Word: sonia
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...whisking Sonia from dreary Chichester to delicious contemporary Boston, Miss Stafford tries to do the job Proust did in Guermantes' Way (third volume of his interminable autobiography...
...long, rhythmic, qualified sentences and is forthwith called "the American Proust." Miss Stafford is the latest to be thus crowned. But while Proust was from birth an accepted member of the decadent Parisian society about which he wrote in Remembrance of Things Past, Miss Stafford's proxy, Sonia Marburg, is rather painfully not a socialite. Sonia is the dreaming, sensitive daughter of a German shoemaker and a Russian chamber maid-as unlikely a person to circulate among Boston's rigid elite as could be imagined...
Boston Adventure attempts not only the Proustian sentence structure and philosophical overtones, but also the use of fantasy as a literary method. Sonia, who spends a disturbing amount of her childhood sleeping on the floor on a pallet, dreams about a wealthy, untouchable Boston spinster named Miss Pride. She met Miss Pride while working as a chambermaid in the Hotel Barstow in Chichester, just outside Boston. "Over and over again," dreams Sonia, "until my eyes closed, I imagined the day on which my parents would die and Miss Pride would come to take me to live at the Hotel...." Eventually...
Russian Interlude. The interval between Sonia's wild daydreaming and her actual departure for Boston is less Proustian than Russian. Her father, a frustrated, hard-drinking man, pulls out one night, never to be heard of again. (The family is sure he headed West, since he practically lived on Riders of the Purple Sage.) Her unwanted, sensitive, epileptic younger brother Ivan dies after spending several hours lying in the snow. Then her mother, a luscious, emotional woman, loses her sanity and is packed off to an institution...
...could not evaluate accurately the aspects of this select world," reflects Sonia, "whether the personal connection of these people with the immortals, or their poised arrogance in regard to such issues as the contemptible political machine in Boston, or their stylish language, or their blue-blooded ugliness was the more impressive. ... It was not, I concluded, that what they said and the judgments they passed were [profound] . . . but that the manner of these pilgrims' heirs was so fearless and direct that one was not struck with their fatuity...