Word: proust
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Aciman is attempting to pin down the feeling of imminent loss; the moment of insane delirium one feels while balancing on the edge of a precipice. For Proust, that loss surrounds mortality and the desire to mentally ward it off at all costs; for the narrator, it is simply a question of “lying low” and warding off the cruelty of lovers. Yet the protagonist and Clara, caught in their self-involved and unspectacular web of emotions, are too banal for Aciman’s trick to work, and the protagonist’s dense, slogging...
Aciman’s effort in “Eight White Nights” to imitate Proust and constantly dwell within thoughts, metaphors, code-phrases, and imagined scenes of passion is misguided. The prose is feverish and obsessive; though his writing occasionally reaches lyrical heights, the banality of his subjects often overpowers. It particularly raises the question of whether the flowery, (pand)angsty voice of the narrator isn’t just Aciman’s projection of how he believes women want men to think, feel and obsess over them, since there doesn’t appear...
...really multicultural. My mom is from Haiti. My dad's from Puerto Rico. I was born in Brooklyn. I read Proust. Your heritage is your heritage, but your soul is truly...
...recent New York Times piece, Tufts University’s Maryanne Wolf, author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain,” feared the trend the vook might encourage: “Can you any longer read Henry James or George Eliot?” she asked. “Do you have the patience...
...spending at least 10 hours each day alone writing in a flat overlooking old Istanbul, and the sense of that isolation drifts throughout his painstaking dissection of heartbreak. More than any other novelist today, Pamuk has laid claim to the dispassionate prose style and layered, self-reflective inheritance of Proust. At one point, he follows a numbered list of the ways in which Turkish girls are socially condemned for surrendering their chastity before marriage with a note: “Clever readers will have sensed that I have placed this anthropological lesson here to allow myself a chance to cool...