Painting in Proust

Today the New York Times Sunday edition had a long article on Painting in Proust by Eric Karpeles. This book looks like a keeper, and if the American economy ever digs itself out of the toilet, I will certainly buy a copy.

In Proust's great masterpiece, he "names more than 100 painters and mentions or describes dozens or works." Who can ever forgot the scenes in Elstir's studio at Balbec?

What a delightful time one would have paging through the paintings that inspired Proust.

The article show a 1922 drawing by Paul Helleu of Proust on his deathbed. He looks so young and calm, as if he just lay down for a nap.

Here is the Amazon link should you decide to buy the book. Oh, why not! Give yourself a Christmas present. It's not THAT expensive.

http://www.amazon.com/Paintings-Proust-Visual-Companion-Search/dp/0500238545/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225674031&sr=1-1

Madame Proust

I finished Madame Proust last night. Of course the ending was sad, with her sickness and death at a relatively young age and leaving the somewhat helpless Marcel, who managed to pull himself together and write his great work.

At some of the writer's groups I've been in, there have been deep discussions of how members really started to write after the death of a parent. Seems to trigger something.

Madame Proust hectored and nagged and cajoled like any mother. Proust's impossible habits--sleeping all day and up (and out) all night with total quiet required during the day would drive anyone batshit. Weird how he always showed up with overcoats and scarves even in mild weather. I know womeome else who does that but she is a frail little thing with no fat on her bones and obviously suffers from the cold. There's a lot to be said for a bit of padding. And poor Madame, walking 10 hours a day at the spa to try to lose some weight.

Is it just me or does pineapple salad with truffles sound rather. . . unappetizing? In days of yore, we sometimes at dined at Le Francais in Wheeling, Illinois, and the meal was often tres truffled but I don't believe the dessert was. Almost sounds like a Roman feast oddity. Pineapples must have been a rare treat.

My husband's father always announced he would only eat the kinds of vegetables that grew in his grandmother's garden. No new-fangled broccoli for him. Rest of family rolled their eyes, of course. I wonder what grew in Swan's garden. Monet had a great vegetable and herb garden. The recipes in the Monet cookbook are so simple that you just know the produce must have been so spectacular it stood on it's own. Meat and fish and poultry, too. Quite frankly, the chickens my grandparents raised were the best, as were the strawberries and the tomatoes. I can mimic the strawberries with organic local ones, but the tomatoes, the tart Kansas tomatoes are gone. Mine were all right this year, better than store bought, but nothing comes close to my Grandfather's. He fed them with horse manure. Maybe that was the trick.

How did we get from Madame Proust to my grandfather's garden? Not so far a jump as you would think. Madame Proust's life was a mirror into the past, and was interesting in her own right, even if her son had not written the great book. How did he do it without her? A miracle of sorts. Something to ponder.

Odette

Is Proust on Vacation, Too?

Not much Proust news this week. Is everyone at Balbec? The Univeristy of Alabama is to receive some important Proust papers. Nice to have them on this side of the pond.

I confess I've dropped the ball the past few nights and have been reading about the Beat Generation in prep for the big Kerouac celebration on Wednesday. Began reading The Poisonwood Bible. New edition of Poets and Writers also littering nightstand.

And I'm working hard on umpteenth revision of my high-tech mystery Festival Madness, gearing up to put the finishing touches on it before approaching editors and agents.

Summer pulls one in various directions, deliciously, but it is hard to stay focused. The garden calls for attention. We have the sweetest ruby throated hummingbirds, and they really like the butterfly weed or whatever the HUGE purple thing that is full of bees and blooms. I have a riot of color, right now, worthy of Monet, but on a greatly reduced scale. Smaller than Swann's garden, small, small, small.

Here's a belligerent view of Proust from a young man. Young, young, young. Ahhhh!
http://eurotastic.tumblr.com/post/9908815

Odette

Balbec is a Summer Place

Hmmmm. Another post where I cannot move the cursor to create a title. What's going on? This will require a trek through the help screens, maybe an email, maybe a session of head-banging.
Note: a seach of the issues revealed the title "problem" reported on 7/9/07 and a work-around, which you can see is actually working.



Proust, Monet, Balbec, etc.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/07/10/basea110.xml


More Balbec,memory and Ratatouille the movie--how weird the connections we make:

http://mleddy.blogspot.com/2007/06/proust-involuntary-memory-foolish.html
Summer even in Proustville. Noteworthy is that many of the Proust postings have move to the coastal town of Balbec. Can't be an accident. I plan to start reading those sections of the great narrative any day, having done with Donna Leon, Sue Grafton, Robert Parker and others. Vacation reading.

Odette

Food For Thought

Monet's Table, The Cooking Journals of Claude Monet is a picture cum recipe book with glorious photographs of the Monet household and gardens at Giverny. Life lived large in a picture book setting most mortals came only dream about. The recipes are simple, and you just know that their deliciousness came from the purest, freshest ingredients. Take for example, Leek and Potatoe Soup. Butter, leeks, salt and potatoes. And water.

I'll wager the butter from rich and fresh from the dairy, the leeks and potatoes from the garden, and the water chlorine-free. Apparently Monet was a tyrant about harvesting veggies at the time of optimum ripeness.

The cookbook calls for lettuce in many of the soup recipes, but I do not see one single salad recipe, or even any cold dishes. Nary a one. Hmmm. The text mentions salads of "chicory laced with garlic and croutons or dandelions with strips of fat bacon or purslane.." Monet insisted upon so much pepper in his salad that two salads were prepared. Likewise, asparagus--he liked it almost raw, and the rest of the household preferred cooked. The garden must have been full of herbs. They also ate salad of lamb's lettuce. Salad was so simple one needs no recipe.

There is certainly no recipe for the decidedly weird pineapple and truffle salad that Marcel's parents served to M. de Norpois; however, Cold Beef a la Mode, which made Francois shine, and Homard a l'americaine, served Chez Swann are both to be found.

Note: one of these days I have to figure out how to key French accents, the grave, etc. kind, not the vocal ones.

Maybe Monet didn't like cold foods. I knew Germans who believed cold beverages caused stomach cancer. Did Monet harbor similar superstitions? A homemade banana ice cream was served at Christmas only. Refrigeration would have been a problem most of the year. No Zero-Kings in Swann's or Monet's kitchens.

Swann had a large garden near Combray. Is Swann the gentleman farmer the same man as Swann of the jockey club, but a different Swann that the husband of Odette and the disgraced habitue of the Verdurin's parties? Swann of the split personality. One interesting thing about great literature is that the reader can think about the various characters for a long time, pondering their foibles and personalities, whereas, if you read the latest thriller, a week later you can barely remember the plot much less the characters. Except for LeCarre and Alan Furst. And Lee Child's Jack Reacher. One recalls Reacher when the plot has long fled one's mind.

So called Literary Fiction is heavy on character, light on plot. If the characters are absorbing and well defined, one doesn't need a lot of plotting, as they can carry the book. Although I would argue that Madame Bovary, War and Peace and even Remembrance of Things Past do have plots. Secondary to the characters, but what is a plot but the story?

Yikes, I don't want to be accused of lit blogging, ex-computer programmer that I am. I only wondered if Monet's Table might shed light of Proust's Table, and to some degree it does.

For an interesting take on personality in Proust go to this link:
http://onphilosophy.wordpress.com/2007/06/09/the-philosophy-of-proust-the-person/

Odette, who was a very bad girl and had bacon, eggs, fried potatoes, french bread and one tiny tomato for breakfast.