Word: proust
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Anthony Powell, a novelist whom British Critic V.S. Pritchett has ranked with Evelyn Waugh, and whom Evelyn Waugh has ranked with Proust (though "more realistic and much funnier"), is almost totally neglected in the U.S. It is not that Powell is dull; he is indeed much funnier than Proust (though not, perhaps, to the French). It is not that his subject matter is so special as to be outside U.S. sympathy; by now, British upper and middle class life should be less exotic to the U.S. reader than Yoknapatawpha County or the gas-filled pads of Jack Kerouac...
...Operettas; The Balcony, Jean Genet's surrealist universe ensconced in a brothel; The Connection, a pad full of Pirandelloish characters waiting, not for Godot, but the heroin fix; and a neat double dose of disenchantment-Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, in which a defeated, Proust-like writer plays back his own past, on the same bill with Edward Albee's Zoo Story, which stars a lonely beatnik trying to communicate with an awful square. Up in Central Park: The Taming of the Shrew...
...Over the years, it has committed some notable omissions, including Tolstoy, Strindberg, Proust, Valéry, Joyce...
...preoccupation with the subsoil of the mind, it owes much to Joyce and Proust, and in its meticulous focusing on reality it often achieves unreal effects-just as a section of skin under a microscope does not look like skin but like a lunar landscape. Despite frequent stretches of dullness, the New Realist writers are sometimes fascinating because they have moved away from the facile psychology and sociology that filled so much fiction in the '30s and '40s; their characters seem to float through the vast emptiness of society like planets close to collision...
Life and literature are not as far apart as some critics like to believe, and few books seem truer to life than those in which the author indulges his nostalgia. Writers as various as Marcel Proust, Thomas Wolfe and James Thurber separately discovered that "you can't go home again." In The Waters of Kronos, Novelist Conrad Richter adds an extra dimension to this truism. His hero grasps what countless other men have sensed: you can never really leave home. Novelist Richter has written a dozen books (The Trees, The Fields, The Town) in which the American grain stands...