read proust

I started to read ‘In Search of Lost Time’ on the day before my sixteenth birthday. Of course I had no idea what I was getting myself into – I only knew that my English teacher, whom I hated, had never done it, and said that I wouldn’t be able to. Being innately obstinate, that was enough for me.

It has had a profound effect on me, and particularly the section when Marcel realizes that he has become old, and that he still has not really even started what he spent most of his adult life putting off. Kind of ironic, in the way that I always put off reading the next bit because those long sentences and unpronounceable French names are so exhausting.

Still, I’m pleased that I finished it :)

i am reading ‘swann’s way’.
it is comfortably boring, in a very interesting way.
i am still at the first bit, in which the narrator talks about being in bed. that goes on for 40 pages, i hear.
my friend D. facebook’ed that he was reading proust this summer.
turns out, he was only kidding and trying to sound all pretentious.
he has a master’s degree in french lit and is incredulous that i am reading/trying to read proust. ha!
(now….where did i leave that dilbert comic?...dilbert good too and so funny and very few boxes to make his points)

I’m a pretty avid reader and don’t shy away from lengthy endeavors. I picked up the first volume about a month ago and am now afraid that I am attention deficient. I have yet to pick up on the development of a plot. I am determined to read this.

I have just begun reading In Search of Lost Time: Volume I by Marcel Proust. These are the longest sentences I have ever read and it has been a little distracting. I have to readjust the circuits of my brain to get used to it. Other than that, the language is beautiful. I only wish that I could read it in the original French.

Encouragement would be appreciated. :)

For the Barbarians.

Finished. I reread passages to make the book more linear for me.

This is a story within a fictional empire that exists in a timeless, somewhat feral world. This Empire centres around the trade of provisions and the protection against attacks from the Barbarians who live on the outskirts of the Empire. The narrator is a magistrate who oversees the fort. He is forced to examine his loyalty to the Empire when a sinister colonel arrives one day to gather information from nomadic traders about supposedly imminent Barbarian attacks. The colonel’s method of interrogation – torture – leaves the magistrate unsure of his purpose within the Empire. In the aftermath of the torturing, one captive dies and another, a young woman, is left behind blinded and crippled.
The magistrate, for unknown reasons, attempts to bond with the girl in a ritual that is almost but not quite romantic. He then sets out to return the girl to her tribe, and subsequently suffers an accusation of treason by the colonel. Armies who have arrived to destroy the Barbarians take him prisoner. His own subsequent degradation and torture makes him a sort of fallen hero, one that forces him to examine how and why he is willing to suffer for what he believes in, as confused as it may or may not be.

It’s not out of step as far as Coetzee novels go, in their spare, descriptive exploration of degradation and redemption.

An attempt again at Proust, but concentration was off. I went back to Waiting for the Barbarians, but it was an off day. Waiting is not my favourite book. I admit I’m going through it for its style. It is spare and yet densely lyrical. I know someone who writes like this, though I am not sure he realises it.
I will write a review when I finish, maybe after the weekend.

Then Proust when my thoughts clear.

but I am reading J.M.Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.

Proust at last! It’s going to be a long, long ride. I tried to cozy up to the first chapter, but it felt like I was thinking with a sock. Proust composes the longest sentences known to humankind.

Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee. Another remarkable and bizarre book. I found the last paragraph unsatisfying, so I reread the last two chapters. There was still something incomplete. But it is a tiny blemish on a masterwork.

Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee.
This, like Elizabeth Costello, is one of those books that needs to be drawn out, savoured. It is delicious. I read, absorb, synthesize. I am imbued with its peculiar cadence, its ease of impossibility.

And Elizabeth Costello has appeared as a character!