Screw you, Proust

Now see, this is exactly what I was talking about in my recent post entitled My personal approach to literature:

Mme. Verdurin, seeing that Swann was two steps away, now wore that expression in which the desire to make the person who is talking be quiet and the desire to maintain a look of innocence in the eyes of the person who is hearing neutralize each other in an intense nullity of gaze, in which the motionless sign of intelligence and complicity is concealed beneath an innocent smile, and which in the end, being common to all those who find themselves making a social blunder, reveals it instantly, if not to those making it, at least to the one who is its victim.

It's an excerpt from the Marcel Proust (rhymes with "roost") novel Swann's Way, the first of seven volumes composing In Search of Lost Time (a.k.a. Remembrance of Things Past) and the reason I won't be reading the other six.

My copy comprises 444 pages of sentences about as numbing as the one above. The translation, from the original French, is widely hailed as masterful (so I can't blame the translator), much as the entire work is widely acclaimed as a masterpiece—even, in some literary circles, the finest novel of the twentieth century.

To which I say talk to the hand.

I've been using Swann's Way as a combination self-imposed penance and prescription-free sleep aid, and boy does it get the job done. The sheer monotony of page after page (some nights just page) of Proust's labyrinthine prose must surely be as effective at eradicating venial sin-debt as it is at rendering me senseless.

And it's not just the book's torturous syntax; it's the action—or more precisely, the inaction. Prime example: Proust took the better part of two full pages explaining how the narrator's family sat down for lunch an hour early on Saturdays—at 11:00 rather than at 12:00—such that Saturday visitors showing up at, say, a quarter past 11:00 would be not only surprised to find the family elbow deep in dining (on the basis that the family usually lunched at noon, remember) but constrained to cool their heels until the meal was done.

Hoo-hah! Almost two full pages devoted to inspecting microscopically that fascinating (I'm being facetious) detail. I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry. What I am sure of is, Proust bores me out of my gourd. For which he roundly gets rejected. By me.

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