I haven't tackled Proust again (for earlier efforts see here and here and here and for my liberation see here).
In all honesty, I probably never will tackle Proust again. I think I understand now that some authors suit some people and some authors suit other people and there is little explanation for this, beyond the differences in human temperament.
Proust is extraordinary, but not the kind of extraordinary that interests me. I could enlarge and start to speculate about the rise of narcissism - or at least an unbalanced interest in the self - and his influence, but, since I haven't finished reading him, I could be way off the mark.
The only thing I am certain of is that I am temperamentally unsuited to a man who chose to bang on quite so nauseatingly about hawthorn.
Nevertheless when I came across a reference to Bernard Pivot and his use of the Proust questionnaire I was intrigued. I can't remember where I first read about it but a quick search of the internet revealed this slavishly adoring article about Proust's own responses to the questionnaire, which was a kind of parlour game in his time (his answer to Question 1. convinces me I will never be able to look at his work without a faint touch of nausea, and his answer to Question 7. reinforces that new conviction) and this.
I think the questionnaire falls under the category of "Quite Fun", which, for me, is more than "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu" will ever do.
There is something wrong with the linked page. The handwritten answers do not line up with those printed below. Or is the handwritten matter not Proust's? I wouldn't know. But for example, in the handwritten area, the favorite authors of prose are George Sand and Aug.(?) Thierry. Printed, one finds Baudelaire and de Vigny for poets, France and Loti for authors of prose.
ReplyDeleteI think the handwritten questionnaire in the photograph is just grabbed, lazily, from Commons & in no genuine way matches the article's text. Sloppy. Annoying. ZMKC
DeleteI am relieved to read this, for a friend and I are trying to read all of Proust and finding it hard going. He hasn't made it through book 1; I am bogged down in book 4. I wouldn't say Proust is awful, but for the life of me, I do not understand those who place him among the all-time greats of world literature. His observations are nearly all banal and his narrative style is overdone and precious. Have his fans not read anything else? To my mind, there are dozens of authors I would place ahead of him, and one short story of Henry James or Eudora Welty contains more wisdom and insight than 1000 pages of this Gallic windbag.
ReplyDeleteI'm beginning to understand - but it's taken me decades - that there are readers who are looking for things in books that I not only don't want to find but actively want to avoid. The most amazing thing is that quite a lot of readers seem to not want to be entertained, to even hate the idea of it - (should that be "want not to be entertained" or is that slightly different? Anyway...) - which is really hard to believe. But I reckon it is true. ZMKC
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