Page: 615 (ish. I've finished, but am not with the book)
Pages read since last post: 335 (also ish)
Days reading Proust: 83 (23,7,44,9)
Books read since last post: 1 (MacMillan, Seize the hour: When Nixon met Mao)
Weeks spent agonising about jobs: 2 (to date)
This was rather good fun. The genuine emergence of a discernable plot, though of course not the critical purpose of this novel, is a great help to those of us with a more literal mindset than Marcel. It's not perfect though - the opening section is tedious - and some elements are irritating, especially the end with the frankly blameless Albertine being buggered around with the narrator's silly posturing (not sure if these are perfectly chosen words).
Still, the meat of the novel is excellent, with the return of the Verdurins and the author's chief comic of the last volume - Charlus - being brought for a more extended turn and reduced to a somewhat more pathetic level. The really fascinating element of the work is however inaccessible to us. The Sodomy of the title is far less shocking to us that it would have been to our parents let alone the readership of the '20s and the force and power of the narrative Proust is trying to convey is thus often either mundane or comic, when one has the feeling that it wasn't to many of the authorship. I'm not sure this would be true of the whole audience and suspect that many of Proust's circle might have been closer to us than we think, but it is a dimension missing nonetheless.
MacMillan's book misses a dimension too and lacks both grit and tension. The relationship between China and America and their clashes in the late twentieth century is enduringly interesting and very relevant. Their ideologies, themselves internally conflicted and opposed make the subject a complex one. This book does not do it justice, and we have instead decent enough portraits of the main protagonists with context shoe horned in. The result is a bit of a mess. A shame, her Peacemakers was one of my favourite politics books of recent times and is far superior.
More than ever before, I am keen to move onto the next. I think that the programme of official start dates has now collapsed given variations in pace. I suggest we that we now simply record days from the reading of the first sentence of a novel to the last.
I am not sure about start times for The Captive. Both Easter weekend and my holiday on the 5th April are possible start dates. Either way, I should have decided about my next job by then, but no promises.
Sometime, late of an evening in March 2007, a regrettable decision was taken. As a consequence of this decision three friends, Dr Andrew Murray, Mr William Garrood (Member of Surrey CCC) and Dr Alexis Haynes would competitively read Marcel Proust's masterpiece A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. The aforementioned Proustanauts were later joined in their endeavour by Mr Elliot Smith, who, aided in part by a bout of pneumonia, promptly overtook them all. The saga continues...
1 comment:
Good stuff as always, sir. Completely agree re: start dates. I think you and I will be roughly synchronised in any case. How is M. Smith playing vol. 6? It makes sense to begin each volume on a day when you can get a decent start (unlike this volume, of which I read 12 pages on the bus to work and then ignored it for 3 days). Am now ~370 pages in and have 2 train journeys in the next few days, so am optimistic. Interestingly, for all the narrator's revelations, my greatest thus far is that I actually quite like the Verdurins after all. Against the ridiculous pomp and posturing of the aristos (particularly the ever-so-tedious Basin Guermantes) they're like a breath of fresh air. Well-mannered, intelligent, cultured, natural. Snobbish? Yes, but frankly, who isn't in this book (Francoise excepted)? Compared to Mme Verdurin, everybody else just comes across like Hyancinth Bucket.
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