Word: proust
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...always the marvelous cones, for Howard Johnson's cones were just about the only ones that stayed crisp and tasty no matter how long one spent lapping the ice cream down into the bottom, trying to make it last longer than anyone else's cone. Mon Dieu, tell Marcel Proust that madeleines are not made anymore...
...because I was never cold." Moments like this almost redeem the strenuous labors that Brodkey and his readers must suffer through to achieve them. Because of his fascination with autobiographical minutiae, his willingness to spin elaborate riffs on the smallest physical details, Brodkey's proponents regularly compare him to Proust. The analogy may someday prove accurate, but this book does not make the case. Perhaps Party of Animals, which is rumored to be sprawling and multivolumed, will demonstrate Proustian breadth, the ability to evoke an entire, glittering world from a mass of perceptions. For now, the sharpest impression given...
...just a matter of a "definitive" array of works, or of critical intelligence applied to them, or of a deep curiosity about the artist's life. It is a combination of all three, a vision of how they weave together -- the museum's equivalent of George Painter on Marcel Proust, or Leon Edel on Henry James. Once you have digested it, neither you nor the artist will be quite the same. You have seen the record set straight. Such events cannot be replaced by 50 Helgas...
...book by burning it than to throw it into the trash compactor? Or to shred it? Not in effect. But somehow the irrevocable reduction of words to smoke and, poof!, into nonentity haunts the imagination. In Hitler's bonfires in 1933, the works of Kafka, Freud, Einstein, Zola and Proust were incinerated -- their smoke a prefigurement of the terrible clouds that came from the Nazi chimneys later...
...essay on multiplicity meditates on technology and literature, considering several encyclopedic writers (he includes Proust as an early borderline example) who have tried to create a coherent vision of a world in which scientific knowledge is too large for any single human understanding...