How to start reading Proust?

[Oomoo]

Some of my favorite novels are considered very "difficult". I love Woolf, Joyce and Faulkner. But for some reason I just can't read Proust - I'm very bored after like 15 pages in which nothing happens. I ask myself what I've just read and I just can't tell. I have the Scott-Moncrieff translation which is good, I suppose. Maybe I read very fast? So I slowed down a little and I still can't read it. I'm in a constant urge to put it down. Anyone else has this problem? My experience with all great literary classics is that if you don't enjoy it it's your own fault. So Joyce sometimes make little sense and you skip it; Faulkner is hard to understand so you reread certain sections, hope it makes sense later on or at worst use some sort of online list of characters or something. But Proust seems... boring. Not boring in the sense that there's no murder or an irrelevant discussion on politics or a relatively boring introduction like in The Brothers Karamazov, but that you read on and it seems like you could skip a page and not even notice it. Does it get better later on? Is there anything you should focus on? "How" are you supposed to read it?

Thanks

[Kafka's Crow]

I am reading Proust and I am taking it really easy. No hurry to finish it. In fact I have started reading other books before even finishing it, something I have never done before. Nothing is forgettable in Proust, you can come back to it again and again. Finished reading Dawkins's The God Delusion this morning and now I can get back to Swann in Love. I don't have to go back and start again as this is one book that leaves a very useful bookmark in your memory and you can always go back to it. I am aiming to finish it within this year while reading other things on the side. I will go back to it now and this evening I'll start One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

[quasimodo1]

To Oomoo: Everyone almost, has a love-hate relationship with Proust, especially "In Remembrance of Times Lost". You might read some bios and about how and where he wrote...sound proof room and all...this might help. quasi

[Kafka's Crow]

Change of mind! I'll start How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton, this evening. Read about 20 pages of The Remembrance of Things Past this afternoon. Will go back to it for about ten more pages later today before I start de Bottom's book.

[Remarkable]

Just read him.And then,if you can't really do it,just put the book aside and pick it up in a year or two.I have understood that with Proust age is an important matter.In the end,he is not boring,he is just highly philosophical.It's like,if you try to read Decarte,you will probably end up finishing the book two years later.It's the same with Proust,only that his philosophies are manifested in novels.

[mayneverhave]

Read Proust unlike any other novelist you have ever read.
While Joyce requires a well-read intellectual background, and Faulkner requires a talent for piecing events together, Proust doesn't necessarily require either of those.

Read Proust like you would poetry. The beauty of his prose is its execution and use of language. His sentences are extradorinarly long, and descriptions of even the most mundane of objects can run for pages. That's the point though, to enjoy Proust you must enjoy those lengthy descriptions of chairs, steeples, or mirrors. Plot is of relatively little importance, as it moves along slowly and Proust jumps around a lot.

Next time you read the novel, try reading it in chunks of 10-20 pages without breaks. Try to appreciate the vivacious use of language and imagery.

[Oomoo]

Thanks. I might give it a try again. I don't care about plots but I hope it has characterization.

I don't have a very strong visual imagination. I mostly don't care for lengthy descriptions of physical objects unless they reveal something about the observer or are somehow relevant to the themes explored. Out of context I simply don't enjoy such things. Perhaps that's the problem? Or maybe the beginning is just slow?

[Kafka's Crow]

Don't read it too fast. This is life and life regained in fiction. Speed kills detail. read it pas trop rapide, detail is everything. Like Joyce and Beckett after him for Proust, form IS the content: pas trop rapide.

[ClickForth]

okokok

[mayneverhave]

hah, instead of worrying about the entire novel

try just getting through Swann's Way first and you'll know what the tone for the rest of the novel is.

[Oomoo]

Read slowly and tell yourself now that you probably won't be done in less than a year if you actually wanna read the entirety of À la recherche du temps perdu.

Does each book stand on its own?

[Kafka's Crow]

Does each book stand on its own?

It can be read that way, one book at a time. Follow the sequence though. I will finish Swann in Love tomorrow.

[Kafka's Crow]

Finished Swann in Love and started reading The Place-Names: The Name. It would not last long but it is slow and more difficult, like the beginning.

[aabbcc]

Do not force things. If for some reason this book does not suit you right now, it does not mean that it will never suit you; some times in your life are perfect for some books, and for some they are simply not; so if you are not assigned to read it, and feel it is not for you right now, even after a couple of dozens of pages, let it go and return to it in a couple of months.

I have read Combray and One Swann's Love, both first for my own joy when I was younger, than re-read the former one due to school. I was one of the few people in my class who actually did read it (as the book is really not suited for 17-year-old's mindset and interests; most of those kids will return to it later in their lives, which is perfectly alright), and even our professor said that he would not force people of our age to read it if we come to conclusion we really cannot cope with the book now.
Don't read it for the sake of having read "classics", there is time and place for every book in your life, and you are certainly going to enjoy it much more when it is congenial with you, than if you are forcing it.
Only my suggestion, though.

[Kafka's Crow]

I am enjoying it. I think it is designed like a symphony with different 'movements' describing different moments. Starting slowly and softly with the narrator's childhood in the sleepy old Combray as it moves on to the hustle and bustle of Paris where the main events happen in Swann's heart-breaking but futile love affair and slowly ebbs away in the narrator's impressions of different places and the stream of consciousness that is triggered by the sound of names. I have found the germinale of Joyce's The Dead in Swann's reaction to the 'little piece' of music towards the end of Swann in Love. The Same concept re-appears in Samuel Beckett's Molloy with absolutely hilarious comic effect:

'I seemed to hear, at a certain moment, a distant music. I stopped, the better to listen. Go on, he said. Listen, I said. Get on, he said. I wasn't allowed to listen to the music. It might have drawn a crowd. He gave me a shove. I had been touched, oh not my skin, but none the less my skin had felt it, it had felt a man's hard fist, through its coverings. While still putting my best foot foremost I gave myself up to that golden moment, as if I had been someone else.'

He is not Swann, he is not Joyce's Gabriel remembering her dead love, he is Molloy, Beckett's crippled protagonist (lame in one leg 'best foot foremost' indeed) being shoved around by a policemen who suspects him of being a tramp. This got me in stitches. Now I know the depth of the parody and it has become even more hilarious.