On Proust’s birthday
“Certain parts take place in the country, some in one kind of society, others in another kind; some have to do with family life and much of it is terribly indecent.”
The Proust aisle, revisited
Wal-Mart’s madeleines, surprisingly good.
Siebold
And then I saw that I had misspelled Sebald as Siebold.
In the Proust aisle
Madeleines in Wal-Mart.
Pretty Proustian
Involuntary memory and shifting mountains.
Proust Barbie
Lucy Boynton reports that Proust Barbie was cut from Barbie because audiences didn’t get the joke: “it turns out that contemporary audiences don’t know who Proust is” (Rolling Stone).
“Flatteringly, like the dentist”
Sonie Marburg — who’s never, so far as we know, read Proust — drops into the Proustian “we.”
A pallet on the floor
The opening sentence of Jean Stafford’s Boston Adventure announces the key signatures, so to speak, of the novel: D and P. The novel is Dickensian, beginning as the story of a girlhood spent in poverty, and Proustian, beginning with sleep.
Proust and turbines
No wind turbines outside llliers-Combray!
In search of lost passage
I may have found the passage Elif Batuman asked ChatGPT to find.
Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust
“My seconds in duels can tell you whether I behave with the weakness of an effeminate man.”
A new Swann in Love
Comparing translations.
La Fabrique de l’oeuvre
A French National Library exhibition devoted to the evolution of À la recherche du temps perdu .
Proust for all
From the journalist Cath Pound, some encouragement to read Proust: “Why the world’s most difficult novel is so rewarding” (BBC).
Proust on paper and film
Manuscript conservation and a documentary about a group of Proust readers in Buenos Aires.
Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust
“Serious conversation is intended for people who have no intellectual life.”
First glimpses of the little gang
From “Young Girls,” Deborah Treisman’s translation of a passage from the long-lost Proust manuscript now in print as Les soixante-quinze feuillets.
Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust
“My characters do not turn out well; I am obliged to follow them wherever their flaws or their aggravated vices lead me. . . .”
Paving-stones
A passage from Villette.
Writing and dressmaking
Proust and Cather synchronicity.
Giggles and glances
A sentence from Finding Time Again.
Adam Gopnik on Proust
So much strangeness in this essay.
A confession
In the company of all those society folk, at those endless luncheons and soirées, like, say, the one in The Guermantes Way that runs for 132 pages, weren’t you ever bored, Marcel?
Art and speed and haste
A sentence from Finding Time Again.
“A child immediately rises up”
A sentence from Finding Time Again.
Theories
A sentence from Finding Time Again.
"Millionaire cousins“
A sentence from Finding Time Again.
Grammar or logic
A sentence from Finding Time Again.
“Merely contingent”
A sentence from The Fugitive.
Time travel
A sentence from The Fugitive.