On the Road with Proust

Kristen Stewart on the Road  Proust and  Kerouac are an unlikely pair, maybe even an unholy won, and I don't think      the Beats read Proust.  Well, maybe they did; who am I to say? 

For some  (old) but dishy gossip, with only one small mention of Proust, here is a book you probably don't need to read after you read the review.   Three American Girls in Paris                                                

It must be the silly season with all these frivolous mentions of Proust.   I am sorry to report that my reading of the masterpiece has been halted due to other reading, houseguests, travel, getting a book ready for publication, cooking and entertaining and well, you know . . . stuff.  But  I'm just stalled not bailing.

By the way, the town of Foxborough is beseiged by big, bad wolf Steve Wynn, who wants to build a behemoth casino here.   We would rather read Proust than deal with drunks, hookers,  and pawn shops.  I mean, really.

Odette, somewhat on her high horse. 

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

Proust and Kerouac revisited

So, all summer I was on a Kerouac kick, along with readings of Proust. Seemed like an unlikely duo. Lately, working through some New Yorkers from the fall, I found "Drive, He Wrote," by Louis Menand.

On the whole, this is a very sympathetic review of Kerouac and "On The Road." But what stopped me in my tracks was the following sentence.

"'On the Road' is as self-consciously a work of literature as 'A la Recherche du Temps Perdu'--and Proust was a writer whom both Kerouac and Cassady emulated, someone who turned his life into literature." Louis Menarnd, New Yorker Magazine, Oct. 1, 2007.

Maybe my reading Jack and Marcel side by side wasn't so weird after all. How did I not notice this, now, when I certainly would have noticed it when I was 21? I don't read so analytically anymore, no longer being an English major. But what a stunning observation.

Truth be told, I did not find Dean Moriarty aka Neal Cassady so enchanting this time around. Manipulative was the word that came to mind. Something I didn't see at 21. This is a good argument for reading works of literature several times in the course of your life. Something new always pops up.

Back to Proust. He may be just the antidote to the holidays.

Odette