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A review by jacquesdevilliers
The Prisoner by Marcel Proust
4.0
A critic having written that in Vermeer's View of Delft a little patch of yellow wall was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it in isolation, like a precious work of Chinese art, of an entirely self-sufficient beauty...
'That is how I should have written, he said to himself. My last books are too dry, I should have applied several layers of colour, made my sentences precious in themselves, like that little patch of yellow wall'...
In a heavenly scales he could see, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He could feel that he had rashly given the first for the second.
A proper review of this book is forthcoming, but I'll just say here that there is something especially moving in this quintessentially Proustian comparison between painting and literature, given that this was the first volume of Proust's novel to be published after his death. Yet whatever Proust's doubts, it's clear to me from this volume alone that he more than painted his patch of yellow wall.
'That is how I should have written, he said to himself. My last books are too dry, I should have applied several layers of colour, made my sentences precious in themselves, like that little patch of yellow wall'...
In a heavenly scales he could see, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He could feel that he had rashly given the first for the second.
A proper review of this book is forthcoming, but I'll just say here that there is something especially moving in this quintessentially Proustian comparison between painting and literature, given that this was the first volume of Proust's novel to be published after his death. Yet whatever Proust's doubts, it's clear to me from this volume alone that he more than painted his patch of yellow wall.