Tout Le Monde is Blogging Proust

The Inkblotter At the King’s English has some thoughtful remarks about Swann’s Way and the Grandmother. It’s always great to find a new Proust blog.

http://thekingsenglish.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/reading-dangerously-proust-installment-1/

On the Road to Library School: where would we be without libraries? And Proust? And checking Proust out of the library?

http://deweyorotherwise.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/167/

This writer really can summarize Proust, and he summed up Swann’s Way very nicely.
Don’t you wish everyone could be so terse, yet eloquent?

http://ifieverfeelbetter.com/?p=131

All England Summarize Proust Contest

I've posted this link before, but it's always good for some laughs. And thought.

http://www.videosolala.com/2008/03/22/monty-python-all-england-summarize-proust-competition/

Parsing Proust Through Sentence Diagrams

Sailor John tackles not only Proust but the diagramming of important sentences. I tell you, no way would I tackle a sentence diagram. In high school, we spent endless hours doing it. I hated it, but later came to understand that taking apart a sentence into its various parts of speech gave me a pretty good understanding of sentences. But Proust, yikes!

http://thewritingsofproust.blogspot.com/2008/03/crutial-summation-of-swanns-way.html

A Proust Reader "Thinks It Through"

I discovered someone who is just about at the same spot in Proust that I am, maybe a few pages ahead, but not much.

http://blog.jcblegen.com/?p=16

Good luck and perseverance to him (?) while we journey on toward that unbelievable ending. Proust's ending was stupendous and it did not disappoint.

Most of my reading now is background for the novel I am beginning which is set in 1928 Southern California. I am reading Upton Sinclair's Oil which the award-winning film, There Will Be Blood was based on. It's very good. First Sinclair book I've read, obviously an important omission.

But Proust remains on my nightstand and is given his due. Just not a race to the finish, no, no.

Odette

Reading Proust Again

Still working my way through the ways and wiles and sorrows of Madame de Villeparisis. Our narrator is at her reception with Bloch and the term "bluestocking" is in use. I wonder what the original French word was.

Lots of talk about rising and falling in society, with veiled speculation that the fallen ladies are perhaps just that, those who in their youth committed indiscretions that can't be forgiven. This topic of the social fall of Mme. Villeparisis and three of her cronies has been going on for page after page. Nonetheless, it's interesting, and Proust remarks that if she were "in society," she wouldn't have time for her memoirs and the social lions or course are too busy at dinner parties and balls and receptions to have time for memoir, so in this case, history is written, so to speak, by the loosers, not the victors. How subtle of Proust to have noticed that. The man is a genius.

From Wikipedia: Bluestocking
Bluestocking is a disparaging term, no longer in common use, for an educated, intellectual woman. 'Bluestocking' may also refer to:
Bluestockings (bookstore)
Bluestockings Journal
Blue Stockings Society (England), a women's movement based on the French movement

Proust and Debelief

The blogger below exhibits wonderment that Proust's work exists at all. The massive task, the writing and thought and rewriting and trying to get it right. It took most of his life, and in his last years he holed up in his cork-lined room and wrote and wrote.

The discipline that took, from a person who had not formerly exhibited any particular discipline. Proust, we salute you.

http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2008/03/i-sort-of-cant-believe-it-exists.html

Odette

Letters from a Librarian

This blog just mentions Proust with respect to the "little phrase" of Vinteiul, but what a lovely blog. The illustrations are so wonderful. I was somehow envious of anyone standing in line for an espresso and thinking literary thoughts, so different from my pedestrian life in Foxborough.

http://lettersfromalibrarian.blogspot.com/2008/03/collections.html

Read down for the Proust mention.

State Street, another cool blogger, has picked up Proust, seamlessly, after a long absence. That is the thing with Proust--he's like imagining an old lover with whom you reconnect and there's no sense of having been away for long. In a sense, Proust is always the old lover, waiting in the wings, to reconnect. A jealous impossible lover, except for the prose, the lovely prose, but I do ramble.

http://statestreet.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/a-little-proust/

How Proust Can Change Your Life

Inexcusable really, to have dribbled off on my posting. The blogs lately have not inspired, and I've been catching up on magazines after being away for a week. Working on three novels and a short story. Cooking up a storm. Working out. Brushing the cat. Reading about Eliot Spitzer. Well, you know. Making travel plans.

Life intrudes on blogging. Started yet another blog entitled The Cheeseparer. Blogging is thinking aloud.

Anyway, here is the one blog I found worthy of mention: http://nathanhondros.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-proust-can-change-your-life.html

The copy of Proust on my nightstand gently reproaches. I promise to do better next week. We have been eating some French food, however. Does that count? Non? I thought not.

Alas,

Odette

Lydia Davis on Proust

Here is the link: http://acxis.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/proust/

I haven't returned to Proust Mode since back from Florida. Davis is referring, I believe, to the narrator's seeing the Duchesse de Guermantes in church at Combray.

In the part of the book I am reading, he is living in the same building and frequently stalking (what we would now call it) the Duchesse, who seems to find him annoying like a mosquito that buzzes around one's head.

I wonder if anyone has catagloged all the examples of unrequited love in Proust. Yikes! The list would be endless, beginning with Swann and on through the dramatic personnae. Is there any requited love? I shall have to look. Perhaps the painter and his wife. Oh, can't remember for sure.

I do hope to engage the narrator again soon. Perchance ce soir?

Odette

Proust wrote a novel not a memoir

Proust used his life to write his novel, and a novel is fiction. It's unfortunate that writers and agents and editors can't seem to get this straight. These faux-memoirs would be written as novels, probably wonderful novels, if the literary establishment and the public responded to the fictionalized story as strongly as they do to so-called memoir. And so we tut-tut over the literary scandals and messes which surfaced this week, not one but three!

Ernest Hemingway stated that "All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened." This understanding, alas, seems to be lost.

I'm glad that Proust had enough sense to know the difference between fiction and memoir and to write his great novel instead of his "memories." All his memories are in the novel, shaped and honed to perfection. How clever and insightful he is.

For more information of the latest literary scandals (and Proust loved nothing better than a good gossip) read here: http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/authors/but_margaret_jones_promised_it_was_true_79038.asp

Snobbery Then and Now

Reading in Proust (The Guermantes Way) last night about the trials of Mme. Villeparisis and how she fell in society due to a neglect of the niceties, shall we say, and when she wanted to make her way back up the ladder to the top, the rungs were no longer accessible.

Snobbery tried and failed to rule on Jane Austen last night, as Pride and Prujudice and love triumphed.

I suppose we will always have snobbery. Right now, people look down on the new McMansions. Some suburbs are better. The right car, the right summer home, the right this, the right that, and above all the right school. The right shoes, handbag. It goes on and on. We are just as bad as Proust's or Austen's snobs. New money, old money.

Or as my very snobby (Mother was DAR, he likes to sail with the "right" people, i.e. the New York Yacht Club) friend said, when I talked about Burning Man. "I wouldn't have anything to saw to those people." Burners? You can say anything to Burners.

Ohmigod, the right yacht club, the destination wedding, the right table in the right restaurant even, if you write, the right genre.

I am a snob, too. I look down on people with no books in their houses, people who eat takeout 24/7 and people who drive enormous black SUV's. So there.

I'm leaving for a writing conference. Not taking Proust. Instead, I am taking a novel called Pasadena. I'll be back in a week, with a week's worth of Proust blogs, should there be any of interest, and there usually are.

I will be able to give a blow by blow of writer's snobberies. Chacun a son gout. Sorry for the lack of the proper French accents. I have never figured them out for Blogger except to cut and paste from word and that is just too tedious.

Odette

La Vie en Proust

Every now and then I find a post that is so perfect it has to be shared.

http://nathanhondros.blogspot.com/2008/02/blog-post.html

Nathan Hondros knows Proust. He has a wonderful post. It makes me happy to read it.

Saluting "Madeline Moments"

Another Proust blogger has an anniversary. A thoughtful, informative blog you should read.

http://marimann.wordpress.com/2008/02/18/one-year-anniversary-contest/

She is offering a contest with a "real" prize.

Odette (speaking here) is still reading about Rachel and St. Loup. As with Swann, one wants to slap St. Loup on the side of his head for wasting his time and money on such a gold digger.

On the other hand, did young women have any legitimate way to earn money back then? Besides marrying well? Maybe we should walk a mile in their moccasins. I am of two minds. Proust, too, seems to waver on the topic of Rachel. This makes literature good, the ability to see both sides of a conflicted character. And all the characters in Proust are conflicted. We like that.

Odette

Rachel from the Lord

The past two evenings I've been reading about St. Loup and the mistress that he loves so much, the mistress that he wants to support in great expensive style by making an "advantageous" marriage.

Marcel, and thus the reader, finally meet the young lady (?) in question, who lives outside of Paris in a rather shabby little banlieu. Marcel is rather horrified to discover that the mistress is none other than Rachel, a former prostitute who would do anything with anyone for 20 Louis.

St. Loup suspects, rightly I think, that Rachel doesn't really love him so much as the money and jewels he provides her with.

Do we see a pattern here? Do we see Swann? Odette was a courtesan, too. Odette never loved Swann, who married here and could never be received into polite society again with his wife.

Proust notes that St. Loup would marry Rachel but once the marriage was a fait accompli, St. Loup suspects that Rachel would not be as devoted as when there are no legal bindings and he can dump her at any time without repercussions.

There are echoes of Marcel's love for Gilberte, and even the Duchesse of Guermantes, unrequited love. Is any love requited in Proust? Jealousy rears it's yellow head. And a shadowing of Marcel and Albertine. This is just too delicious.

Now what is also interesting, is that Rachel isn't really all that "common," as one would expect. She can hold her own in literary discussions, in fact can't wait to chat with Marcel about certain subjects. She has common friends, who call to her to join them for a day in Paris before they realize she has St. Loup in tow, friends whom she does not snub.

In other words, although she was a common whore, and still appears to be venal, Rachel is treated rather sympathetically. I find this intriguing. It would have been so easy for Proust in the person of Marcel to dismiss her completely, and he does not. After all, the over-infatuated St. Loup must see something in her.

It's all very intriguing, and I had forgotten all about St. Loup's mistress.

Odette