Things Past. Professor Said, who read
along with us, called Moncrieff's pleasingly
mannered translation "impressive."
The above is a long-winded way of saying
that the retranslated In Search of Lost
Time, known for its longeurs—some
people claim to read only a sentence of
it a day—is a riveting read, a high and
low society suspense novel, provided you
read it fast. The appearance, the vanishing
and the resurfacing of certain characters,
their surprising ascent or plummet, over
decades, on the social scale, is a thriller,
one you can only get to grips with if Proust's
numberless supply of characters, his
minutiae of incident, stay freshly contained
in your memory. Therefore I recommend
the seven volumes of A la Recherche as
a perfect late summer project, one I will
undertake ten years from now.
A brief, breathless read is New Yorker
theatre critic Hilton Als' memoir The
Women, a meditation on what he calls
"negressity," a study, in 145 pages packed
with erudition and action, first, of his mother;
then Dorothy Dean, bitter black muse to
white gay intelligentsia and socialites in
the 1970s; and finally the dramatist Owen
HYLAND
...no
thrill
equals
the
vicarious
one...
University of Chicago Press
ISBN-10 0226153061
