Regrets, I’ve Had Few

…but on of them isn’t reading Swann’s Way (by the way the subject post and this first sentence fragment should be sung to the tune of that Paul Anka/Frank Sinatra classic “My Way” or “Strangers in the Night”–just make sure its Sinatra!).

Well its Friday night and I’m home reading Proust.  I can’t decide if this makes me really intellectual and cultured or just nerdy.  I think I’ll let you make the call.

But part of the reason I’m spending my Friday night thusly is because I’m enjoying this book so much.  So far its a corker!  Sure there’s some room for complaint…let me enumerate

• Not a lot happens. I’m on page 43 and this guy is still in bed.  At this rate this 450 page book is going to end at breakfast.  And where are the damn madeleines?  Bring on the cookies!

• Some of the metaphors are a little…extended. For instance:

My mother did not come, and with no consideration for my pride (which was invested in her not denying the story that she was supposed to have asked me to let her know the results of some search) asked Francoise to say these words to me: “There is no answer,” words I have so often since then heard the doormen in grand hotels or the footmen in bawdy houses bring back to some poor girl who exclaims in surprise, “What, he said nothing? Why, that’s impossible! Did you really give him my note? All right, I’ll go on waiting.”  And–just as she invariably assures him she does not need the extra gas jet which the doorman wants to light for her, and remains there, hearing nothing further but the few remarks about the weather exchanged by the doorman and a lackey whom he sends off suddenly, when he notices the time, to put a customer’s drink on ice…

Um..what were we talking about?  What was that doorman like?

• The narrator’s a little creepy. The little dude is staring at his mom’s face planning where he’s going to give her a kiss.  That’s a little weird.

But I like it…and I can’t decide if its because of the idiosyncracies listed above or in spite of them.

Here’s something I know I like.  The narrator as a little boy thinking “I had heard people say that George Sand was an exemplary novelist.”  What a delightfully nerdy little kid!  I’m probably just jealous because when I was little I wasn’t so much weighing the relative merits of gender-conflicted novelists as trying to be funny because I thought that when people on TV watched TV they were watching us.

And don’t worry…I’ve just come to expect that you identify with every major character in fiction from The Hunchback of Notre Dame’s Quasimodo to The Secret Garden’s Colin (I’ve told you…it’s not that noticeable).  And I imagine it will continue…when we read Moby Dick you’ll be Ahab, when we read Watership Down you’ll be a bunny.

Well I think I’ve written enough for one night (Proust makes me wordy…its contagious!).

Adieu,

Jon