Madame Proust

Some Proust blogs/articles/etc. of interest today. I wonder if the Hawthorne's are blooming. Always wanted to try to grow them, but I never did.

Some notes on Proust's family life

http://thelawsofnightandhoney.blogspot.com/2008/04/prousts-mom.html

And a review of the excellent bio, Madame Proust.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/lade01_.html

Odette who has been ultra-busy this month with this and that.

It's a Movement!

A fellow-writer told me she was listening to Proust on tape. There’s Proust madness afoot. Cool, huh? I subscribe to a service that puts all Proust references on the net in my mailbox.

The majority of references are in passing, like how the Madeleine made Proust remember, and I just bit into a cupcake and thought about by grandma’s chicken yard. Well, you get the idea.

Other references to all the books, from Proust and the Squid, Madame Proust, to large tomes of critical work about Joyce, Proust and whomever. Extreme literary stuff, parodied by the All England Summarize Proust Contest.

Then there are the Proust bloggers. My favorites are Orange Crate Art and Marcelle Proust. I believe they are both academics.

We have ordinary people who are trying to read or re-read Proust and blogging it occasionally, or habitually like Odette.

Taken together, one thinks the entire world is reading, studying and blogging Proust which is not the case, as one finds out when EYES GLAZE OVER, when the reading and blogging or our narrator is mentioned. Eeeek. A passive sentence.

So anyhow. I have to confess I have been slothful and less than energetic about pursuing Proust lately. Got bogged down with Albertine in Balbec. Onward.

Maybe if I whipped up a recipe of madelines? No? What then?

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

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

Time Regained, the Movie

Significant Other and I saw this movie a few years ago at Harvard Square. It was shown in the funky cinema in a basement with folding chairs--they frequently have revivals of movies you can't see anywhere else. 50 cents says your local video rental place does not have Time Regained. Probably Netflix does. We are so time-starved (and so picky) about movies that we can't barely get through the On Demand offerings.

Click here for a review: http://www.weekinrewind.com/2007/11/time-regained-movie-review-dvd-review.html

Catherine DeNeuve is beautiful as an aging Odette, whom I had always imagined as a brunette. I always liked Odette better after seeing the movie. Ruiz was perfect at Marcel, the narrator, and the rest of the cast was stellar. It's definitely worth finding or renting if you dig Proust.

I continue to make headway into Madame Proust, sympathizing with her "female troubles" and intrigued by her dinner parties for Proust's friends. The Dreyfus affair is always riveting, a small precursor of what would happened in Europe during the 30's and 40's. The book explains some of Proust's anti-semitism in the novel. The descriptions of the seaside hotels where she stayed are interesting. We were at one of those old dowagers once on the Ligurian Riviera. It had seen finer days, but one had one's own table, en famille, with the water and wine carried over from meal to meal. The same waiter, alas sometimes the same napkin, and the waiter would become familiar with one's likes and dislikes. Are there still such places?
But I digress.

Today is cat blog day, and this morning there was the de riguer game of chasey-face with somewhat desultory running about the living room. Annie finally settled down on the sideboard, and Thisbe on the dining room table, where they ignored each other until the game was forgotten. Last night I went to bed really early and forgot to check the contents of the cat bowl. Significant Other was awakened in the middle of the night by a cat licking his face, a gentle reminder that the dish was empty. They never come upstairs into our bedroom and bawl for food. It's always just a very gentle reminder. Wake up and feed me.

Off to do battle with HTML. Read some Proust this weekend.

Odette

The All England Summarize Proust Contest

This is a classic. You have to admire Maud's mother-in-law. Obviously a lady with a certain amount of leisure.

http://maudnewton.com/blog/?p=8096

Everyone is blogging Madame Proust as well as her great son. See below:
http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2007/10/29/the_quintessential_writers_mot.html

And yet more literary musings. Did I list this yesterday?
http://penamerica.blogspot.com/2007/10/michael-ondaatje-davis-on-proust-urban.html

Sometimes it seems the entire world is Proust obsessed, except here in the Boston area where we in Red Sox Nation are World Series and the-end-of-a-perfect-baseball- season obsessed. The fete yesterday was one for the books. It's like a tsunami of energy is rolling onward.

My question: after Proust secluded himself in the cork-lined room, did he still want to go out into society? Maybe some of my readers know the answer. I have Painter's biography, but have not perused it lately.

Onward.

Odette

The Narrator, Neglected

Eeek! It's been a hideous Proustian dry spell, with no reading of Lost Time and not even any progress in Madame Proust.

Odette broke her foot and her ankle (major bummer) and has been taking a novel plotting course and an HTML class, and getting ready for a writer's conference and stuff like that. Reading Ridley Pearson instead of Proust, can you believe it?

Now if I wrote like Proust, I wouldn't need a plotting course, because I could use my life as a plot, except that taking HTML courses and reading Ridley Pearson don't sound as though they would provide any kind of plot at all. Not literary, certainly not genre, not even mainstream fiction, whatever that is. Does it exist anymore? Seems like there's thriller and paranormal and fantasy and romance and a few actual mainstream books like The Kite Runner, but not many of those. What is mainstream fiction anyhow? Anxious minds want to know.

I also began a new novel, not crime fiction, titled, Such Stuff As Dreams. Sort of a historical mainstream romance, but not a gloppy romance, a kind of tough romance. Well, we'll see what kind it is. I do have a plot, though, and turning points, and archetypes and all that jazz.

So Odette has not been dawdling, except her poor injured foot has turned all sorts of interesting colors and refuses to fit into anykind of shoe except a big klunky sneaker. No stillettos, no pumps, no cut little ballet shoes, no boots. Nada. Shapeless houseshoes, mostly. Madame Swann would be appalled. So am I.

Au revoir!

Odette

Weirdest Proust Post of the Year

This has to be a put-on, but then, who knows? Anyone for a precocious four-year-old?

Mordecai reads Proust:
http://gawker.com/news/nevermind-the-pollacks/my-son-mordecai-and-i-read-proust-308649.php

Odette, of late, has read no Proust. The reasons? I got out of the habit on my trip to Nevada. Nevada and Proust don't meld nearly as well as Foxborough and Proust. And then I had been gadding about all summer and having house guests and then post-Nevada a big dinner party, and then eeek! it's almost October, and there were a number of icky things on the to-do list that just wouldn't disappear and then October comes in and I have to get ready for my HTML class with a finished design of the web site and now there is a plotting class, and I realize the characters is the book-to-be are all cardboard, so I try to get to know them a little better, and there's a speaking "gig" for Sisters In Crime which needs a soupcon of prep, and here it is today and did I mention that I broke my frigging ankle a week ago which should be a fool-proof reason to sit and read Proust all day, but I have felt like lighter fare, such as Harlan Coben and Ridley Pearson, and also I became absorbed in Madame Proust.

Do you get the picture? When I finish the Pearson book, I'll return to Proust. So this should be an exciting month with beginning my new novel (not crime fiction) and the class for the web site. And fall is pretty is New England and Foxborough and...and...and.

What do you think of Mordecai?

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

Madame Proust

If you happen to be in the vicinity of Urbana-Champaign, drop in on the lecture about Proust's mother. I know I read somewhere that instead of his dear grandmother, he was really writing about his mother, and we all know from the opening chapter that he was a real mama's boy.

http://www.news.uiuc.edu/news/07/0927proust.html

The University of Chicago exhibit at NEIBA has a copy of this book in their booth, which I am coveting greatly, since all things Proust are grist for the New England mill here.