The Proust Project, in which I attempt to change my life by reading through Proust in one year

 

When I was an innocent young lass, I decided that by the time I turned 33 I would know Everything.

I would be confident. I would be intelligent. I would know how to cook pork chops without making them dry. I would know how to buy car insurance. I would understand the difference between who and whom. I would be an expert at bridge. I would finish the New York Times crossword puzzle without help.

I turned 35 last Saturday and must face the unpleasant fact that I am at least -- and this is being deliriously optimistic -- two years behind schedule in knowing Everything. I am not confident, or intelligent, and my pork chops are always dry. I don't know what kind of car insurance I have, nor who (whom?) I would contact to find out. I can't play bridge. I gave up on the crossword puzzle.

It would all be rather depressing if I hadn't discovered the one thing I can do to make up for all that lost time. It's a thing hardly anyone else living has done, and one that -- so I've heard -- will change my life for good: I can read all seven volumes of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. In one year.

I've long believed there are only about five people walking the earth at any given moment who have read the entire 3,000-plus pages and million and a half words of In Search of Lost Time. And some book critics consider that number of readers a high estimate.

According to a 2009 World Book Day survey, Mr. Proust's alleged masterpiece is the 8th most common book for people to lie about having read. One of the first publishers to read Mr. Proust's manuscript responded with the bracing words, "..I may be dead from the neck up, but rack my brains as I may I can't see why a chap should need thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep."

Publishing house reader Jacques Madeleine was even more cutting:

At the end of seven hundred and twelve pages of this manuscript, after innumerable griefs at being drowned in unfathomable developments and irritating impatience at never being able to rise to the surface -- one doesn't have a single, but not single clue of what this is about. What is the point of all this? What does it all mean? Where is it all leading? Impossible to know anything about it! Impossible to say anything about it!

When Evelyn Waugh began trekking through the text he remarked,  "I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective." And the Guardian's Germaine Greer certainly considers Mr. Proust's ponderings as An Excellent Way to Waste Time. In 2009 she wrote:

If you haven't read Proust, don't worry. This lacuna in your cultural development you do not need to fill. On the other hand, if you have read all of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, you should be very worried about yourself. As Proust very well knew, reading his work for as long as it takes is temps perdu, time wasted, time that would be better spent visiting a demented relative, meditating, walking the dog or learning ancient Greek.

There are, as in all things subject to the absurd eccentricities of human taste, readers who believe In Search of Lost Time a masterpiece. Somerset Maugham called it the greatest work of fiction to date. Graham Greene said Mr. Proust was the finest novelist of the twentieth century. 

 

But it wasn't my belief that In Search of Lost Time would be the best thing I've ever read -- or even that I lack a demented relative or an interest in meditation or ancient Greek or dog walking -- that convinced me I must conquer Mr. Proust before I turn 36.

It was, first, that reading Proust represents the ultimate in literary one-upmanship. I like to imagine there isn't a single literary dispute I won't be able to end with these magic words:  "Yes, you have a point but, I read Proust." Disagree with my take on Ian McEwan? On Wuthering Heights? On the Reviewerspeak Awards? Yes, but I've read Proust. See what I mean? It's the supreme bookish argument-stopper.

The second, is Mr. Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life. I've read my share of self-help books, and while they promise to get me organized, to help me make friends and impress people, and to render me highly effective, none tantalize me with the same delights as Mr. de Botton says I will reap from plowing through Proust: How to Love Life Today, How to Suffer Successfully, How to Read for Yourself.

And on page 31 of his book, Mr. de Botton claims that In Search of Lost Time's fifth volume, The Captive, contains a sentence so long that, when printed out in standard-sized text, it could wrap around the base of a wine bottle seventeen times. This is the sort of thing that simply cries out for practical experimentation. What size text? What font? What vintage? What recommended blood alcohol level? I feel it is my peculiar calling to determine these details, and at speed.

I'm not going to attempt to read the book in the original French. My French is stubbornly 1A. I once trained under a hoity post-doctorate student (this was in my Other Life as a Neophyte Medical Researcher) who was from Quebec and on whom I used to practice my French. "You," she told me one day, "have the worst French accent I have ever heard. And your grammar is awful. You are practically unintelligible." Because she didn't like me and because I didn't like her, I used to force her into torturous Beginner French conversations that went on for hours and drove her slightly insane.

My French hasn't advanced much since that time, so I'm going with the C.K. Scott Moncrieff's translation (à la Vintage International), one that even Ms. Greer deigns to acknowledge renders Mr. Proust's writing with "the right pace and rhythm."

According to Patrick Alexander in his excellent Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time: A Reader's Guide to Remembrance of Things Past (a book that will be my close companion on this Proust expedition), the book is

like a beautiful garden filled with delights but hidden behind a forbidding wall. The wall is too high to scale and the gate is jealously guarded.

Even ignoring the disturbing echoes of Song of Solomon that this brings to mind (echoes Proust would, no doubt, have found highly interesting), it's obvious a book of this weight and sheer length requires a bit of summarization before naive readers leap in. In Search of Lost Time is actually seven longish books -- Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way, Cities of the Plain, The Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained -- and a number of people have attempted to summarize all seven in one go.

Here's the Monty Python's Flying Circus version from their 1972 All-England Summarize Proust competition:

Very nice. I'm certain the winner there was more successful than I would have been.

Here is one, rather more serious Proust summarization, that features the author of Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time and various readers giving an under-600 word synopsis of all seven books:

Doesn't sound too bad, right? Even a little shocking in parts. The trouble with starting Proust, as many disgusted and disillusioned readers have discovered before me, is the first 40 pages.

Remember that English professor of yours who insisted one of the most important parts of any piece was writing a strong, interesting introduction that pulls the reader in? Mr. Proust must have slept through that lecture. Mr. Alexander blames the first "apparently formless and abstract" 40 pages of Swann's Way as "the reason that many people never progress further into the book." These pages function as a sort of literary bottleneck, possibly designed to shunt off the less devoted readers. Think of them as the novel equivalent of the first semester of college Organic Chemistry: if you can make it past this, you can make it.

Here is one publishing house reader's 48 word summary of the book's initial 17 pages:

A man has insomnia. He turns over in bed, he recaptures his impressions and hallucinations of half-sleep, some of which have to do with the difficulty of getting to sleep when he was a boy in his room in the country house of his parents in Combray.

After attacking these 40 pages, I confess I'm surprised that anyone has ever managed to make it past the first nine pages, much less made it to the 40 page mark. How ironic that Mr. Proust is expounding on sleeplessness in this mind-bending narrative since I know of few sections of text that could function as a better insomnia cure. It's more effective than Valium.

The narrator wakes up after dozing off unexpectedly quickly. He drowsily imagines himself to be a character in a book; he hears a train whistle and imagines the thoughts of travelers; he imagines the nighttime agonies of invalids; he thinks about women (following this corker of a sentence: "Sometimes, too, as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, a woman would be born during my sleep from some strain in the position of my thighs."); he remembers waking up in Combray; he remembers waking up at Mme de Saint-Loup's country house; he remembers rooms he woke up in during the summer; he remembers rooms he woke up in during the winter; he remembers the objects in these respective rooms; he ponders the position of the sun and moon upon waking in each of these rooms; he recalls being terrified of the great-uncle who used to pull his curls when he was a child; he goes on at length about how memory is the magic rope that pulls us out of bestial animal consciousness and into humanity.

And this is all just in the first nine pages.

The narrator then settles his attentions on his childhood in Combray and the peculiar wretchedness he suffered when he was sent to bed, waiting, sometimes in vain, for his mother to come kiss him goodnight. He would get so worried about not getting this kiss, he would fret about it all day. Mr. Proust seems to been an unnaturally broody and unhappy child and he dwells on each facet of his childhood displeasure in masochistically loving detail. 

But this is where the narrative then begins to pick up some speed (if acceleration from complete motionless inertia to continental drift can accurately be termed acceleration). The reader meets the family members at Combray: the brainy father; the mother eager not to tick the father off; the hearty grandfather; the grandmother; the great-aunt who gives the grandfather liquor that he isn't supposed to have, then calls for the grandmother to "Come in and stop your husband drinking brandy!"; the grandmother's sisters who have such little interest in gossip that Mr. Proust slyly suggests their ears have atrophied; and the family cook, Francoise, who I can already tell is going to be a favorite character of mine.

Despite Mr. Proust's earlier dip into brain-numbing boredom, his writing about the family is witty and funny. He is an exceptionally good observer of human quirks and relates them with just the slightest touch of farce. When describing Francoise's inexplicable refusal to do certain things the family asks of her, he writes:

...she possessed a code at once imperious, abundant, subtle, and uncompromising on points themselves imperceptible or irrelevant, which gave it a resemblance to those ancient laws which combine such cruel ordinances as the massacre of infants at the breast with prohibitions of exaggerated refinement against 'seething the kid in his mother's milk' or 'eating of the sinew which is upon the hollow of the thigh.'

I made it through those first 40 pages and, despite some rough patches, I admit that I liked it. Astonishingly, I want to read more. I haven't yet earned to Love Life Today or how to Suffer Successfully as Mr. de Botton promises I will, but I've got some 3,000 pages left to be thoroughly schooled in those delights. And by the end of all this literary effort, I had better know Everything or I'll know the reason why. What fun it will be to embark on my 36th year of life as a veteran of Proust AND omniscient! I'll be just in time to start fretting over all the other things I haven't read.

Follow along, if you like, either here at the Examiner page or on your personal Proust trek. By the time we get to the third volume or so, I'm expecting we'll have to set up a support group.

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