Saturday nite out
Catmojo
Matt
Sun 25 Apr 2021 05:05
1am in the approximate middle of the Atlantic is a good a time and place to make Big Decisions, my latest but which isn't yet Final being that I'm probably Not going to pursue reading the Proust book to the end too avidly, partly because the book is so huge and I'm only 25% through it, and partly because there's still no sign of an actual narrative plot, the entirety of the book being a collection of fondly-remembered long-ago reminiscences very gradually revealing a genteel upper-class lifetime spent or rather "wasted away" in late 19th century and early 20th century Paris and his family summer house at Combray, during which period of history if you think about the actual times not TOO much actually happens in terms of World Events, especially if you lived in the 16th arondissement where you'd even miss the Eiffel tower going up in the late 1880's and ... nothing much of note from there to the Great War 25 years later (and even that didn't impinge on Paris itself) and thus the book and the novelist are both grasping around for a plot, an event, or something, perhaps even a wildly tragic mad or bad love affair would be okay but alas! it's a century before an English Princess memorably kerunch! aargh! dies in a car accident in Paris, a hundred years until 24hour rolling news and hence no newsworthy events are reported or even manufactured and nor do any particularly interesting events in the author's life ever occur, a life which remains comfortable and predictably brought in each morning from breakfast time and obediently cleared away by servants throughout the rest of the day leaving plenty of time and almost no jeopardy whatsoever in which M Proust can write his book in a vacuum, free of the slightest trial or tribulation (other than sometimes and entirely non-ironically fretting as to whether he'll ever be a novelist) and the unsurprising result is this interminably long book in which absolutely nothing happens, the most excitement to be generated for the reader being "I wonder how long this bloody sentence is going to continue?" until at long last, breathlessly, yet again uneventfully, it at last does so, drawing slowly to a close in the creaking style of all the other Proustian sentences in which so many words are used and written, and yet actually almost nothing at all is said.