Word: proust
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Remembrance of Some Things past: Few argue that Marcel Proust didn't possess a remarkable memory. But even the recent three-volume edition of Provst's work remains unwieldy. You can't carry a boxed set on the subway...
...with striped and starred wings, perched on a tangle of multicolored little bodies; beneath the caricature ran the capitalized words INTELECTUAL REACCIONARIO, IMPERIALISTA, ENEMIGO DE LOS PUEBLOS." In Africa, Bech the imperialist discovers that the rate of cultural exchange is being alarmingly devalued: "The students found decadent and uninteresting Proust, Joyce, Shakespeare, Sartre, Hemingway-Hemingway, who had so enjoyed coming to Tanganyika and killing its kudu and sitting by its campfires getting drunk and pontifical-and Henry James. Who, then, Bech painfully asked, did measure up to the exacting standards that African socialism had set for literature?" The Orient brings...
With hindsight, Updike's unswerving dedication to realistic fiction looks both daring and inspired. At the beginning of his career, the prevailing wisdom held that Joyce, Proust and Kafka had made the old-fashioned novel redundant, a tired illusion that had been exposed once and for all as a sham. Literature should no longer pretend to portray people doing things: it ought to be an artful arrangement of words on a page. Critic Richard Oilman, typically, called narrative "that element of fiction which coerces and degrades it into being a mere alternative to life." Updike's novels...
...show (ABC, Sunday, 7-8 p.m. E.D.T.) is thoughtful enough to provide identifying labels for those viewers who may be getting their diploma through a matchbook correspondence course: Isadora Duncan is described as "the controversial dancer," Balzac and Proust, in no uncertain terms, as "French novelists," and Thus Spake Zarathustra as "the famous composition by Richard Strauss...
...writers on the list of the Great are rarely those whom one simply loves. Great writers are often interminable bores. D.H Lawrence once said that reading Proust was like trying to till a field with knitting needles. Cyril Connolly would not have made his own list. He wrote his line about writers we might miss in a minor book called The Unquiet Grave (1944). He died in 1974. But open the book now, in 1982, and his mordant, elegant light pours out of the volume, alive, into the eye, the waiting, conscious mind...