Proust

About 15 years ago I read the first volume of the old two volume Moncrieff translation.It was slow going, but I enjoyed it. I would read at least 10 pages per day, at around 6:30 a.m., in the family room, with the gas fireplace glowing: I live in a part of the world where we have long, cold winters, when the sun doesn’t rise until after 8 a.m. long after I have arrived at my office at work,a black coffee nearby to warm my innards, while Proust’s sinuous sentences unwound themselves before my eyes and my inner eye saw hawthorns and I could almost smell the aroma of the chicken that Francois was turning on the spit for the family’s Saturday lunch, always taken an hour early on that particular day,until I was so hungry that I went upstairs and made myself some bacon and eggs, because I was on the Atkins diet, which helped me lose 30 pounds but shot my cholesterol level to such heights that, a decade and a half later, I am still taking a lipitor daily.
Last week, while on vacation, I wandered into a book store and found the new revised paperback of Swann’s Way, and on a whim, bought it and can’t put it down. The flow, the detail, the ironies and side issues. Formidable!

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