Word: proust
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Marcel Proust recalled a childhood Easter vacation. By embroidering its anniversary edition with evocative pieces from its rich past, Paris' oldest daily, Le Figaro, celebrated its centennial in grand style last week...
Papa finally gave his permission, but to spare him any embarrassment Françoise changed her last name from Quoi-rez to Sagan, after a character in Proust. Tristesse sold 4,500,000 copies around the world and launched her not only as an author but as a peripatetic and hyperbolic prototype of the restless, anarchic youth of Europe. Although her face is triangular and her figure suggests undernourishment, French magazines played her up as if she were Bardot. She played right back, danced all night at a Paris bar called New Jimmy's, raced off in sports cars...
...STENCH in the ear," wrote Ambrose Bierce, fulminating against noise in the long tradition of sensitive and thinking men. Marcel Proust was so fastidious about noise that he had his study lined with cork. Juvenal bemoaned the all-night cacophony of imperial Rome, observing that "most sick people perish for want of sleep." To Schopenhauer it was clear that "the amount of noise which anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity, and may therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure...
This book, though at times tedious, heaps a hillock of fresh laurels on Balzac's grave. André Maurois, an old hand at literary biographies (Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Dumas, Hugo, Proust), disavows that intention. "This is a life of Balzac, not a critical study," he says in a foreword and, having passed his 80th year, announces that it is the last biography he will write. Nevertheless, Prometheus is strewn with the kind of judgments that a disciple makes at the feet of the master: "A super-novelist," "the greatest novelist of the century." Balzac's very faults become...
Cortázar, 51, an Argentine novelist now living in Paris, has already evoked comparisons with Sterne, Proust and Joyce, and certainly Hopscotch's obfuscation is occasionally relieved by glints of unmistakable skill. Here and there a single sentence escapes the darkness with epigrammatic force: "All madness is a dream that has taken root...