Word: proustian
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...While A Life Apart revolves around the past, the past is not the same as nostalgia. There is little romance or Proustian yearning here (although a childhood storybook fills Ritwik with "a strange longing"). But if Mukherjee is scathing about Ritwik's history in a city "that had leaped out of the pages of Dante and transposed east," he also refuses to extol Oxford as the site of Ritwik's apparent freedom. Ritwik ignores the university town's prettiness, fixating instead on the "s___-brown door" of the toilet cubicle he favors for his risky liaisons. And London, while offering...
...eyes as he tastes a spicy hors d’oeuvre. This moment appears to be directly inspired by Proust’s episode of the madeleine—in fact, André Aciman’s entire second novel reads like an exercise in bringing a feverish Proustian narrative to twenty-first century Manhattan. This novel, which blurs the boundaries between supermarket romance and literary fiction, mainly relies on Aciman’s ease at spinning together long, hypnotic sentences to fuel the heavily psychological and minimally plot-driven narrative. However, the same characteristics that give Aciman his writerly...
This is the story of Eric Kraft's novel Flying (Picador; 581 pages). And of course, Peter's "full and frank disclosure" is much more a Proustian exercise in creative recollection than a marshaling of the facts. After all, Peter is an imaginative soul, and he knows it--that's what got him into this mess in the first place. "When you are a seat-of-the-pants memoirist," he writes, "you don't write about your life; you live your memoirs. You begin to feel that you and your account of yourself are one, like a mythical beast...
...local 7-Eleven and built right through the cow tongue before Karaoke, the glutinous rice balls at Miyajima, and the plum wine at a restaurant in downtown Tokyo that tasted exactly like Clearly Canadian’s Wild Cherry Soda. “It” was the Proustian sensation of being suddenly launched back into childhood. I was instantly four years old again, back when the bakery in Chinatown still sold green tea jelly, when my family still took vacations to Cape May and I drank Clearly Canadians by the crate, and before I’d accidentally opened...
...home at 2 for lunch," he said, recalling the roast-centered family meals when he was a boy back in Scotland. "You never missed it, or you were in serious trouble. It's how I went through my early years of childhood." Still, he resisted the obvious Proustian implications and stuck to the argument that while a civilian foodie would compile an elaborate, complicated meal, a chef appreciates the perfection in simplicity--a sentiment shared by Florence, a Food Network host. "One of the most brilliant meals I've ever had was at Il Cibreo in Florence. Or real authentic...