Category Archives: Good Reads

Vacations and Proust

16 Tuesday Apr 2013

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IMG_0575So… I’ve begun reading Proust.

More than once, I’ve begun Swann’s Way.

I can’t say how many times I’ve picked it up off my nightstand… only to put it back down two paragraphs later. I tell myself I’m done with it, that the time isn’t ripe for me to read this  masterpiece; but then, resolve weakens.

So I pick at it.  And it picks back.

Between all that picking, sometimes I flip pages back and forth to ferret out meaning, while wondering where Monsieur Proust is taking me.  I’ve no answers.  Only questions.  Easy ones, like what brings people to Proust if he’s such a hard read?  What causes readers to persist and not give up hopes of reading his work?  Is there any plot?  If so, has it begun… and I missed it?

With no small relief, I’m able to report my reading experience imperfectly normal, if one ignores all my vacation time away, which amounts to something like four days out of every seven.  I know this because, when on vacation from Proust, I take off on the internet to visit other readers who’ve confessed their many failed attempts in reading this four thousand word page story.

One of my favorite retreats, which I’ve visited over and over since beginning the novel last month, is a blog piece addressed to a reading group connected with The Guardian.  Authored by Sam Jordison, the entire post is wonderful; the blogger’s insights, as well as testimonies of other readers, has assuaged my guilt and inspired me to soldier on in spite of the questions littering Swann’s Way.  A short excerpt follows:

Of course, describing Proust in terms of plot alone does no justice to the reflections, counter-reflections, digressions and musings that form so much of the immersive pleasure he offers. But it does explain why so many readers feel themselves going under so quickly. Even those who find his writing lovely struggle to progress, as Reading Group AndrewLesk puts it,

‘I have started this book four times. Once got to page 200. Why did I stop? Time, ironically. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve read. Looking forward to getting through it all now that the Club is onto it.’

He wasn’t the only one to struggle.  JuliaC42 wrote:

‘I started reading it once (the Moncrieff) but it took me so long to read the first chapter that I gave up. It is now doing a good job of supporting my clock radio at the correct height.’

So what brings me back?  Why do I continue to pick up Proust?  I wish I knew.   But what I know instead is that is has nothing to do with checking off bucket lists or acquiring bragging rights for traversing the work’s heights “because it was there.”

Perhaps Proust’s appeal lies in passages, like the one below from page 116 (The Modern Library Classics version, translated by Moncrieff, Kilmartin and Enright) as well as others that allude to the way reading a book can help us better read everyday life… to know reality rather than the perceptions of reality that too often blind us to truth.

Next to this central belief which, while I was reading, would be constantly reaching out from my inner self to the outer world, toward the discovery of truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in which I was taking part, for these afternoons were crammed with more dramatic events than occur, often, in a whole lifetime.  These were the events taking place in the book I was reading.

By excerpting this, I’ve killed its passion, haven’t I?  So it goes with me and Proust and why I turn so often to the world-wide web for comfort.

If my internet interludes tell me anything, it’s that there are many ways to take Proust.  Some read to get the gist of his thoughts; others consume his prose in small doses, like poetry.  That neither approach has worked for me, nor that I’ve yet stumbled upon some middle way, may explain why I’m out of step with my own on-line reading group since I’ve only half-finished with Part One.  And why I’m planning to take Proust with me on vacation next week… if not to catch up, or to catch on, then to at least allow Proust to catch some Caribbean sunshine…before we begin again.

Winter Mulling

23 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Good Reads, Life at Home, Soul Care

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IMG_0481“”It’s not good to complain about your flock,” she advised.  “A flock is nothing but the put-together of all your past choices.”"

– Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

 

It happens rarely, but sometimes, words I’ve read from a novel will linger within me.  To be sure, it is never the exact line of prose that I remember, the one rendered so beautifully by the author.  Instead, it’s something all together better since the author’s lines point to a living truth.

It happens something like this:  I’m going along reading, reading, reading, really involved in the story, words flying and zooming past my eyes before I realize, a few sentences too late, that I’ve passed an important turn or perhaps a yellow blinking light that was cautioning me to slow down and take note.  I have no choice but to pull over and take myself out of the story.  I know from experience that I cannot proceed without circling back up the page to reread the unmarked but blinking passage.  I return long enough to pause over it.  Not too.   But long enough that some bit of truth flies off the page to live within me.

Usually, the words, like those above written by Barbara Kingsolver, seem too small to fuss over.  I don’t know what deeper meaning, if any, they are suppose to possess.  Or what I am to make or do with them.  But two days ago, more than a week after finishing Flight Behavior, I saw that if I substituted the word ‘flock’ for ‘life,’ how the meaning of Kingsolver’s two lines came close to thoughts I’ve been mulling over since …. well, whenever I last wrote a post in this blog.

IMG_0485I’ve been reading more than mulling here of late.  Lots and lots of good books –  not good enough to keep but good enough to donate to the local library for the good of a larger reading circle.  Or so I thought, until today’s lunch, when I decided I’d been too hasty or perhaps moving on autopilot, when it came to my most recently stacked book, Amor Towles novel, Rules of Civility.

Six chapters into my latest read — E.L Doctorow’s award-winning Ragtime — I kept on thinking about Towels novel.  Not the story, as good as it was, but two blinking passages I decided important enough to turn around for, to pick up, like hitchhikers off the side of the road.

The first passage reminds me never to give up on my dreams… and really, some things in life are too good not to share…

“You look back with the benefit of age upon the dreams of most children and what makes them seem so endearing is their unattainability–this one wanted to be a pirate, this one a princess, this one president.  But from the way Tinker talked you got the sense that his starry-eyed dreams were still within his reach; maybe closer than ever.” (p. 300)

The second speaks around the same truth I tripped over in Kingsolver’s two simple lines.  But since the passage is followed by a one sentence paragraph that reads — “Maybe that sounds bleaker than I intended — I’ll stop here.  The second slice is good  enough to keep for another day.  My memory, unfortunately, is not.  So note to self:  the second can be found hiding on page 323.

 
 

Anna Karenina (final four parts)

31 Wednesday Oct 2012

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It was my first time to read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, but not in a Lena Dunham sort of way.

Today, having no polling stations to visit or curtains to pull back, I’ll cast a small line in the sand on top of a new ground rule: Rather than playing loose and twisting facts into saucy vote-catching soundbites  — that spin so out-of-control during hunting seasons for offices where the buck rarely stops anywhere any more — how about some good old-fashioned honesty?

For when it comes to sharing thoughts about anything important — Anna Karenina, included — nothing else will do.  So here it is:  I was just like one of those non-voting but imaginary Girls in the political endorsement ad that merited Ms. Dunham’s raised eyebrows.  Yes, upon finishing the book last week, I knew which way I wanted to vote.  But I couldn’t justify the reasons for it.  I wasn’t feeling it.  “No, I wasn’t ready.”

When words wouldn’t come last Thursday, I decided to first put some literary distance between me and Anna Karenina.  In short order, I consumed two contemporary novels:  First up was Kevin Powers highly acclaimed and National Book Award nominee, The Yellow Birds; the lesser second was Emma Staub’s Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures.  Both possessed nice form and stylish uses of language.  But neither moved me.  The stories felt manufactured.  The characters, unfortunates souls that they were, felt flat and far removed from their own story lines.  In the end, the novels held no meaning for me, in spite of their glowing endorsements.

Anna Karenina, on the other hand, offered words that made time fly and other commitments negotiable.  I can’t count how often I nodded to thoughts expressed over one hundred and thirty years ago.  How well Tolstoy shadowed the messy human condition with his pen.  To be sure, the structure and the language were not the highlights, but instead, the invisible seams that held everything together.  Why for an old girl, this story still moved well, on and off the page.

But still — what was it about this old, not so unusual tale, that made it feel so alive and fresh?  That made me care about the characters, even when they were being terrible and so humanly self-centered?  I wish I knew.  But after reading the two books above and a third — Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue — in the same space of time that I read Anna Karenina, I know that whatever Tolstoy possessed cannot be taught, even in the most prestigious of MFA programs.

All of this is not to say that Count Tolstoy didn’t write beautiful passages.  There are a number I could pluck from the text, to offer as souvenirs of reading pleasures.  I enjoyed the hunting scene where the point-of-view takes us into the mind of Levin’s conflict-ridden dog, who sensed the fowl before his human owner knew it was afoot.  (Chapter XII, Part Six).  And then there was that lovely contrast drawn between Levin’s two social calls during a single day in Moscow.  The obligatory first felt like hours, though counted in minutes by the clock; the second, its mirror image, revealed how sharing good company makes time pass as fast as life itself. (Chapters VI and X, Part Seven)

These I resist, and others too, for one that seems most appropriate in the closing days before elections are held:

“‘One vote could decide the whole thing, and you must be serious and consistent if you want to serve the common cause,’ Sergei Ivanovich concluded.

But Levin had forgotten that, and it was painful for him to see these good people, whom he respected, in such unpleasant, angry agitation.  To rid himself of that painful feeling, he went to the other room without waiting for the end of the debate.  No one was there except the servants at the buffet.  Seeing the servants busily wiping platters and setting out plates and glasses, seeing their calm, animated faces, Levin experienced a sudden feeling of relief, as if he had gone from a stinking room into the fresh air.“  (Chapter XXVIII, Part Six)

Oh, the truth of it!  Why it’s almost too good to be true.  And for that reason alone, I can’t imagine this first reading of Anna Karenina will be my last.  Nor, I trust, will voting in the upcoming election be less satisfying than my first.  But I wonder:  Are first times at doing anything really as good as some promote them to be?

In the tale end of things, it’s your vote.  It does count, but not in a Leo Tolstoy sort of way.

~~~

Much thanks to Arti for hosting this read-along.  For more reviews and reactions, visit Ripple Effects.