Unblinking Eye: The infinite rewards of immersion in Proust | Hacker News Reader

Unblinking Eye: The infinite rewards of immersion in Proust

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33 pointssamclemens18 comments

>In art there are merely—some merely—discrete geniuses, who arrive without predecessors and depart without successors.

Well, after Proust there was Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Completely different from M. Proust in ideas, writing style, novels, but surely a great successor. I loved Céline and his major work: Voyage au bout de la nuit.

I loved also how quick was the shiftment from the Proustian period to the new Céline era.

It's easy to see how we went from Balzac to Flaubert but it's totally non-sense how we went from Proust to Céline a in a few years.

A huge part of literature is not predictable and that's the most interesting part of it.

I remember having to read Proust's In Search of Lost Time in school when I was something like 16-17 years old. I remember the book as excruciatingly boring. It's a small book and I used whole two weeks to read it because of that and went away from it with no takeaway whatsoever.

I blame it on the school program. Perhaps we were too young to appreciate it at that age, perhaps the approach was upside-down: we first had to read a book w/o any guidance, and then we'd discuss it.

It's not only boring, but also incredibly poorly written. Disregarding from the fact that he's using far too many words to say very little (which is arguably a matter of taste), having a single sentence strech multiple pages is just poor writing.

I do disagree with you that the book is short though. According to Wikipedia it's 4215 pages, which I believe is correct.

Oh, we have to read only the first part; it was ~250 A5 pages.

Having sentences that go on and on would be poor writing if it were done unintentionally or for the lack of skill. But in case of Proust the text is very deliberately composed in a particular way as a stylistic device.

Just because it's done intentionally doesn't make it better in any way.

Sure, you can look at it as some kind of art piece, but I would not call it good writing.

Third longest ever novel, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_novels

Well, you're welcome to your opinion, but the statement "Proust (sometimes) writes long sentences" is a fact, not a value judgement. Whether the prose can be understood or not is how we separate good writing from bad, and in Proust's case it's not hard to follow what he's saying. There are, by the way, a large number of people who would strenuously disagree with you and consider Proust one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Among them are people like Edmund White, John Updike, André Aciman, and Vladimir Nabokov, formidable prose stylists themselves; in fact, here's Nabokov explaining precisely why it is that Proust is so unique, using an illustrative passage to come to an understanding of how Proust's prose works as it does: http://www.catskill-merino.com/blog/nabokov-on-proust-in-blo...

...Nabokov being a good example of a person who never shied away from making sweeping value judgements about authors, but was usually willing to back up what he said with examples.

It is indeed my opinion, but when reading your response I felt it was an appeal to authority, which is a fallacy, and as such difficult to constructively argue. I would much rather hear what your personal opinion is on Proust.

I read your linked article by Nabokov, and suffice it to say that I don't agree. And, yes, I do recall the very passages quoted in the article since I have read it before.

A good writer would have been capable of conveying the same message with the same emotion, but with sentences that does not require the reader to concentrate to the point of it being work to actually read the thing.

When reading it, I used to feel a sense of accomplishment after every few pages. That's a pretty good feeling, and if it was hard to really understand what the author wanted to say, it must be better than that simple writing by lesser authors such as Tolstoy, right? (yes, the last part was irony)

Well, arguing about literature never really leads anywhere. I'd rather argue about why Emacs is better than every other editor than talk about authors that I don't even enjoy reading.

Not all arguments from expert opinion are fallacious. In this case I think that those authors are recognized, themselves, as excellent prose stylists. Therefore it's reasonable to accord their opinions more weight than the average person's. If I'd said something along the lines of "Dan Brown says Proust is a master prose stylist and he's a writer..." then you'd have a point. Also, they are pretty representative of the critical consensus on Proust's particular strengths. Finally, they all happen to have written on Proust and what they like about him, some of them quite extensively. (Sadly, not all of it is available online. John Updike penned a very nice piece years ago on the ways Proust shaped him as a writer and the difference he found reading him first in the Moncrieff translation and then later in French; doesn't seem to be available anywhere.)

>> Well, arguing about literature never really leads anywhere.

A problem with the inherent subjectivity of art in general, I suppose. But nonetheless, it can be an enjoyable past-time if kept civil and respectful. Anyway, I appreciate you explaining what it is that you don't like about Proust, even if we don't see eye-to-eye.

I have not read the Updike article, but I might seek it out and read it if I find myself with some extra spare time.

Based on what you have said so far, I get the impression that you admire handiwork of actually constructing a 4000+ page novel of this kind. In that respect I can actually agree with you. It is indeed a remarkable work in many ways. But, it is my opinion that in terms of a vessel for conveying a compelling story, it completely fails.

Can you say that you actually enjoyed reading the book? Or did you appreciation stem from a feeling of accomplisment that you managed to plow through something that few people succeed in reading?

I can happily admit that I was not able to complete it. Once I realised that it wasn't going to improve, I just stopped.

While I haven't personally read the work in question, I remember enough about school book selections to observe that you should not rule out the possibility that the real source of the problem is that the book is genuinely boring.

Some of my french teachers (I am french) were fond of Proust and have read all his books many times. Some people hate him. Very few are "in between".

Having long sentences is not bad style in french literature. Many authors use long sentences intentionally (I remember a sentence longer than 1 page in "la modification" from Michel Butor). This kind of critics is very similar to the "too many notes" of Mozart: http://www.toomanynotes.com/Amadeus.htm

A small book? In the edition on my shelves, the first and I think skinniest volume runs to 600 pages. Among modernist paperweights, I guess that is smaller than Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, or The Man Without Qualities. None of them, though, had another five volumes trailing behind. I can't imagine reading any of the volumes in two weeks, unless in conditions of solitary confinement. Nor can I imagine, as a teacher, asking 17-year-olds to read the book.

[Edit: missed the part about only reading the first volume. Still, a couple of weeks is one hell of a pace.]

Wow he really loves Proust

There is a reason why he is described as one of the greatest novelist that ever lived. I'm reading through In Search of Lost Time and just the simplicity of the writing, exploring some of the most seemingly banal aspects of human nature, is astounding. I do wish I knew French; I can only imagine what the original manuscript must feel like.

What a weird web site. You need to click for the second page of the article, yet you can scroll down for the "next" article.

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