Proust's commitment to the intimate and almost microscopically detailed reproduction of certain fleeting moods can seem oppressively moony. One moment the narrator is shading in an enchanting character study of the relationship between his invalid great-aunt and her prickly maid, and the next he's going on and on (and on!) about a bunch of hawthorne blossoms. (Or maybe I'm just too much of an Anglophile.) "The Remembrance of Things Past" is a somewhat peculiar fusion of Montaigne-style personal essay and more traditional third-person narration, which makes it the sort of work that's best digested in the variable pacing available to anyone reading in print. I've had a life-long difficulty in engaging with just about every French novelist beside Alexandre Dumas there is something about that culture's valuation of the refined over the genuine that rubs me the wrong way. Proust offers a particular challenge, for both objective and personal reasons. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series (the basis for HBO's "Game of Thrones") and Anthony Powell's famously Proustian 12-volume "A Dance to the Music of Time," deliciously read by Simon Vance.
After all, that's how I've consumed all five doorstops in George R.R. To date, I've yet to get past the second volume, "Within a Budding Grove," in print, but I have high hopes that, by switching to audiobooks, I can vault through the whole sequence of seven novels by the end of 2013 (despite needing to review at least one new book per week for my day job). Scott Moncrieff, as that's the version I'm listening to). For ages I've been meaning to finish Marcel Proust's "The Remembrance of Things Past" (now more commonly translated as "In Search of Lost Time," but I'm going to stick with the titles as translated by C.K. But if you have to make the resolution in the first place, chances are something is standing in your way.įor me, it's time and eye strain. As New Year's resolutions go, vowing to read more ought to be easy - easier, anyway, than making it to the gym on icy January mornings or forgoing that plate of salty, golden French fries.
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