Word: proust
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Unaccountably, Spacks' catalog of great gossips omits Marcel Proust, the greatest eavesdropper and scandalmonger of them all, as well as James Joyce, who, like so many of his fellow Dubliners, regarded rumor and innuendo as meat and drink. Still, her thesis holds. No one, from the whisperers about Socrates in ancient Athens to the viewers of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, could ever resist burbling about persons not present. If the rumors are written down, they are called gossip. If they are written up, they are called literature...
...criticim, it's a biography Beautiful done," Barthes remark on George Painter's Proust in another interchange. Yet another is a sense ion which biography, or seeds of biography which rest in the interstices of these questions and answers constitutes a type a protocriticism--not so much a voyeuristic attempt to divine the "real" writer behind the text, to pry into the realm of his "personality" in the hopes of somehow catching him "off-guard," but, in the senses, rather, of a self-reading, a reading of the body of one's own writings, the writing...
...agrees completely with Edmund Wilson's celebrated verdict that Nabokov's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is unreadable. Lately, Manheim has been outraged by the praise lavished on the new English version of Remembrance of Things Past. Manheim, who has translated Proust's letters, says, "The first translator, C.K. Scott Moncrieff, was a little awkward and a little mistaken, but he did a "marvelous job. Now Terence Kilmartin has altered Moncrieff, and not well." Manheim is most derisive about one Kilmartin method of cor rection: "The way he fixed up a passage was to leave...
...wish to approach Swann in Love or The Bostonians undemandingly, almost as one would an antique show, browsing and ruminative but not expecting to make powerful emotional connections with the objects on view. On that level, Volker Schlondorffs lightly heated rearrangement and compression of approximately one-fifteenth of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past is altogether more beguiling than James Ivory's attenuated version of one of Henry James' liveliest long novels...
Tugging the viewer through the streets and salons of la Belle Epoque Paris, Schlondorff offers less a version of Proust than a pictorial comment on him. For Proust the heavily draped and cluttered rooms, the constraints of clothing, language, manners and social ritual were familiar givens, matters for exquisitely observed, morally neutral description. For Schlondorff they are a malevolent astonishment. If there is a rational explanation for the obsessive, socially destructive love Charles Swann (Jeremy Irons) feels for the courtesan Odette de Crecy (Ornella Muti), it is to be found in these oppressive surroundings, where the very air breathes...