Word: proustians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (translated as Journey to the End of Night) is as un-Proustian as a novel can be. Its scenes are the battlefields of World War I, hospital wards, lunatic asylums. The mysterious author's protagonist-narrator is a most reluctant soldier and postwar wanderer named Bardamu. Murderers, wife beaters and abortionists appear as ordinary characters in Journey. Its language-French jangled into street argot-is a kind of frenzied shorthand of pain, terror and hate...
There is more Proustian remembrance to come, mostly in what may be described as sandlots-revisited prose: "It is difficult to express the sheer beauty I experienced facing leftward, feeling the blazing sun upon my head, feeling the weedy field fly beneath my feet . . . looking back and spotting it, falling out of the silvery blue sky, glinting in the sun, the burning pointed oval that my out stretched fingers so desired...
...other neo-realists in the supermarket-check-out-counter-school of modern American fiction might have been able to go somewhere with this plot, but Agnew simply does not know where to start. Nothing happens for the first two hundred pages. Agnew introduces his characters with an almost Proustian verve for description, but his idea of expressing meaningful detail is to inform the reader every time a character shaves, or brushes his teeth. Then, when the action finally takes place--most of it in the final fifty pages--Agnew makes up for lost time and all hell breaks loose...
...even without cohesive drama or great characters, Beyond the Bedroom Wall demonstrates a fine talent for description, coupled with a Proustian ability to re-create the past. Much of Woiwode's fiction seems knit from the strands of his own life. Like the fourth generation of Neumiller children, the Manhattan-based Woiwode was born in North Dakota and spent part of his childhood in rural Illinois. After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1964, he began selling articles and short stories to magazines. His first novel, What I'm Going to Do, I Think...
...height of Harvard Square's equivalent of the Parisian May riots, in April of 1970, I came upon a Proustian looking youth contemplating the pastry in the shattered window of the French pastry shop C'est Si Bon on Dunster Street. After many moments of intense scrutiny he decided on a golden croissant which he carefully picked from out of the broken glass...