Moments of the radiance of the eternal caught on paper.

books:


	• In Search of Lost Time: Proust 6-pack (Proust Complete) Marcel Proust Modern Library, 2003 average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The most important literary work of the 20th century

I finished Proust's magnum opus a couple of years ago. I read Swann's Way, then got about a quarter of the way through Within a Budding Grove, before stopping and taking a year's hiatus. When I returned to it I read straight through the remaining 6 volumes. Proust became for me, not so much a duty, or even a quest, but an addiction. There is really not much to add other than the fact that these books affected me more than any other books I have read. Once you are drawn in there is no escape. What one encounters within are some of the most fascinating and frustrating people one can imagine, and the most profound ideas and greatest insights on human nature ever recorded.

There are a number of themes explored here..memory, fidelity, love, obsession, jealousy, homosexuality, and the nature of art. It has been designated as semi autobiographical, but maybe it is the greatest autobiography ever written, since it portrays in detail, the truest possible representation of the author's heart, mind, and soul. It is perhaps, the most important and influential literary work of the 20th century.

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Marcel Proust & my book "Archetypes for Writers"

Like others who've read and reviewed Proust's opus here, I did not read it in one consistent long read. I read the first ten pages and put it down for a year. I then read up to page 100 and put it down again for six months. Thereafter, pregnant with my first child, I read through all the rest.

I found Proust immeasurably easy and pleasant to read. The long sentences are almost musical and facilitate rather than impede understanding of Proust's deep insights.

Further, despite Proust's own unhappiness, I have never been happier reading a book. Nor have I ever felt so "let into" a person's life as I did reading him.

But, as important as my joy in reading Proust was the fact that it was Proust's masterpiece -- and most especially the last volume (Past Recaptured, by the old title) and particularly Chapter 3 of that volume -- that confirmed much of what I already secretly and silently knew and had begun developing into a method for finding one's own already-existing characters inside oneself, which I had already started teaching and continued to teach for twenty years (first in my own business and then at the New School University in NYC) and finally developed into my book Archetypes for Writers: Using the Power of Your Subconscious.

Proust's value for me was not in his exquisitely minute and drawn-out descriptions of drinking tea or misstepping on a cobblestone (which both triggered the reliving of lost moments for Proust). It is a misunderstanding of Proust to think that that is all he is about. (There was, in fact, an entire acting method developed out of this view (called "method acting").)

Rather, I found Proust's understanding of character valuable. He knew the power of juxtaposition -- which he called "mental gymnastics" and "the miracle of analogy."

I found his articulation of the "extra-temporal being" or "the man freed from the order of time" valuable -- that which I have called to my students: the "author self," the self that knows the whole story of all one's characters: the beginning, the middle, the end -- without having to wait for anything to happen -- a knowledge that almost presupposes the non-existence of time, in an Einsteinian sense -- and something which I have found is naturally developed through the use of the skill I called "arkhelogy" or "doing archetypes."

The habit or skill of "being in the moment" -- something that is a primary skill enumerated in my book -- is also something of what Proust reveals (he calls it a "minute freed from the order of time")

Proust practiced suspending moments in his mind in order to reclaim his past, but it is also a central skill possessed by all great novelists -- for, how do you experience the life of another if you do not grasp and suspend in your own mind the moments in which that person lives and breathes?

And this brings me to another concept that Proust knew and realized in his work (but did not express in the way I do), which was something I had learned from my years in the theater: analogy. Proust talked about analogy in the context of the juxtaposition of two moments. But analogy is also about making analogies between oneself and others (something which Proust called "substitutions"). In other words, finding how to "relate" to another, how to feel what the other feels. This, of course, is a human ability, but it is also a skill that can and should be encouraged and practiced. Proust achieved this level of understanding of his fellow humans to a high degree.

Finally, there is Proust's recognition that "in fashioning a work of art we are by no means free, that we do not choose how we shall make it but that it is pre-existent to us and therefore we are obliged, since it is both necessary and hidden, to do what we should have to do if it were a law of nature, that is to say to discover it." Similarly, one of the main premises in my book is that one's character's and their stories already exist and that one needs only to learn how to find them -- which is, of course, what all the rest of Proust's novel is about (and my exercises teach one to do).

I owe a great debt to Proust. Apart from my sense of love for his language, his words, his phrases, not to mention his insights into people and events, Proust was for me the major impetus behind the development of both the book "Archetypes for Writers" and the course out of which the book grew.

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Moments of the radiance of the eternal caught on paper.

If someone told me ten years ago that one day I would read 4,000 pages of dense, hypeliterate ramblings, filled with single sentences that sometimes go on for at least ten pages, I would have thought myself more crazy than the guy who wrote them. Two years after reading all of Proust, incredibly, I find myself longing to spend afternoons again immersed in it. Such is the beauty of this momumental work.

While James Joyce's Ulysses deserves to be considered the best and greatest novel of the 20th century, I think it's fair to say that it's doubtful that any writer will ever reach the majesty and breathtaking beauty found in Proust's "In Search of Lost Time". Proust is not great for the 20th c., it's great for all time.

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On reading Proust.

I've just finished reading The Search for Lost Time and I'd like to share a few thoughts.

First, commit to reading the whole thing, all seven volumes, all million+ words. However if the commitment frightens you (as it should) first read Swann's Love, the middle part of the first volume.

Second, if you commit don't be afraid to take a break and leave the book aside. I began reading it fifteen years ago, and read Swann's Love several times before finally getting a one volume omnibus and reading the whole thing. It took me eight months, during which I freely allowed myself to read other books.

Third, don't read Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life until you're reached the final volume. It's a wonderful book, but if you want to read the Search, then De Botton's little book is a "digestif" that will help you put Proust in perspective.

Fourth, you don't have to read Proust. No one does. If you don't enjoy reading the Search, leave it alone. Proust never liked the title "The Search for Lost Time" and I think he might have actually preferred the now discredited original English translation title "Remembrance of Things Past".* In French Lost Time (Temps Perdu) implies a waste of time, and Proust was very conscious of having wasted the first forty years of his life.

Lastly, I wouldn't worry too much about the translation. I read the Search in French and it struck me that translating Proust wouldn't be much harder than reading him. The essence of Proust's style is not dramatic rhetoric, it is patient and painstaking descriptions and explanations. He wants the reader to understand something very complex and subtle: his or her own self. You'll find the drama in his philosophy. His sentences are long, convoluted, dreamy, full of meandering turns, but Proust doesn't use French the way, for instance, La Fontaine or Hugo do. Most of Proust's meaning will survive the translation, very little will be lost.

Vincent Poirier, Tokyo

*I was wrong there, Proust hated the "Remembrance..." title. See the comments for details.

Vincent

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Lost Time? Not at all.

Reading Proust is a major undertaking, a life-changing event for some, if only the committment of time is considered. This edition is superbly translated from the French, and loses very little (as my undergraduate French is concerned). The text[s] allow one immerse in Proust and the turn-of-the-century life of an upper class family. As an academic I see so many uses for this material, but as a reader it's a pleasurable experience to take in a true genius who can spend seven wonderful pages describing and elaborating on taking tea. Well-worth the small amount of money.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin?s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff?s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of À la recherche du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).

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