Word: proust
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...folly or masterpiece, the French comix artist Stéphane Heuet has decided to adapt Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." Proust's masterwork, a seven-volume, 4000-plus page French novel published between 1913 and 1922 will become twelve comicbook volumes published between 1998 and perhaps 2020. The first of these has now been translated into English (NBM Publishing, $19.95, hardcover...
Heuet has squeezed the first of Proust's volumes, "Swann's Way," into 72, full-color, large-size pages. When it first appeared in France in 1998 it caused a literary scandal, as only the French can manage. Since then the French version has reportedly sold over 40,000 copies. (Can you imagine Americans caring enough? It brings a melancholy tear...
...after all, the text was written by Marcel Proust, who, based strictly on my experience with this book, justly enjoys his reputation as a very fine writer. There are lovely passages that evoke the original's themes of memory, loss, sensation, nature, and the ability of art to make all of this clear. The famous madeleine sequence, for example, has been adapted with great care: keeping the narrative visually-oriented, including wisps of steam that cross over the panels, while using passages of text to evoke the feeling of not only the events but the book itself: "Will it reach...
...regardless of its origins, Stéphane Heuet's "Remembrance of Things Past," makes for a fine read, evoking a lost world, not just of physical superficialities, but of the very thoughts of the time. I am sure even the book's harshest critics would agree that a little Proust is better than none...
...parts of Asia) as a single interpretive subject. In Cadmus and Harmony, Calasso set the rules arbitrarily, but he also played by them. In Literature and the Gods, his choices for inclusion seem too arbitrary to carry any real weight; even if one can find parallels between the Vedas, Proust, Nietzsche and Mallarme, one has to wonder how useful such an accomplishment...