Rating: 1/5
Review:
Oh, for heavens' sake!
I tried this because I thought that I really ought to read
some Proust. A friend suggested that we
read it at the same time and discuss it, which sounded like a good idea at the
time. I have dutifully slogged my way
through as much as I could bear.
Someone said of Wagner's Parsifal that it's the kind of
opera that starts at six o'clock and
after it has been going three hours you look at your watch and it says 6.20. Well, that's nothing to how I feel about
Swann's Way. Endless, endless pages
about what he thought as a child when trying to sleep, some reasonably well
observed but incredibly laboured social comedy (I use the word comedy in its
loosest sense), monumental quantities of minutiae about uninteresting
characters (in which I include the narrator) and an overriding sense of someone
utterly self-obsessed – and who is determined to visit the obsession
mercilessly on everyone else. I was
irritated and, frankly, bored witless; when I saw that, after a long, serious
struggle through really quite a lot (it seemed to me), my Kindle said "8h
07m left in book" I heard Billy Connolly in my head saying, "Oh, d'ya bloody think so?"
I gave up. Seven volumes
of this? *Seven*? Sheesh! Does anyone know the French for "For
heavens' sake get over yourself"?
And now, following the effortful and emotionally enervating
distress of having composed this piece, reminding me irresistibly of the long
years of suffering in education (the subject of volumes 23-47 of my proposed
masterwork), I feel the distressing stirrings of the need to go and do
something else. And yet, I am in an
agony of paralysed indecision, for I find that I am unable to move, to think,
to live in any meaningful sense before I have received some response, some
word, some show of acknowledgement from my readers, for without such approval
(or it's simulacrum, at the very least) how may my very existence be
continued? My pulse beats and I become
aware of inhaling and absorbing the exquisite torture of the realisation that
no-one may read this, in the way in which, in that moment in which a maitre d'
informs one that no table will be available for ten minutes, a torment of
anguish and crushed hope gives way to the desire to repeat the request, a desire which must be immediately suppressed
as the impulse would… (continué p. 794)
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