Can Anyone Truly Say They've Read *All* Of Proust's Books?

I'll make another effort to pick it up when they cart me off to the cancer ward (hopefully) in 40 years time.

I adored Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove.

I don't know what happened, but I gave up around halfway through The Guermantes Way. This was in my college days, probably 15 years ago.

Maybe someday I'll go back, but I assume at this point I'll have to start over again at the beginning.

Yes, about 20 years ago -- the Moncrieff translation. To enjoy Proust, you have to be in the mindset of taking a long, warm bath. The sentences can be nearly a page long. But if you're in the mood and not anxious or distracted, he's enjoyable. My favorite parts were his tenderness toward his grandmother, his obvious love for St. Loup, and of course the scandalous proto-DLer Baron de Charlus. I got quite tired of Albertine and 'doing the cattleya'. Not convincing, gurl!

r3 is the Moncrieff the Modern Library edition?

No, I don't think so. Mine are the famous silver bricks:

Regular bricks are much cheaper.

I can truly say I've never read one.

Proust

I got about half way through Swann's Way (Du Côté de Chez Swann) in English, before I'd had enough, thought it was boring. Then I thought maybe it's a lousy translation, so tried reading it in the original. It was even MORE boring.

I've been reading volume 2 for À la recherche du temps perdu for a while, nearly at the end. Am definitely going to read all 7 volumes though.

He also wrote other books, not just À la recherche du temps perdu. What I'd really like to read is his gossipy society columns.

He does drone on and on, but if you think of his work as basically high-brow gossip, it's fun.

I’ve read all those nine books of In Search of Lost Time. Very interesting story about ”nothing”. Hard SM scenes in the final books. But I’ve also read Joyce’s Ulysses and Tostoi’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I like long and difficult novels.

Did you read it in French, R10?

No r12, in English, but not solely in one translation so I prefer to use the French name.

My French is almost non-existent and Proust was writing a century ago, but his writing style is actually easy (albeit extreme waffle) so if I ever improve my French enough I'd like to give it a bash in the original.

It’s said that Keanu Reeves has read and enjoyed Proust.

I'm sure Proust did.

R5

That's my set!

Those "silver bricks" were gifted to me by an older person in neighborhood who was moving house and in process of throwing tons of things away. Sadly the bindings now are so fragile that taking first book back and forth daily to read has caused binding to crack.

R8

Entire episode

R14

Yes, but not the Moncrief edition.

"As we pass Proust, Keanu reveals that he devoured every page of the meticulous colossus that is Remembrance of Things Past. “It took a couple of years, but I did it,” he says. The grin has straightened itself; it’s ear-to-ear now. “I didn’t do the Moncrief, I did the newer translation. Some books would come in between. But I found that it was a thread—like time—that you could walk away and come back to. I didn’t feel like I had lost the momentum of the story at all. It was like meeting a good friend or someone that you like, and you’re like, ‘Hey, dude! How’s it goin’?’”

r5 Modern Library published the Moncrieff - revised (and I loved the packaging):

I also had a couple of volumes of the newer Penguin translation.

They're all in storage now, sadly -- a downside of being a nomad with a large personal library.

I’m French. I adore reading, and have read classic literature since I was a teenager. I also love long novels. I devoured War and Peace in a few weeks. It must have taken me just about.a year to go through all 20 novels of Zola’s Rougon Macquart cycle. I love a challenge. I even read Joyce’s Ulysses in English (god that one was painful). However the only classic I ever dropped was A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). I just couldn’t. That book defeated me (the other one that did it too later was Atlas Shrugged - what absolute garbage).

C.K. Scott Moncrieff is a fascinating guy : war hero, spy and lover of men. Chasing Lost Time, the biography by his grand-niece , makes for entertaining reading.

Why ever would one want to, dear boy?

Who?

I read her biography, does that count?

I keep trying to read "Remembrance of Things Past." I cannot get beyond page 1. C'est ca.

I read Proust because I want to read the classics of modern literature. Proust is not difficult, it’s an immersive experience. I read the Moncrieff translation in the silver brick edition, two paperbacks. I’ve been curious about the new translation but I read a bad review of the translation in the NYRB.

[quote]Atlas Shrugged - what absolute garbage

Indeed, R20. As Capote said of Kerouac, "That's not writing, it's typing." Rand was SO dogmatic and certain of things. I think Dorothy Parker said in a review of Rand: "This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly; it should be thrown with much force."

Proust actually had an excellent mind and saw the shades of color. Woolf loved reading him.

[quote]Can Anyone Truly Say They've Read *All* Of Proust's Books?

I can truly say I slept through *all* of Proust's books.

There are novelists that one doesn't need to read integrally. I surprised myself by enjoying Gertrude Stein in my teens. Then Proust. Joyce not so much enjoyment but I read Portrait. I had a friend in college who read books backwards after reading them straight through. It takes a special mind. My point is after you've read one by such stylists, the pleasure is picking them up and reading a couple of pages, just to enjoy the style. This I discovered long before the Internet, and when I had a normal, intellectual's attention span. Trump keeps Mein Kampf in his nightstand for browsing pleasure so I can't vouch for my company.

Go ahead and browse Proust.

I heard that Jessica Simpson read them all

Lens Dunham has the entirety of À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs tattooed on her left thigh.

Judy reads Proust aloud to Dolly every night in bed before lights out.

"Dead at 40 of an oesophageal cancer that, Findlay speculates, may have had something to do with his fondness for oral sex, Scott Moncrieff is, in the end, rather hard to pin down."

Cannot believe that was actually written.....

[quote] Cannot believe that was actually written

I cannot believe half of what appears in the Guardian propaganda newspaper.

I took AP French Lit and, mercifully, Proust was absent from the syllabus.

Dr. Philip Kolb read all of Proust's work, including the letters. But he is no longer living.

Lady Mosley said she has read Proust several times.

Also, she was not a Nazi sympathizer

I'm a college professor and read the whole thing with a reading group of other college professors in 2009-10. We met each month, and did roughly each book in the sequence over two months.

“All of Proust” would include his earlier novel Jean Santeuil, which is a blueprint for A la Recherche but much more accessible.

There a many critical guides to Proust that are very helpful in getting through the volumes. Would love to have taken a course in Proust to read along with a class. But if he's not to your taste, better to avoid. ULYSSES is one I'll never warm to, and that's ok by me.

I've read all of it and and mostly I enjoyed it (the best part is at the very end), but after a while I was skimming the bits about Albertine because everything about her is unconvincing and tedious.

I listened to about 1/3 of a BBC RADIO 4 adaptation of the series on Audible. I can’t remember why I stopped, because I was enjoying it and a couple of the narrators - namely James Wilby and Julian Wadham - had extremely sexy voices.

Reading Proust is like reading Datalounge.

The same thoughts are mulled over and over again by a collection of amnesiacs.

Someone starts a thread even though they started the same thread 12 weeks previously.

Richard Howard was writing a new translation. Did he finish before he popped off?

I prefer Genet.

God, I've tried several times to get past page 1 of Remembrance of Things Past.....I bought the book probably 30 years ago. Just can't do it.

Proust = Masturbateur.

I haven’t read any of them. I don’t think I’ll bother.

R45 yes, Genet is fantastic. Helped his writing that he was an exciting, unusual person who led a full life and had unique perspectives.

Proust seems a boring, prosaic and empty man by comparison, and as a boring person myself, I don't want to hear from other boring people.

[quote] I had a friend in college who read books backwards after reading them straight through. It takes a special mind. My point is after you've read one by such stylists, the pleasure is picking them up and reading a couple of pages, just to enjoy the style. This I discovered long before the Internet, and when I had a normal, intellectual's attention span.

This is the relationship I have as a reader to Pynchon's work. Never have read a book of his straight through, cover to cover in a linear fashion--don't think I could, nor would I want to. It's work to wade into at random points, like swimming in a river. Never the same experience twice.

R50 William S Burroughs did the same. Proust did the same. They threw the loose pages of their manuscript into the air and the poor typist had to figure out the sequence.

R11 what is the hard SM content? Never got far enough to find out.

"Sodom et Gormorrah" was as lame as cucumber sandwiches.

Why, YES!!

Proust = milquetoast

I looked at the comic book set, but when Charles Swann had not arrived yet that for that evening without Mother's kiss by the 37th comic in the series, I gave up.

Who wants to commit to something that will take longer than the rest of one's life to finish looking at it? Although the penetrative purple dream octopus depicting the beginning was arresting. You know, “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure" and all.

I wanted to know what Harold Pinter did to compress 1,128 hours down to 90 minutes.

R42 James Wilby will always have goodwill from the gay community.

Completists of anything in terms of leisure are an alien race to me.

If in your free downtime you aren't enjoying something, why slog through it for the sake of it?