(no subject)
I am flitting a lot at the moment; I can't concentrate on one thing for very long. Everything feels very transient. This is especially reflected in my current reading: I normally have a couple of books on the go at once, but right now I am in the middle of no fewer than seven, which for me is a lot, and indicative of some weird mental flightiness.
The one I have been reading for the longest is Proust's Swann's Way, which I must admit has been a real disappointment. So many people that I respect have admired Proust that I am reluctant to give up. But for the most part I find his famously long sentences to be a source more of irritation than anything else. There are so many subordinate clauses and tangential asides that they seem to be made all of elbows. You go in, clinging desperately to a transitive verb like Theseus's twine, a verb whose object is some hundred or two hundred words away, so that by the time you reach it the chances of linking the thought together are minimal. Have a look at this one sentence for instance:
By this love Swann had been so far detached from all other interests that when by chance he reappeared in society, reminding himself that his social relations, like a beautifully wrought setting (although she would not have been able to form any very exact estimate of its worth), might restore something of his own prestige in Odette's eyes (as indeed they might have done had they not been cheapened by his love itself, which for Odette depreciated everything that it touched by seeming to proclaim such things less precious), he would feel there, side by side with his distress at being in places and among people she did not know, the same detached pleasure as he would have derived from a novel or a painting in which were depicted the amusements of a leisured class; just as, at home, he used to enjoy the thought of the smooth efficiency of his household, the elegance of his wardrobe and of his servants' liveries, the soundness of his investments, with the same relish as when he read in Saint-Simon, who was one of his favourite authors, of the mechanics of daily life at Versailles, what Mme de Maintenon ate and drank, or the shrewd avarice and great pomp of Lulli.
I mean for fuck's sake. I do not believe anyone could avoid having to read this at least two or three times to piece it together. Of course some authors quite deliberately force their readers to read their sentences a couple of times (as any Pynchon fan will know) - but here I just feel I am gaining nothing from the exercise except a too-slow understanding of what it was Proust was trying to articulate. Naturally I have serious questions about the translation, which is the Moncrieff / Kilmartin / Enright version. Perhaps the effect is much more voluptuous in French.
It just feels so sacreligious to be criticising him! And reading the book does make you much more appreciative of narrative devices. When, on about page 300, there was A Slight Misunderstanding, I was as riveted as if Swann had been pursuing Odette through Mordor in a car chase. But overall (and bearing in mind I am only three-quarters of the way through the first book of the sequence), I associate him with brilliant perceptive originality combined with an awkward fastidiousness of expression. This is a classic example of both: here Swann has just overheard Mme Verdurin listening eagerly to gossip about him at a party:
Mme Verdurin, seeing that Swann was within earshot, assumed an expression in which the twofold desire to silence the speaker and to preserve an air of innocence in the eyes of the listener is neutralised into an intense vacuity wherein the motionless sign of intelligent complicity is concealed beneath an ingenuous smile, an expression which, common to everyone who has noticed a gaffe, instantaneously reveals it, if not to its perpetrator, at any rate to its victim.
One of the other books I'm reading is Madame Bovary, which I AM reading in French. It's exceptional - the quality just shines through on every page. Reading Proust in translation was one of the reasons I got Flaubert in the original - and I guess perhaps, if I had picked up a bad translation, I would be complaining about that here as well
The one I have been reading for the longest is Proust's Swann's Way, which I must admit has been a real disappointment. So many people that I respect have admired Proust that I am reluctant to give up. But for the most part I find his famously long sentences to be a source more of irritation than anything else. There are so many subordinate clauses and tangential asides that they seem to be made all of elbows. You go in, clinging desperately to a transitive verb like Theseus's twine, a verb whose object is some hundred or two hundred words away, so that by the time you reach it the chances of linking the thought together are minimal. Have a look at this one sentence for instance:
By this love Swann had been so far detached from all other interests that when by chance he reappeared in society, reminding himself that his social relations, like a beautifully wrought setting (although she would not have been able to form any very exact estimate of its worth), might restore something of his own prestige in Odette's eyes (as indeed they might have done had they not been cheapened by his love itself, which for Odette depreciated everything that it touched by seeming to proclaim such things less precious), he would feel there, side by side with his distress at being in places and among people she did not know, the same detached pleasure as he would have derived from a novel or a painting in which were depicted the amusements of a leisured class; just as, at home, he used to enjoy the thought of the smooth efficiency of his household, the elegance of his wardrobe and of his servants' liveries, the soundness of his investments, with the same relish as when he read in Saint-Simon, who was one of his favourite authors, of the mechanics of daily life at Versailles, what Mme de Maintenon ate and drank, or the shrewd avarice and great pomp of Lulli.
I mean for fuck's sake. I do not believe anyone could avoid having to read this at least two or three times to piece it together. Of course some authors quite deliberately force their readers to read their sentences a couple of times (as any Pynchon fan will know) - but here I just feel I am gaining nothing from the exercise except a too-slow understanding of what it was Proust was trying to articulate. Naturally I have serious questions about the translation, which is the Moncrieff / Kilmartin / Enright version. Perhaps the effect is much more voluptuous in French.
It just feels so sacreligious to be criticising him! And reading the book does make you much more appreciative of narrative devices. When, on about page 300, there was A Slight Misunderstanding, I was as riveted as if Swann had been pursuing Odette through Mordor in a car chase. But overall (and bearing in mind I am only three-quarters of the way through the first book of the sequence), I associate him with brilliant perceptive originality combined with an awkward fastidiousness of expression. This is a classic example of both: here Swann has just overheard Mme Verdurin listening eagerly to gossip about him at a party:
Mme Verdurin, seeing that Swann was within earshot, assumed an expression in which the twofold desire to silence the speaker and to preserve an air of innocence in the eyes of the listener is neutralised into an intense vacuity wherein the motionless sign of intelligent complicity is concealed beneath an ingenuous smile, an expression which, common to everyone who has noticed a gaffe, instantaneously reveals it, if not to its perpetrator, at any rate to its victim.
One of the other books I'm reading is Madame Bovary, which I AM reading in French. It's exceptional - the quality just shines through on every page. Reading Proust in translation was one of the reasons I got Flaubert in the original - and I guess perhaps, if I had picked up a bad translation, I would be complaining about that here as well