Marcel Proust and time recovered

From time to time the spirit needs to get rid of the overwhelming environment of crime news, corruption and more crimes and the best way to escape is to seek refuge in good literature. One of my favorite novels is In search of lost timeof Marcel Proust, who passed away in Paris one hundred years ago, on a day like today.

The novel is made up of seven parts and I was lucky enough to read it when I was young. I bought it at the Scientific Bookstore, two volumes with more than three thousand pages, bible paper, a very careful edition of Plaza & Janés, from 1967.

New discovery about character that inspired writer Marcel Proust

I cannot make a synthesis of that work, it would be unfair. Critics have devoted hundreds of volumes to him, and many writers around the world have recognized his influence. With “long and enveloping sentences” he recounts events from a world that disappeared with the First World War, that of Paris in the belle époque, the world of Guermantes, of the high nobility of that family from the San Germán neighborhood of Paris. Proust’s amazing memory recalls the feelings, the jealousy, the conversations of the characters, their dresses, the landscapes, the dinners; some haughty and authentic nobility, others climbers and gorged; the loves that are born and die out like that of Charles Swann for Odette de Crécy, those of the same author for Gilberte Swann, who had been his childhood playmate and with whom he fell in love, as he would later do with Albertine.

One of my favorite novels is In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, who died in Paris a hundred years ago…

One day, when the character who is a kind of alter ego of the narrator returns to society, a beautiful lady asks him to go out to dinner. He accepts “if he is not afraid of being seen alone with a young man”, causing laughter from her assistants. They laughed that an older man was called young, as if joking. The passage of time affects the appearance of people. A fat lady approaches him to greet him familiarly and he makes an effort to remember the woman’s name, until she says: Sure, they say that I look more and more like my mother. She was Gilberte, daughter of Odette de Crécy. This woman is one of the characters that runs through the entire novel: from the time the narrator met her and called her the “lady in pink” when she was a gallant woman who visited her uncle Adolfo, to when she married Charles Swann, the rich expert in arts. After being widowed and while she was still attractive, she married the Duc de Guermantes. He lived corroded by jealousy: “The old duke no longer went out, because he spent his days in Odette’s house. (…) He would not have recognized it… it was nothing more than a ruin, that beautiful romantic pink thing that can be a rock in the storm. Whipped on all sides by the waves of suffering, of anger (…) his face chipped like a block kept the style, the line that he had always admired was gnawed like one of the beautiful old heads too smashed, but with which we felt very happy being able to decorate our room”.

Proust’s rules

Proust was asthmatic. Five years before he died he locked himself in a room lined with cork walls to write his novel. “A new light was shed on me” because I had discovered “that the work of art was the only means of recovering lost Time”. (EITHER)