And some of it, too, may be consumer reaction against the “dumbing down” of the publishing business in a world more and more dominated by the media corporations. Or with the self-absorption of the Boomer generation, to whom those genres may seem particularly relevant. Or with the current vogue of memoir and autobiography, of which Proust stands as the master. (And if so, what a vindication for Proust, who may finally be gaining the more general audience he always felt he should have!) Some of it may have to do with the popular success of De Botton’s book, stressing Proust’s relevance for today, and designed as a classy self-help book for a general audience. I suspect the reason may lie more in the area of popular culture than literary taste. While publication of the new definitive edition may supply the literary basis for this Proustian renaissance, it can hardly explain it. (A shorter version of this review can be found in Proust’s Way.) And to add to this, in 1989, Pléiade/Gallimard brought out the final installment of Tadié’s mammoth, four-volume, expanded (!) French edition of A la recherche – a project slammed by Shattuck in The New York Review of Books as a misbegotten venture in “hypertrophization”, of use only to scholars, not readers of Proust. To what do we owe this resurgence of interest in the novel? After all, in its sublimely prolix style and rarified subject matter (not to mention its formidable page count: six volumes in the latest Modern Library English translation, totaling 4,347 pages, not including addenda, notes and indices) it can hardly be considered an easy read. ![]() And last year saw the critically-acclaimed movie adaptation of the epic’s final volume, Time Regained. The documentary Marcel Proust: A Writer’s Life, produced by Carter, was released in 1992. Another chapter of Swann’s Way, “Swann in Love,” was made into a movie, starring Jeremy Irons, in 1983. Nor have film treatments of Proust and his novel been lacking. ![]() Most of these – Heuet, De Botton, Rose, White and Shattuck – are aimed at general readers rather than academic scholars Heuet’s, in fact, is a comic-book adaptation of the first chapter of Swann’s Way. ![]() Besides the two under review here, there have been: in 1997, Alain De Botton’s delightfully original venture into Proustian self-help, How Proust Can Change Your Life, and biographer Phyllis Rose’s memoir, The Year of Reading Proust in 1998, Malcolm Bowie’s critical study, Proust Among the Stars in 1999, Edmund White’s introductory study, Marcel Proust, and Proust’s Lesbianism, by Elisabeth Ladenson and last year, William Carter’s full-length biography, Marcel Proust: A Life, and Roger Shattuck’s Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time (as it is now titled in English). Over the past few years, a number of new books have come out in English on the subject of Marcel Proust and his great novel, A la recherche du temps perdu.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |