![]() But only specialists debate his translators, and there are no books delving into the originals of his characters, or providing recipes for Chekhovian blini, or explaining how Chekhov can change your life, or presenting photographs of his intimates. Chekhov, born a decade earlier, is a writer of similar stature, and his plays are genuinely popular. And now, in English, arrives a fearsomely slender book, “ The Mysterious Correspondent,” nine stories, mostly fragmentary, mostly unpublished, that have only recently been rediscovered, appearing as something between juvenilia and a sketchbook.Īll this work attests to the reputation of the most often attempted, most rarely summited, of all mountainous modern books, Proust’s multivolume “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” which, first Englished as “Remembrance of Things Past,” is now routinely more severely Frenchified as “In Search of Lost Time.” (That there are passionate debates about the varying merits of his translators and of these titles is part of the general Proustian effect.) Why some writers get this kind of attention-rooted in encompassing appetite rather than in mere admiration-and some do not is hard to know and interesting to contemplate. Just last month, Gallimard, in Paris, published “Les Soixante-quinze Feuillets,” an early, more directly autobiographical overture, long thought to have vanished, of themes that he would later develop in depth. (The room’s original interior can be found at the Musée Carnavalet, the museum of the history of Paris.) “Lost” works appear. ![]() ![]() In one, we are given a detailed diagram of the apartment with the cork-lined room where Proust spent his reclusive late years. The books are often illustrated with the intensity of religious tracts. That’s doubtless not even half the harvest. In the past fifteen years or so, certainly since the dawn of the new century, the huge success of Alain de Botton’s “ How Proust Can Change Your Life” has been followed by a candid book on Proust’s sex life (by his American biographer, William C. Carter) the memoirs of his Swedish valet (also edited by Carter) a study, by the Auden biographer Richard Davenport-Hines, of Proust’s final days, at the Ritz and the Majestic Benjamin Taylor’s study of Proust’s life as a distinctly Jewish one the first fully annotated versions of “Swann’s Way” (both by Carter and by Lydia Davis) Clive James’s long verse commentary “ Gate of Lilacs” and a graphic-novel version of “Swann’s Way,” not to mention an album by the talented Russian-French sisters called the Milstein Duo, “The Vinteuil Sonata,” devoted to the real-life candidates for the musical phrase that entangled Swann’s heart and doomed his life. Not long ago, we were given a book made up solely of his desperately polite, querulous letters to his upstairs neighbors in one of his last apartment buildings, on the Boulevard Haussmann, complaining about the noise-and sounding exactly like a classic S. J. Perelman casual. Anything Proustian, it seems, gets published now. What comes after is mostly academic commentary.īut with the biography, the letters, and the journals long in the rearview mirror, the popular secondary works on Proust continue to appear in manic numbers. The usual run of a famous author’s remains is more or less set: first the (disillusioning) biography, then the (surprisingly mundane, money-mad) letters, and finally the (painfully naked) diaries, in which erotic obsessions that seem curious and fresh in literary prose look mechanically obsessive in daily record, as with Kenneth Tynan and John Cheever. And so, having reached the very bottom of the barrel marked “Marcel Proust,” the scraping continues, even unto the splintered wood. When one finds the bottom of a barrel being energetically scraped, it is proof, at least, that whatever was once floating on the top must have been very delicious indeed.
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