a la recherche du temps perdu

[star blue]

I'm not sure whether I want to read this or not . . . it's so long and wide, and I haven't read anything in a grip.

what do you think, fayefaye?

[Munro]

Read it.

I haven't read it (of course), but one of these years I will, I really want to. My friend keeps telling me it is amazing and relishes Proust's observations of relative human memory and how time changes perception . . .

If you have no problem with being committed to a text over a lengthy period of time (and judging by your enthusiasm for Joyce and Pynchon, you probably don't) I'd say you will like it.

That's my advice, but yes, fayefaye might know better.

[star blue]

I read the first thirty pages . . . they were funny because it was just this guy experiencing that split-second moment when he realizes he's no longer sleeping. I don't know if I could handle 5,000 pages of it, though.

[IWilKikU]

If you have to ask, "Should I read this?" You probably should.

[Munro]

Originally posted by star blue
I read the first thirty pages . . . they were funny because it was just this guy experiencing that split-second moment when he realizes he's no longer sleeping. I don't know if I could handle 5,000 pages of it, though.

My friend told me once there was something like 40 or 50 pages in which he described a walk he took down a street in Paris - I never heard something I wanted to read more in my life.
Proust was absolutely neurotic and a hypochondriac. He wrote the entire volumes with cork padding on his wall so that no noise whatsoever would seep into his room - and he was extremely emotional and sesitive. what a character.

Anyway, tell what you think if you do read it!

[star blue]

I like Joyce's style much, much better.

[star blue]

I'm gonna stick to reading comic books for now.

[Munro]

Hey, at least you don't have to read a 400 page autobiography by Mahatma Gandhi for Religion. . . I love him, but it's killing me, and worse yet my time.

Speaking of Joyce, how do you rate 'Dubliners'? (if you've read it) It's lying on my bedside table right now and I'm busting to read it.

Oh, and finally - which comics do you read?

[sloegin]

Dubliners, is great. The stories are more subtle, I think, than Joyce's other works.

[Dr Cynic]

Well I've got that series but it's currently way down my "To Read" list. That's because I have heard people describe Proust's style as "too elaborate and rather hard to understand". So it will be great if one of you guys do it first and then tell me how it is :p :p

[star blue]

read the dubliners stories, you'll like them a lot.

anyway, I've read a lot of graphic novels like the sandman and the dark knight series. I have a pretty extensive comic book collection. a lot of the early batman and x-men comics, and about a hundred and fifty spiderman comics. they're my most valuable possessions.

[fayefaye]

Originally posted by Munro
the entire volumes with cork padding on his wall so that no noise whatsoever would seep into his room - and he was extremely emotional and sesitive. what a character.

I always wanted a room with padding. No, seriously. Like the crazy padding from insane asylums. I think that'd be so sweet.

And no, I don't know better. But I love Calvin and Hobbes [not really 'comic book' but hey], and star, there's probably an Evangelion manga somewhere, if you want more evangelion stuff. There are mangas of most anime, and Evangelion's got such a following, I think it'd be bound to have one too.

[IWilKikU]

I got to go in a padded room once (volenterilly, I assure you!). The pads are really hard. If you smashed your head against them, it would hurt alot. You just wouldn't bleed. The walls are all made of leather, or somthing that looks/feels like hard leather.

[fayefaye]

On the up side, I'm well on the way to getting one myself.

Voluntarily? Let's just see about that....

[quasimodo1]

Mostly got to go with the comments of Monro on this author. The only exception to that point of view is that Marcel Proust was a kind of genious. Nobody I ever knew or heard of could remember such detail. Reading him can be a drag, it can be interesting just for love of his words and style. He is all the things Monro says including the part where he secludes himself in a house by the French Atlantic shoreline and writes about the cookies his mother brought him to his room when he was three years old; still there is a kind of genious here but one that's not for everyone. He is saying with these remembrances and comments on; hey this happened in my life, this individual memory is triivial but the combined effect of all the life he remembered no matter how well heeled he was or how sensative or neurotic and how artistic...the effect all combines itself into something writers and philosophers have called "sea change". A single wave doesn't change the shoreline much but seventy years of wave and tide mean something: an individual and the totality of the reality remembered is his life. There is some reason why some writer's names have become adjectives...like Proustian. quasimodo1

[PeterL]

I have been strong;y advised to read it, but I have resisted, because of its length. I wonder why he wrote in a continuous form, rather than separating it into descreet sections that had a single theme.