an the New England Independent Booksellers Association Trade Show yesterday and scooped up a wonderful bunch of books.

When people say they don't read, I feel an awful sympathy. How could you not read?


After all, Onscreen Scientists reads the master in French. Zowie!
http://onscreen-scientist.com/?p=35

Odette, the other one

Proust and Fortuny

Apparently Fortuny's technique has been lost and can't be recovered. Interesting, that with all our technology no one has figured it out.

In the meantime, here's food for thought. Albertine and the Duchesse of Guermantes both wear Fortuny. La di dah!

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/30/arts/rcartborch.php

While we're on the topic of Fortuny, here is a link to the website:

http://www.fortuny.com/Mariano/History.html

Others are re-reading Proust like moi. I wish the blogger would change fonts and colors. Sometimes interesting blogs can be, alas, hard to read, font and colorwise.
http://anthonyscoggins.blogspot.com/2008/05/rereading-proust.html

The Guermantes Way

A Christmas gift from me to myelf. I finally finished Young Girls in Flower, the Proust book set in Balbec by the sea where Proust first meets Albertine and her friends.

I was touched an amazed at how the last few pages summarized the whole book, with beautiful lyricism about the sea and the girls and how everything came together. One had earned these fantastic passages by reading the preceding pages, and contemplating Albertine's cheecks hundreds of times. It reminded me of the lyrical Kerouac after many tedious pages about the exploits of Dean Moriarty. I wonder if anyone has ever written a thesis about Proust and Kerouac. It won't be moi.

The odd thing is, I have the idee fixe that Albertine looks like a high school friend of mine, and I can't dislodge it, no matter how I try.

Now, on to The Guermantes Way, and long descriptions of the Guermantes humor which I don't think is anything like Saturday Night Live, or Susan Silverman, or Mort Sahl, Shelly Berman, Bill Murray or Blue Man Group.

I ordered the Proust cookbook or whatever it is, not, I assure you, to make truffled pineapple salad but for the whole experience of food in the Belle Epoque. The January edition of Gourmet Magazine is devoted to Southern Food, and noted that Southern Food is the only food genre, so to speak, that the United States has produced. I daresay this excludes Tex Mex which is derivative, and Yankee Cooking which is not, per se, a whole cuisine but a collection of "dishes."

Last night I made crepes stuffed with chicken and mushrooms napped in a Mornay sauce with some white wine added, and let me tell you this is good and it even looked Christmasy with parseley and bits of pimento for the red and green.

Onward,

Odette

My Proust Reader

There is a very funny cartoon in this week's New Yorker, the fiction edition, where a man is pointing out his designated Proust reader.

Proust is so big, I am just amazed. Still plogging away at Albertine and Marcel in Balbec. 706 pages into the novel. Savoring. Considering. Contemplating. Wonder what the Proust household was like a holiday time. Was there a Christmas goose? A plump capon? A roast beast. A buche de Noel?

Joyeux Noel, to touts le monde. And pardon my fractured French.

Odette

Madeleine

A link to a blog not Proust, but I loved the discussion of the Italian foods. Yes, cannoli and manicotti and spaghetti and stuffed shells. What's not to love? http://madeleine.typepad.com/my_weblog/

The best Italian food I ever tasted was at the SmokeEnders celebration where one of the women who had quit smoking hosted the gang for a bang up homemade Italian meal. Mama mia was it good!

By then I was a backslider and didn't quit for a few more years, but the food was great, even if I was dying to get outside and smoke a cigarette.

Everyone smoking in Atonement, of course. The anti-smokers are bullshit about all the smoking in movies, but that's the way life was and whatchagonnado?

By the way, I am in possession of the world's two best lasagne recipes. Both are a) a lot of work, and b) seriously high cal, but are they ever good.

I am still reading about Albertine and how she pulled the bell after inviting Marcel to her hotel room for the evening. What a tease. He is mystified, having decided apriori that the little "band" had loose morals. He didn't say whether he beat it or whether a servant came or what happened. Obviously he did not kiss and embrace her. This was a funny scene.

Where are the bistros of yesteryear? They have all been ursurped by trattorias and pasta places. This is too bad, as French food is now almost impossible to find. So is German food. The Italians won the food wars. They ordered ziti instead of shells. (Think!)

Odette

Reading Proust Ain't All Beer and Skittles

I have no idea where the old term "beer and skittles" came from. Did my Dad use it? He had such colorful language. Beer and skittles is something easy and pleasant.

Last night I got tired of Marcel and his endless games with Andrea and Albertine and the other girls. I mean, it sounded so like high school, genteel, and oh so refined by still like bloody high school.

Marcel was nice to the girls he didn't like and cool to the one (Albertine) he liked. And the stuff about the exam, while interesting, didn't exactly advance the plot. Oh! There's a plot? Well, sort of. Getting close to Albertine and all that.

Gossip Girl in Balbec. Can it be? The problem is, I can't force myself to skip pages. What if I miss out on a true gem?

Not only is my goal of reading the entire oeuvre this year going to fall miserably short, I doubt if I'll get through half of it.

So what have I done? I finished my novel, (well, almost); I gave 10 speeches at Toastmasters; planted a garden, did lots of jobs for all my writerly organizations, went to Alaska, Denver, Nevada, New York, cooked up a bunch of meals, mostly good, and spent quality time with the cats. I read a lot of other books, magazines, 3 daily papers, I did a new website, tried to stay in touch with friends, relatives, Romans, countrymen. Seems like a pretty busy year.

I blew off my gym membership for six months (bad!) and sold my old car. I broke my ankle. But I didn't finish Proust. I feel like Sisyphus. Nonetheless. 700+ pages of really fine print ain't nothing. I also read about Madame Proust , but not about Proust and the Squid. I read Kerouac and participated in the anniversary in Lowell. So......

Onward, allons!

Odette

Back in bed with Proust

Big weekend coming up, and since we are old enough to be sensible, it was early to bed last night. I looked at the two exciting mysteries on my nightstand and thought "no way." The last thing I needed was to be flipping pages past midnight.

Picked up Proust for the first time in weeks. He was meditating upon his introduction to Albertine, and puzzling why the beauty mark on her face seemed to move from brow to cheek to chin. Marcel and Albertine certainly do prove the point that opposites attract. At the seaside he walks a bit and spends a lot of time in the sun (not swimming), while she cycles and plays golf and confesses to being mad about sports. Her Little Band almost presages the flappers. Wonder if anyone ever wrote a thesis about that? Our narrator still doesn't know what to make of her. A very intriguing passage, but half an hour later I turned off the light.

I had a scary dream that might have turned into a nightmare except that the presumably vicious dog guarding the dark warehouse where I was spending the night became a friendly beast that licked my hand.

So this will be the last post until Sunday, because I am off to a writing conference. Meeting with editors and agents and picking up useful advice, schmoozing, probably drinking too much. It's been years since I was seriously drunk, but don't think this would be the right time for that. Proust never mentions wine or spirits. Wonder why.

Odette

Albertine Murdered?

The variety of Proust musings is truly staggering. A blurb on Milan Kundera, a mountain hike and the mysterious lady.

http://thegayrecluse.com/2007/10/07/on-milan-kundera-and-how-our-killing-of-albertine-is-the-least-of-his-problems/

I continue my trek through Madame Proust. It's lonely reading Proust in Foxborough.

Odette