Word: proust
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...What remains for the Quennell corps are mostly second siftings, attractively presented, which reinforce the charm of the whole Proust legend. The English novelist most often compared to Proust, Anthony Powell, contributes a pleasant little piece about "Proust as a Soldier." (When Proust was asked "What event in military history do you most admire?", he answered: "My own enlistment as a volunteer...
...endless game of guessing who's really who in Proust gets another whirl from Novelist Elizabeth Bowen. She takes the character of Bergotte, Proust's fictitious writer of fiction, and after wondering briefly whether the original might have been Anatole France, finally decides Bergotte is really a "standin, scapegoat, whipping-boy for" Proust-particularly as a purple stylist and a snob...
...Proust and fashions, Proust and the 19th century-no approach is too narrow, no approach is too wide. Proustians are forever arguing among themselves. In this short volume the Master is variously defined as a chronicler of society whose work was "a summing up of the nineteenth century" and, on the contrary, a "visionary artist" whose genius was to transcend time. He is described as a moralist who "judges" and "condemns" and a "visual writer" who sees. He is compared with French Impressionist paintings and Wagnerian opera...
...Proust criticism remains more a matter of saturation than of precision. He still gets praised a little abstractly as a technical innovator, a man who ran time present and time past on dual tracks and played with memory like a zoom lens. Read today, Proust gives curiously old-fashioned satisfaction: full-flavored character and a rich sense of time and place...
...Possibly the best cultural and historic fix on Proust is that he was a man caught between two centuries. Proust valued three things in life: love, society and art. He became disenchanted about the first two, and out of this half-cured 19th century disenchantment he created his 20th century art-as tragic and as comic and perhaps ultimately as mystifying as life itself...