🖋️ “If a fairy godmother gave me the choice: to become Proust, but to suffer from asthma and insomnia until my…

🖋️ “If a fairy godmother gave me the choice: to become Proust, but to suffer from asthma and insomnia until I died, or to sleep reasonably well and remain myself, which would I choose?”

🗳️ What about you?

Catherine Cusset is a multi-award-winning novelist 🌟 who has been published by Gallimard for 30 years. Here, she offers a personal account of her readings of Proust, in a style reminiscent of Laure Murat’s “Roman familial”, published in 2023.

As she recounts snippets of her life and the stories behind some of her books 📚, she draws parallels with her layered readings of “the Search”, which she organises thematically:
I. The Great Love Story
II. The Great Social Novel
III. The Great Novel of Writing

It is in the first part that her own narrative is at its most personal, and she tells us how her own love affairs 💔❤️‍🩹 were, in a sense, already lived, recognised and validated by those of the narrator. In the second part, she examines various works, including those by Tadié, Compagnon and Murat on Proust and society, humour and anti-Semitism. In the third and final part, drawing extensively on the literary theory set out in “Finding Time Again” 🕰️🛌, she returns to the fundamentals of writing: why do we write? Do those we write about have a right of reply? She mentions a talented, even brilliant, friend who, in her view, had ‘wasted his life’.

The book’s 229 pages are an easy read and sometimes make you want to (re)immerse yourself in the Search 🕵🏻‍♂️🔎. It is not a scholarly work, nor even a critical essay, but Catherine Cusset, being a teacher, does not forget to present her arguments in an educational manner, albeit at the cost of a few simplifications. The most annoying of these is her repeated confusion between Proust and his narrator.

#MarcelProust #ÀlaRechercheduTempsperdu #RTP #proustagram #LeTempsretrouvé