proust encore

Hard to imagine Proust as a gripping read, but so far his strategies intrigue me for being stagey and loose. Plot? Not very much in that area. This may be the way memoir works, but when he gives you 100 plus pages of "Combray," the small provincial town the family retires to in the summer, we get a succesion of observations on what life consists of when they spend time there. They seem to be in no compelling order, or none that a good thumping plot would demand. Great social satire. Few are spared the barb of little Marcel's eye, while he of course pursues his impossible pre-adolescent needs and dreams of holding everything as still as possible so that it will not slip off the map of being and into the past. No luck, of course. Everyone is on the treadmill of life, ignoring Marcel's need for eternal incipience, that is, a life always about to be because it is a life forever in the tall shadow of his parents' life.

And the sentences! Never start one that you can't qualify at least four times with parenthetical insertions. Life, after all, is infinitely perceptible. Or, what can be perceived of life knows no end. Is that good? Wrong question, perhaps.

More later on the tight claustrophobia of French middle-class life, the thing that creates Marcel's jail, a jail he and others would not leave if they could. Or so it seems.