Marcel Proust’s masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu, translated as In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past, is a famously formidable novel. After reading the seven volumes over four months earlier this year, however, I’m here to dispute its reputation as being difficult. Daunting? No doubt. A few pages into Swann’s Way, the first volume, I got hypnotized by the narrator’s voice – Marcel’s voice. The microscopic focus on his immediate surroundings flips and expands into a panoramic view of the outside world. I learned about art, architecture, literature, furniture design, botany, French history and politics at the turn of 20th Century, plus manners and mores of the upper classes, the Dreyfus Affair and so much more, without ever feeling like I was being lectured or instructed. Unlike, say, Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace, Proust doesn’t digress, he weaves disparate threads into a subtle and elegant tapestry. And the dinner party scenes, between the social climbing and posing on display, are vastly amusing.
Since I’ve spent the last three years working on an autobiographical project about my early years in New York City, the following quote, from The Guermantes Way, has come to serve as both a guidepost and a warning sign.
Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.
Finishing the fifth volume of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle spurred me on to In Search Of Lost Time. Reviewing the sixth and final volume of My Struggle in The New York Times Book Review, the great critic Daniel Mendelsohn nailed the difference, and similarity, between Knausgård and Proust.
It is for this reason that “My Struggle” in fact bears so little resemblance to the work that the author himself so frequently refers to as an inspiration, and to which his magnum opus has so eagerly been compared by reviewers: Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” In that novel, the life of the narrator, its arc from childhood to middle age, climaxing in his becoming a writer, functions as a prism through which virtually every aspect of the lived reality of the author’s time — art, music, literature, sex, society, class, theater, technology, science, history, war, memory, philosophy — is refracted, in a way that enlarges you, gives you a heightened sense of the world itself, its contents and possibilities.
Knausgaard’s creation, for all its vastness and despite its serious intellectual aims and attainments, reduces the entire world to the size of the author.
Volume Six of My Struggle will be my first book in 2019. So I’ll get back to you.
2018 READING LIST
Roberto Bolaño The Savage Detectives
Karl Ove Knausgård My Struggle Book One
Karl Ove Knausgård My Struggle Book Two
Karl Ove Knausgård My Struggle Book Three
Karl Ove Knausgård My Struggle Book Four
Karl Ove Knausgård My Struggle Book Five
Jan Wilem van der Wettering Outsider in Amsterdam
Jan Wilem van der Wettering The Rattle-Rat
Johann Theorin Echoes From The Dead
Martin Amis The Rub of Time
Tina Brown The Vanity Fair Diaries 1983-92
Zadie Smith Feel Free: Essays
Shiva Naipaul An Unfinished Journey
Joe Hagan Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine
Sigrid Rausing Mayhem: A Memoir
Ian Buruma A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir
Julian Barnes The Only Story
Marcel Proust Swann’s Way
Marcel Proust Within A Budding Grove
Marcel Proust The Guermantes Way
Marcel Proust Sodom & Gomorrah
Marcel Proust The Captive
Marcel Proust The Fugitive
Marcel Proust Time Regained
Kim Phillips-Fein Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis And The Rise of Austerity Politics
Jussi Adler-Olson The Keeper of Lost Causes
Jussi Adler-Olson The Absent One
John Darnielle Wolf In White Van
David Kertzer The Pope Who Would Be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe
Lars Kepler The Sandman
Seymour Stein Siren Song: My Life In Music
Wayne Kramer The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, the MC5, and My Life of Impossibilities
Barbara Tuchman The Guns of August
Haldor Laxness World Light
George Pelecanos The Man Who Came Uptown
Javier Cercas The Imposter
Emmanuel Carrère The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception
Dawn Powell The Locusts Have No King
Martin Gayford Modernists & Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters
Caroline Weber Proust’s Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-siècle Paris
Craig Brown 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret
Arnaldur Indriðason The Shadow District
Lisa Halliday Asymmetry
Michael Connelly Dark Sacred Night
Zachary Leader The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife 1965-2005
City Slang 