Word: proust
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...result, the Unread Classic has become as much a part of vacation nostalgia as the unvisited museum or the unclaimed laundry. The catchall bookshelf in a rented summer cottage, once the hallowed repository of mildewed National Geographies and Mary Roberts Rinehart, now often runs to Pasternak and Proust, to Galbraith and Gideon's Trumpet. Even in the remotest fishing village, the drugstore often offers a conscience-pricking range of paperback titles. Inevitably, as he scoops up Louis Fischer's Life of Lenin, Camus' The Plague, George Orwell's Essays, and four Ian Flemings for insurance...
...Italo Svevo's The Confessions of Zeno, is currently reading or rereading Coriolanus, Anthony Powell, Stendhal, Hart Crane and T. S. Eliot. His schedule is modest compared with the ten-foot shelf that French Critic Claude Roy claims to have taken on his vacation: all of Henry James, Proust, Chekhov and Henri Michaux; three volumes of Sartre's Situations; Isaac Deutscher's Trotsky, in three volumes; four F. Scott Fitzgerald novels and two by Hemingway; six art books; Nan Hoa Tchen King by Tchouang Tzeu; Leopardi's Zibaldone; and Alice in Wonderland...
...seems to have been, practically from birth, a perfervid scholar, linguist, spiritual genius and altogether verbose little man who finds everything in life "heartrending," or "damnable." "My emotions are too damnably raw today, I fear," he starts, and in 28,000 words plunges forth to speculate on God, reincarnation, Proust, Balzac, baseball and the charms of the camp director's wife ("quite perfect legs, ankles, saucy bosoms, very fresh, cute hind quarters"), while insistently querying his parents about "what imaginary-sensual acts gave lively, unmentionable entertainment to your minds...
...reviewer of my novel The Smile on the Face of the Lion [Feb. 12] writes that "[the author] seems to have derived his literary manner in equal measure from Marcel Proust, Ian Fleming, Bernard Shaw and Michelangelo Antonioni." I have read the regular amount of Proust, very little Shaw, and no Fleming-though I am planning to. As for Antonioni, the really relevant thing we have in common is, of course, optimism (i.e., the awareness that making films, writing novels, etc., are the ultimately worthwhile pursuits...
...names and relationships, assembled by London's Time and Tide two novels back, occupied four full pages of type. Yet every one of them is as distinctively striated and plump with life as a mountain trout, and the society they inhabit is as compellingly real and elaborate as Proust's Paris...