Proust on film

I saw the dramatization of Proust's last "book" in Cambridge, MA several years ago.  Catherine Deneuve played Odette, a casting that would never have occurred to me.  The film was quite good. There were no car chases, no explosions, no blood and gore, and I don't think there was a seventeen year old in the house.  Just a hushed, reverent audience. 

Here is a link to an NYTimes article about the man who created the film. A Mild Mannered Maniac. 


The last volume of the great tome is, to my mind, the best, and I found the great denouement utterly thrilling. 


The Other Odette

Why is Everybody Reading Proust?

Well, Proust gets a lot of free PR. Proust and the Squid, How Proust Can Change Your Life--Proust's name in the title of a book is not uncommon.

How many undergraduates read Proust these days? That's when/where I learned about the Narrator. My god, I read parts of Jean Santeuil and all sorts of references. Poulet's Studies in Human Time and ??? I wish I still had the list. Wish I still had my paper. Hmmm. Maybe one more trek through the folders of olde college stuffe.

I doubt that anyone in my writing group has read Proust. Suspect a couple of them may not have even heard of him. But of course, unless you are writing long, long sentences, Proust isn't required for writers. These days, those sentences would be out of favor.

Saturday evening at the Boston Festival of Books, I listened to Orhan Pamuk's address, and tried to think when, except for Proust, I read anything the least bit "literary." Couldn't think of anything going back to The Corrections. That novel, while excellent, did not read as "literary"--think big words and long sentences.

Pamuk, whom I have not read, seemed literary. Maybe literariness is a European thing. Literary Americans? Faulkner was literary. Thomas Wolfe. My mind has gone blank. Who else? Ah, Henry James. Definitely James. The Golden Bowl. Very literary. Is literary a function of writing structure or of subject matter. What makes literary?

Proust is definitely "literary." Here is a link again to a new Proust reading group.

http://thecorklinedroom.wordpress.com/

And here's a link to an opinion about the cork-lined room. I notice the author does not have this blog in his sights. Oh well, no matter.

http://pykk.blogspot.com/2009/10/possessor-possesses-nothing.html

When I climb out from under 2009, I'll read Proust again. Practically salivating. Can't wait to get to the last book, The Past Recaptured, the reward for all that hard reading.

Onward

It Was The Year Everyone Was Reading and Blogging Proust

Another Proust reader and blogger:
http://gaiawriter.blogspot.com/2007/11/on-marcel-proust.html

And yet another:
http://booksinnorthport.blogspot.com/2007/11/when-to-hold-em-when-to-fold-em.html

This reader liked the first and last volumes, Swann's Way and The Past Recaptured. Have to admit these are my faves, too. But one has to merit The Past Recaptured, which is won, so to speak, by reading the whole WORK.

The blogger above, booksinnorthport, has an interesting post. When does one actually abandon a book? When I was younger, I would pursue the book to the bloody end, no matter what. This is how I actually got through Moby Dick and others classics. It was how I got through Proust the first time as an undergraduate, that and the fact that I was writing a senior thesis on a group of writers of whom Proust was one.

I had a bunch of false starts with War and Peace and then one Christmas vacation I read it from cover to cover in about a week. Wanted to weep at the end. No, not from relief, but from the final passages about history.

I am having trouble getting through Three Trapped Tigers, but I will. Works of so-called popular fiction, i.e. genre writing, I abandon after 50 pages if it doesn't grab me. Have a whole shelf of those. Some of the authors are famous.

A book I read recently that I would heartily recommend if The Poisonwood Bible. Just knocked my socks off. Kingsolver gets better and better, and I would love to read her latest non-fiction about growing your own food.

Now I have to make a mad dash through my own latest oeuvre, before sending it off to a publisher who will maybe even like it. One gets so close to one's writing that the perspective just disappears.

In the meantime, I am enjoying the narrator and Albertine and the little band at Balbec. With winter approaching, Balbec seems desireable, non? The sun, the sand, the dining room, the snobs, the parading up and down. Does Balbec have a Strand Promenade? I feel I know these people. That's what a great writer does.

Odette