Word: proustian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...autobiographical minutiae, his willingness to spin elaborate riffs on the smallest physical details, Brodkey's proponents regularly compare him to Proust. The analogy may someday prove accurate, but this book does not make the case. Perhaps Party of Animals, which is rumored to be sprawling and multivolumed, will demonstrate Proustian breadth, the ability to evoke an entire, glittering world from a mass of perceptions. For now, the sharpest impression given by Brodkey is of an artist entranced, and imprisoned, by a narrow range of self-preoccupations...
Today Lacroix has a Proustian sense of his childhood. He was taken up by a little band of mini-aesthetes: "We were like dandies, snobbish and arrogant. We might show up in green velvet suits and pink shirts and read Wilde -- anything we thought was daring." Christian was taxed with designing costumes for their amateur shows. He traces his enduring preoccupation with the turn of the century to this early research; at one point he plotted out a season-by-season directory of changes in the minutiae of fin-de-siecle fashion...
...somewhere between the Proustian ambience of Woody Allen's films and the never-never land of the Emerald City: a town of tart talk and smooth tunes, where women sported black silk stockings and Cadillacs purred down clean streets kept orderly by serried ranks of trusted policemen. The skyline, crowned by the 1,250-ft. Empire State Building, was the most imposing man-made sight in the world, and at night it glowed with the fires of 2 million aspirations. Visitors to Grand Central Station, where the trains were out of sight and the zodiac was on the ceiling, could...
When he was six or seven and spending many of his days in British hospitals, a nurse gave Dudley Moore a good-night kiss. Her name was Pat, and 40 years later he can still feel the imprint of her lips on his cheek. He describes it in Proustian terms. "I almost spin when I think of it," he says. "She was truly an angel of mercy, and that kiss was probably the first taste of real, unqualified, uncomplicated affection I had ever had. In many ways my entire life is based on recapturing that single moment of affection...
...afternoon, it was drizzling-that I found it after searching all Europe and North America for a copy; that it is dog-eared at passages that mean more to my life than my heartbeat; that the mere touch of its pages recalls to me in a Proustian shower my first love, my best dreams. Should I mind that you seek to take all that away? That I will undoubtedly never get it back? Then even if you actually return it to me one day, I will be wizened, you cavalier, and the book spoiled utterly by your mishandling? Mind...