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A review by nick_jenkins
In Search of Lost Time: Time Regained by Marcel Proust
5.0
I believe that it is in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home that the father says something like, if you don't read the Recherche before you're thirty, you probably won't. Well, now i don't have to worry.
Seriously, though, Time Regained was my favorite volume of the novel, and it is rather shocking to see how immensely talented Proust is at achieving a range of effects that we surely have not yet seen: his description, for instance, of a zeppelin attack on Paris is astonishing, reminiscent of Wells in War of the Worlds.
This volume also is denser, I feel, in Proust's greatest strength, his combined mode of social observation / philosophical meditation that is neither about people or characters nor about ideas or truths, but about habits and norms. The closing passages about aging, for instance, are not really about how the specific characters of the novel have aged, nor about the metaphysical specter of the aging process, but about the conventional perceptions that people make use of to see aging as a set of recognizable deviations from a norm of youth, and about the equally conventional strategies by which people try to evade or confuse that code of perception.
Those passages are, incidentally, perhaps the best answer to Alison Bechdel's father: there may be something to what he says, but why that is (or isn't) is less about age than it is about our fears about the norms of aging, the habits that we fear we cannot break once we have settled into life. The novel itself, as the story of its own composition, reflects a late triumph over habit--Marcel breaks off from his procrastinatory life to commit himself to real writing. The cost is great, but it is also, I feel, an inspiration.
Seriously, though, Time Regained was my favorite volume of the novel, and it is rather shocking to see how immensely talented Proust is at achieving a range of effects that we surely have not yet seen: his description, for instance, of a zeppelin attack on Paris is astonishing, reminiscent of Wells in War of the Worlds.
This volume also is denser, I feel, in Proust's greatest strength, his combined mode of social observation / philosophical meditation that is neither about people or characters nor about ideas or truths, but about habits and norms. The closing passages about aging, for instance, are not really about how the specific characters of the novel have aged, nor about the metaphysical specter of the aging process, but about the conventional perceptions that people make use of to see aging as a set of recognizable deviations from a norm of youth, and about the equally conventional strategies by which people try to evade or confuse that code of perception.
Those passages are, incidentally, perhaps the best answer to Alison Bechdel's father: there may be something to what he says, but why that is (or isn't) is less about age than it is about our fears about the norms of aging, the habits that we fear we cannot break once we have settled into life. The novel itself, as the story of its own composition, reflects a late triumph over habit--Marcel breaks off from his procrastinatory life to commit himself to real writing. The cost is great, but it is also, I feel, an inspiration.