A Very Long Book

Last night around 1 a.m., I joined the small and pedantic club of People Who Finished In Search of Lost Time. Alex suggested I share my thoughts. Would I recommend this feat of endurance to others?

Well, only if you enjoy feats of endurance. I myself have been known to watch an entire Ken Burns documentary in a sitting and attend bikram yoga classes in the hideous Philadelphia summer (not to mention personal quests of the "I will drink this whole bottle of wine and NO ONE CAN STOP ME" variety). For what it's worth, yoga classes are a much, much bigger waste of time and money than Proust. Seriously, let this stand as my public vow not to spend money on yoga ever again. It's just stretching. Christ.

So assuming you like to set long-term goals: Yeah. Do it. Read the book. It's kind of...awesome.

For starters, it is gay as hell. It's so fascinating to me that this book isn't ghettoized in some Special Interest section in Borders, you know? I suspect this has a lot to do with the fact that not so many people make it past the first couple sections, and homosexuality doesn't become a major theme until Sodom and Gomorrah. Sure, everyone knows the author was gay, and there are all those theories that Albertine = Albert, gasp, whatever. But seriously: it's kind of incredible that the work is considered a major pillar of modernism first and of queer literature second. Nearly every male character besides the narrator turns out to be a homosexual (or "invert" in the book's lingo) sooner or later; Marcel's whole obsession with keeping Albertine captive is based on his fear that she sleeps with women -- a fear which turns out to be thoroughly justified. Proust's meditations on the life of a gay man in pre-war Paris high society are interesting enough on their own to merit a stab at reading.

But interest in that theme -- or any other particular theme that strikes your fancy, like the study of aristocratic society and its fluctuations, or French anti-semitism, or the nature of art -- isn't gonna get you through several thousand pages, because there are bound to be huge sections about nothing but precisely what doesn't interest you (for me: reallllly long dinner party conversations about contemporary political/academic affairs, the Dreyfus stuff sometimes excepted). I advocate skimming. You have to be willing to go with it though; as a friend of mine who somehow read the whole thing in high school and several times since has put it, it's sort of like living an entire life along with someone. Life is boring sometimes, and doesn't that just really mean we are sometimes conscious of time passing?

Proust doesn't really spell it out til the end (and when he does, it's a bit strange, to have read so many many pages and then have his views on literature laid out so succinctly and the whole story wrapped up in an and-then-I-wrote-the-book-that-you-now-hold-in-your-hands sort of convention), but in a way the characters are the least important part. As he puts it, "in a book which tried to tell the story of a life it would be necessary to use not the two-dimensional psychology which we normally use but a quite different sort of three-dimensional psychology...the mighty dimension of Time which is the dimension in which life is lived."

So yeah, according to the Internet there are over 2,000 characters in In Search of Lost Time, but you only need to bother remembering the names of a dozen or so. And it's only how they change over time in relation to each other that really matters. And Albertine -- the more you read about her the less you know. She only becomes increasingly fragmented and increasingly internal to the narrator, until she's not a person at all but an infinitely multiplying memory: "In order to be consoled I would have to forget not one, but innumerable Albertines. When I had succeeded in bearing the grief of losing this Albertine, I must begin again with another, with a hundred others."

It's the exact opposite of what any self-respecting fiction teacher would say -- they want characters to emerge slowly, to become whole through your masterful writerly observations. But here the characters disintigrate! This book is crazy!


Well. Goodness I've been prattling on, although long-windedness is appropriate enough here. And it's not like I can exactly bring this stuff up in casual conversations with all the new Pittsburgh friends I hope to make. It'd be like tattooing I AM AN ASS on my forehead. Let me just say, as soon as I finished, the first thing I thought -- and I realize this may be some form of literary Stockholm Syndrome -- was "I want to read it again."


next time: DIVORCE RANCHES!!