Month: November 2013

One hundred years ago this week, Proust published Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way), the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Richard Lea ruminates on what draws Proust aficionados back to the seven-volume novel again and again:

The memories that the narrator recalls over the course of seven volumes include childhood anguish in the country, an intrigue with a courtesan, a portrait of high-society entertaining, an exploration of fin de siècle gay life, a relationship doomed by jealousy and more and more and more. It’s a novel so voluminous, so capacious, so complete you can spend weeks, months or even years submerged in its crystalline waters. When you surface – gasping a little from the spectacular dénouement – you find that the world you have just left seems big enough, mighty enough to encompass the world around you, to measure up to life itself. For about a year or so after I finished Le Temps retrouvé I couldn’t read another novel without thinking Proust had written it already. It’s a universe that you are obliged to explore at the languid pace of Proust’s serpentine prose, snaking from enumeration towards explication, from description into deviation.

If you’ve attempted to crack the novel and been turned off, you’re not alone, as Adrian Tahourdin recounts:

As is well known, André Gide turned the novel down for the [literary magazine] Nouvelle Revue Française, thinking it, on the evidence of the sections he skimmed, the work of a snobbish dilettante – a decision he was to regret for the rest of his life (and a lesson to all publishers’ readers maybe); by 1918, he was writing in his Journal of “Proust’s marvellous book, which I was rereading”, almost as if in a quest for private redemption for his earlier misjudgement.

Fortunately another publisher, Bernard Grasset, stepped in. William Carter writes in his mammoth and invaluable Marcel Proust (2002) that Grasset regarded the publication of Proust’s work as a “business deal” and had tried to read it “but found it impenetrable”. He told a friend “it’s unreadable; the author paid the publishing costs”.

Colin Marshall marks the centennial by digging up a letter from a 16-year-old Proust to his grandfather, pleading for 13 francs to cover a disappointing visit to a brothel:

I so needed to see if a woman could stop my awful masturbation habit that Papa gave me 10 francs to go to a brothel. But first, in my agitation, I broke a chamber pot: 3 francs; then, still agitated, I was unable to screw. So here I am, back to square one, waiting more and more as hours pass for 10 francs to relieve myself, plus 3 francs for the pot. But I dare not ask Papa for more money so soon and so I hoped you could come to my aid in a circumstance which, as you know, is not merely exceptional but also unique. It cannot happen twice in one lifetime that a person is too flustered to screw.

Also in commemoration, The Public Domain Review has assembled a collection of works of art mentioned in Swann’s Way. Previous Dish on Proust here, here, and here.

Buzzfeed’s new books editor, Isaac Fitzgerald, made waves when he announced that the site won’t publish negative reviews:

He will follow what he calls the “Bambi Rule” (though he acknowledges the quote in fact comes from Thumper): “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.” … “Why waste breath talking smack about something?” he said. “You see it in so many old media-type places, the scathing takedown rip.”

Tom Scocca snarkily suggests that Fitzgerald’s background in publicity might have something to do with his editorial attitude:

Publicity is a job where you try to help people become interested in books and feel positively toward them, so that they buy books and the books’ authors feel successful and everyone enjoys things very much. In some sense, it could be argued that the publicist is the best friend that books have. Now BuzzFeed will also be a good friend to books. This is very nice news.

Eric Levenson insists that “everyone loves a good takedown,” and Paul Constant argues that “with self-publishing exploding and publishers catering to a more and more insular audience, we need negative book reviews more than ever.” Scott Lemieux finds Buzzfeed’s policy “bizarre,” writing that “opposing negative reviews as a blanket policy is just indefensible, of service to nothing but advertising revenues”:

For example, consider Dwight Garner’s review of a new book about fracking this week. It’s a fine piece of writing in itself, and for people who might consider purchasing the book the fact that it’s badly written and doesn’t make any serious effort to deal with many of the issues surrounding fracking seems worth noting. I’ve linked to it before, but consider also Ruth Franklin’s superb essay about Freedom. Again, it needs no further justification for being published than its own excellence. And beyond that, it makes valuable explicit and implicit contributions to a major ongoing debate within the culture. When critics hail the book as a masterpiece without noticing or (caring) about things like the fact that the memoir-within-the-novel written by the character we’re told again and again is a nonverbal jock is in nearly the same voice as the rest of the novel, or that the novel’s answer to the question of What Women Want is “to have sex with the thinly-veiled stand in for Jonathan Franzen,” this seems worth knowing. Particularly when one of these critics was editing the New York Times book review at the time and was facing justified criticism for gender double standards.

Maria Bustillos joins the debate, writing, “The reader who disagrees clearly and well is the greatest treasure of all. How else can we progress? What else is the point of all that hard work?”:

I find the very idea that one should “respect” the authors of books by publishing only positive reviews to be absurd. I think that, rather, the exact opposite must be true: real respect means having balls enough to publish the unvarnished results of a close reading. No adult author writes for praise alone. Surely any serious writer writes because he has an urgent message to impart, one that he hopes will be of some use to the reader. I don’t know the origin of the idea that writers are such delicate creatures, barely able to withstand public scrutiny of their genius, but it seems ever-present.

The respectful critic, then, is the critic who, to borrow [Heidi] Julavits’s phrase, “reads hard.” He brings the results of his researches, whatever they may be, to interested readers who can then take his views and use them to begin compiling their own. If we accept that the making of meaning is a collaborative process between artist and audience, then the value of honest criticism becomes immediately apparent. Dialogue is what counts: praise or blame are similarly irrelevant.

In an engrossing mini-travelogue, Laura Barton traverses the “boulevard of broken dreams”:

When we mention that we are walking the length of Sunset [Boulevard], people look at us in disbelief, assuring us that it was not only dangerous but most definitely weird. At street level, though, you see more: an IBM laptop in a discarded takeaway box holding seven prawns; two men dancing in the back room of a salsa club; the words “Love Is What You Make It” scrawled across a wall. You catch the faded incense as you walk past the Church of the Blessed Sacrament, see Jayne Mansfield’s pink suitcase displayed in the window of the Dearly Departed Tours Office and Curiosity Shop, with a sign beside it instructing you to “note the damage”. …

To walk Sunset is to be struck not only by the deliberately outlandish characters but by the many mentally disturbed people on its sidewalks: the woman rooting through bins who growled on approach, the man masturbating in a car park, the slink-eyed souls muttering darkly to themselves on street corners. Then there was the peculiar encounter not far from the intersection with La Brea Avenue, as a normal-looking young man hurtled towards us on a skateboard.

He was bare-chested, carrying a guitar and eating an ice cream, and it was only as he drew close that we saw something fractured in his eyes. “Save us!” he barked as he skated by. “Before they all kill us!”

And if the air soured then, it was just as suddenly sweetened by the chirruping of a man sitting among the plants on the verge, his hair a tangle of ribbons and purple plastic, swigging Bud Light from a large water bottle. “I’m in the penthouse!” he called brightly. It would be wrong to say we had a conversation. He spoke as if a string had been pulled to make him talk. Why had he come to Los Angeles, I asked, and he gave a disconcerting grin. “I’m tropical, like a dolphin!” he hollered. “You don’t put it in the snow!” He propositioned us, and upon our polite refusal he launched into Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain”. We all sang it, from start to finish, there on the sidewalk.

(Photo by Flickr user misterbutler)