Sata Yoshirō, “A Boat Cast Adrift” (Ukifune), 1966. Osaragi Jirō Museum, Tokyo. We reached the end of The Fugitive. The same stories and desires repeat, but now in a pale, world-weary register. My friend Janine said it reminded her of the end of the Tale of Genji, when, after hundreds of pages of pursuing Ukifune, Kaoru is still at it. Still jealous, imagining that “some lover” has secretly installed her at Ono. He will keep pursuing her, we know, even as the floating bridge breaks off. Proust’s narrator has lost his Albertine. But she has not escaped him by dying any more than Ukifune esca ..read more

  Louis Martin-Chauffier (1894-1980)  I just read the most delightful letter from Marcel Proust. [1] He wrote it two years before his death, in January of 1920, to the twenty-five-year-old archivist, paleographer, and aspiring novelist Louis Martin-Chauffier. Martin-Chauffier had inhaled the second volume of In Search of Lost Time when it came out the year before, in 1919. He then went back and read the first volume and was so “intoxicated” by them both that he sat down and wrote a pastiche of Proust’s style as a way of expressing his admiration. He mailed the pastiche to Proust ..read more

                    Suzuki Shintarō in 1925, age 30, just before his departure for France.   As I wrote in an earlier blog entry, last summer I paid a long-overdue visit to J. Theodore Johnson, Jr. a favorite professor of mine who taught me French literature when I was an undergraduate at the University of Kansas and who first introduced me to Proust. When I arrived at his house in Lawrence in June, Ted had a present ready for me from his bookshelves: a book of essays by the Japanese Proust translator and scholar Suzuki Michihiko.[1 ..read more

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Untitled (Cathedral) Irregularly shaped blue and white tie-dyed paper, with text from Proust, against blue textile backing. 15 x 25. Date unknown. Photo by Kevin Ryan) Posted by permission of Hal Sedgwick. It’s a straight shot north from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Lawrence, Kansas on Highway 169. The drive takes just under four hours. I know it well, having driven it many times going to and from school when I was an undergraduate at the University of Kansas in the late 1980s. The little towns you pass through on the way are all pretty much the same: a high school, a Sonic d ..read more

I saw an incredible production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” last night at the Tennessee Williams Festival in Provincetown. If you need a refresher on the plot, “Brick” is a former high school athlete who can’t get over the suicide of his close friend Skipper. Brick’s wife Maggie is frustrated by his total sexual and emotional withdrawal from her in the wake of Skipper’s suicide.  Having injured himself by running hurdles drunk at night on the track of his old high school, Brick holds a crutch throughout the play, literalizing his state of dependence and a kind of “arrested development” t ..read more

In my Proust reading group we are reading the translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and I’m so glad. I know some readers find Moncrieff’s prose too ornate or outdated. Roger Shattuck finds “annoying bloomers and occasional excesses of style.”[1] Lydia Davis, who has a horse in this race as the translator of the competing Penguin edition of Swann’s Way, has written of Moncrieff’s “extreme archaisms” and his “preciousness.”[2] Well, yes, Moncrieff does get carried away sometimes. A typical example mentioned by Davis is when he translates the perfectly ordinary French word “l’oubli” (forgetfuln ..read more

I saw the Argentinian director Maria Alvarez’s film “Le Temps Perdu,” about a Proust reading group of octogenarians in Buenos Aires, at Film Forum in New York. It was wonderful, although I napped a little. Things I noticed:  how little you know about these people. How they are cordial but not all that close. There is an affection but also a formality, a distance.  The cafe where they meet is totally ordinary. The whole film takes place there, punctuated by shots of the street outside. Changes in the weather and the group’s slow progress through the novel are the only indicati ..read more

Lydia Davis says that while translating the first volume of Proust she began to notice “how he was incorporating alexandrines into his sentences or building parallel structures, with liberal use of assonance and alliteration…” As a result, “…a single sentence would thus sometimes require the sort of writing and rewriting, fiddling and refining, that might have gone into translating a piece of verse (Davis, Essays Two, 2022).” This will not surprise any reader of Proust. His prose is always threatening to turn into poetry. But it’s not just French poetry. Having haiku on the brain while read ..read more

We finished Proust Volume Two. We all laughed out loud when Marcel tried to kiss Albertine, his head swelled to contain the whole universe and then some. We loved the faces changing over time, successions of selves, faces viewed by other selves, how the girls are the sea, and how they are goddesses too, just like Madame Swann. Proust knows, it seems, and Jonathan said, what it is to be a plant. It’s connected to being human. It’s all connected, said Kate. If there were any doubt, it was dispelled when the hawthorns started talking. We loved the cliffs that were a cathedral, the marvelous, n ..read more

I went for a long walk yesterday and when I got back a very heavy box was sitting at the foot of our mailbox. I assumed it must be for Anthony. Some new rocks for his aquariums?  But then I saw the label from Yaguchi Shoten, a used bookstore in Tokyo’s Jinbochō district, and realized it was the gorgeous new encyclopedia of haiku seasonal words, called a “saijiki” in Japanese, that I had ordered and was anxiously awaiting. The Shin Nihon daisaijiki, color edition, was published by Kōdansha just before the turn of the millennium.  It has five volumes, one for each season and one for ..read more