Swann’s Way or the highway

I started reading In Search of Lost Time when it was still called Remembrance of Things Past. That’s how long it’s been. Random House put out a pricey box set in the eighties, in a super-duper new translation, and my friend was working there and got me a crazy deal. Or got Roni a crazy deal, because she bought it for my birthday after I’d got all carried away. Which is the way it is with me, because I read a lot of book reviews and am tragically susceptible to high-brow hype. I think I got about 100 pages into Swann’s Way before I drifted away.

That was 30-odd years ago. But I can still see the box set gathering dust bunnies across the living room at the bottom of a pile of other tony tomes I mostly haven’t read. And now I’ve succumbed to the finger-mustache bloviating about the latest Proust translation, this one that’s vastly superior — more nuanced and natural and oh-so-much truer to the original — and bought the damn thing all over again. For my Kindle (actually, for the Kindle app — the device itself molders in a different dust-bunny-besieged pile, under my TV, where over-hyped tech goes to die).

And, once more, I’m about a hundred pages in (or a truly pathetic-sounding 6%, as the app would have it), and, due to circumstances beyond my control, I’ve drifted.

Again.

And not because I don’t like it. Au contraire. I’m enjoying it immensely. Or I was. And remember enjoying it immensely the first time around. (And not only for what enjoying Proust might say about me.) So this time I’ve been reading much more diligently, going back over the serpentine sentences to lock in my remembrances of his remembrances before I read on — and before I drift out of sight of the narrative shore, into the dreaded narrative doldrums.

And I’m happy to report, with a hundred-pages of absolute certainty, that In Search of Lost Time is poignant and funny and visceral and magisterial and magnificent, all in a surprisingly modern way (Proust as the original VR?), and precisely the near-psychedelic act of remembering that the hype says, and not at all effete or obscurantist or whatever I first imagined, and though it was written more than a century ago, in a vastly different era (of waxed mustaches, if you can imagine), I find myself identifying deeply: the creepy, crabby aunt upstairs is so much like a character in my own life (and my own thinly veiled novel), it’s frightening and thrilling, both.

Anyway, serpentine has always been my kind of sentence.

I’m pretty sure In Search of Lost Time is my favorite novel. And pretty sure that when some fawning future interviewer asks what I deem the most important fiction of the 20th century, I’ll take a quick pull on my briar and say: This. These. The three or four volumes of In Search of Lost Time. And it’ll not only be true, but totally cool.

So what’s with the driftaway, Dobie Gray? Aren’t circumstances always beyond your control? Or has it just become so difficult, in this post-corklined-room existence, to find the time and space to read?

It’s not like I’ve surrendered. I constantly think about the story and remind myself where I am in it. And at the moment that happens to be Combray, just after the old perv who encouraged his daughter’s lesbian piano teacher to live with them wastes away from moral turpitude, right around the time the young fictional perv Marcel spies on the girls humping. I force myself to remember, much as the nonfictional Marcel forced himself. And every page I enjoy his remembering more. But it’s been a few months now since I looked at any page, and, for folks not named Marcel, with less heroic powers of recollection, memory of his memories must soon, perforce, fade.

What’s more, I’m impatient. But beyond the need to go slow here, reading good writing always makes me nervous. Agitated, as much as inspired. Makes me want to drop the book and do good writing of my own, to reassert — in the face of overwhelming beauty and unattainable genius — my eensy-teensy raison d’etre.

The other thing reading makes me do is fall asleep, even if I got a full night’s sleep. Which I haven’t in 32 years, not since the plague of children. So between the narcolepsy and the narcissism, I’m practically an American Hero for finishing any book, let alone the dense three or four volumes of a deeply neurotic, turn-of-the-century (previous century) Frenchman, no matter how natural and nuanced and authentically froggy the translation.

This time, I swear, will be different — as soon as I’m not so tired, as soon as I’ve got a few days off, as soon as I’ve finished my next novel and sold the last one and things settle down at work and with our friend in the hospital, and the demolition in Fairfax is finished, maybe when we go on our pseudo-sabbatical to Amsterdam (no, that’s not for six months). Just as soon as I find the time.

It’s around here somewhere.