About Marcel Proust

Hello all!  I usually like to go over a little bit about the author and book prior to reading it as well as actually announcing what book I am going to read for the millions of readers following the blog.  This time I have obviously skipped most of the formalities such as finishing the last book, or announcing the new book before doing anything.  However, despite my literary misbehavior I am going to go ahead and provide a brief introduction of Marcel Proust and the book Swann's Way.

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was born near Paris, France on July 10, 1871 and died on November 18, 1922.  Proust was a sickly person who developed asthma at an early age and affected him greatly throughout his life.  It interfered heavily with is attempts at working and being in the military and he used his illness as leverage to secure a multi-year leave of absence from his "job" that he never worked at until they retired him.  He stayed at his parents home for the entire duration and was still there when his parents passed away.  Luckily his parents were well off and left him a considerable inheritance when they passed.  Despite his illness and inability to work (at a library, no less) Proust was able to spend a great deal of time writing and social climbing.  Of all of his essays, stories, and critiques, Proust is best known for his gargantuan work In Search of Lost Time of which Swann's Way is the first volume.  Proust was also a closet homosexual and is respected by some for being one of the first writers in France to openly write about homosexuals. (This does not occur in Swann's Way aside from a brief mention of a lesbian interaction but apparently comes up at length in the fourth book with some characters noticed by the protagonist.)

Swann's Way is part one of a seven volume series revolving around the memories of the Narrator as a child staying at his home in a fictional town called Combray (based on Proust's home near Paris).  The volume (as well as the entire work as a whole) deals heavily on random memories generated by the taste of a madeline cookie dipped in tea and in the involuntary and fleeting nature of memory.  Most of the stories revolve around the Narrator's fascination with nature and observations of the people his parents have dealings with, often with a philosophical tinge.

Ok. There you go.  I hope to have this finished up by the end of April (early  May, at the latest) so look for that soon!  Joe

Just touching base...

After re-reading my January post on La Morte d'Arthur I can still detect the excitement I felt in planning to read that gigantic work.  I can also smell my naivete wafting off me like roadkill.  My eyes were definitely bigger than my stomach in this case. The stories are unusual and fascinating but they are also short and redundant like reading all of Aesop's fables and Grimm's fairy tales in a single read-through.  Don't get me wrong, I actually like the book and how it reads, I just cant do much of it at a time.  What it basically comes down to is that I have had to take breaks from reading it and I am still not nearly finished.  In between "takes" I have squeezed in some sci-fi books and even began another classic.  So,  I have decided to make this a long-term project that I hope to have finished by the end of Summer  (hopefully long before that). In regards to the other classic I'm reading; In my complete ineptitude I allowed myself to randomly pick my next classic off the shelf, not even attempting to adhere to my impromptu book-list from January, and guess what my finger chanced upon?  Swann's Way by Marcel Proust was my choice of folly, and by playing the stoic rather than declaring a mulligan as a wiser man would do, I have chosen to escape one difficult book by choosing another famously mind-numbing one. At least it was, coincidentally, already on the list.  I am hoping that by comparison, La Morte d'Arthur will read like an intense, action packed beach book.  As far as Swann;s Way goes, it slowly becomes more interesting about the 50% mark, but that should not be difficult do do because the first 250 pages essentially describes the countryside surrounding the home of the main character in florid detail and at least 25% of that is dedicated exclusively to describing flowers and sunbeams in a similar fashion. Nevertheless, I hope the remainder of the book will have some value to me as I plan to push through to the end.  I have decided to go ahead and do my author introductory as usual and you can look for that soon.
Thanks, Joe