Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871. From a 1912 letter:
Du côté de chez Swann is the fragment of a novel, which will have as a general title A la recherche du temps perdu. I should have liked to have published it as a single whole, but it would have been too long. They no longer publish works in several volumes. There are novelists, on the other hand, who envisage a brief plot with few characters. That is not my conception of the novel. There is a plane geometry and a geometry of space. And so for me the novel is not only plane psychology but psychology in space and time. That invisible substance, time, I try to isolate. But in order to do this it was essential that the experience be continuous. I hope that by the end of my book what I have tried to do will be understandable; some unimportant little event will show that time has passed and it will take on that beauty certain pictures have, enhanced by the passage of the years.Related reading
Marcel Proust, in a letter to Antoine Bibesco, November ?, 1912. From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)
comments: 3
I'm reading Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, two volumes in, of 6. Very compelling. Modern day Proust?
That’s what I’ve read. Do you think so?
Well, it's a long long story, closely observed. This has caused quite a bit of ruckus because he uses real names and is recounting what I assume are actualish events, but labeled as fiction. I do think it raises similar questions about story-telling.
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