In Search of Lost Time

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

>From: robinlandseadel at comcast.net

>And now some 'technical data' concerning my reading process:  I'm on page
>270 of the recent translation of Marcel Proust's "The Prisoner', the fifth 
>book
>of "In Search of Lost Time". It's tough, right about now.

In the next book it will even get tougher. Don't know if you checked out a 
detailed content synopsis or if you worry about spoilers, but since the next 
book's title ("Albertine vanished"? "The Runaway"?) does already hint in a 
certain direction, I may say that there will be a --- temporary --- decline 
of poetic energy after a certain person leaves the book. But you must go on 
and will, if you do, be earning the sweetest fruits in the end!  It's always 
satisfying to finish a really voluminous book, but this is different. It's a 
magical shot injected directly into your brain circuits. Really trippy! It 
has to do with the phenomenology of the there-beings 'time-exposure' 
(Heidegger's "Zeitlichkeit des Daseins"), and I guess that Imre Kertész 
learned here a lot from Proust for writing the impressive finale chapters of 
"Fateless". The final volume (Le Temps retrouvé) brings it all back home in 
a way I have experienced it with no other novel so far. Your payoff will be 
at least as big as with Ulysses.


>Right now, M. de Charlus is being an insufferable
>bitch, and I never really went for full-tilt costume docu-drama before 
>anyway.

Yes, the fascinating old pervert is quite a crazy guy (not primarily in the 
nice sense). In the book he's very important. Charlus is the novel's 
paranoid. He is interpreteting all the time. And one has to follow this 
character into madness when he's furiously stepping on the gentlemen's hat. 
As Deleuze writes in his profound semiological analysis: "Charlus presents 
himself as a giant blinking sign, a huge optical and vocal box: the one who 
listens to Charlus or meets his gaze finds himself in front of a secret that 
has to be revealed, a mystery which must be penetrated and interpreted, 
whereat one anticipates from the beginning that it will reach into madness" 
(own translation from page 137 of the German edition of "Proust et les 
signs"). The narrator Marcel himself he will in the end have saved himself 
by having become a writer. And us readers we can share this with him. At 
least in our imagination.

>Proust's got a thing for mauve---dare I say that he adopts a precious turn 
>of
>phrase, from time to time and sometimes altogether too, too much?  But I
>persevere, because there were unexpected payoffs in the previous four and
>really, truly the man is an exquisite author, particularly on the subject 
>of
>music and the heart.

When you've finished the book you should reward yourself with the French 
original. There's this beautiful one-volume-edition from Quarto Gallimard, 
and you can put the translation next to you (so you don't need a dictionary) 
and re-read your favourite passages in the original flow.

À la vôtre! Kai

Playlist Addition: "Une petite phrase aus dem Film Une amour de Swann" (Hans 
Werner Henze)