How to Navigate the Proust-Industrial Complex – The New York Times

LIVING AND DYING WITH MARCEL PROUST by Christopher Prendergast

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Marcel Prousts death, and writers on both sides of the Atlantic are producing books on every aspect of his life, just as museum curators are organizing relevant exhibitions and musicians are recording the work that influenced the writer. (Proust even wrote texts meant to be recited to piano music by his boyfriend, Reynaldo Hahn.)

Proust has become the premier novelist of the 20th century. Every aspect of his uneventful but hugely productive life has been studied. Jean-Yves Tadi has devoted his adult life to researching his biography. In Search of Lost Time has been translated into nearly every language and several times into English. Library shelves groan under the thousands of volumes about the originals for his memorable characters, the theater he loved, the few cities he visited, his bizarre sex practices and so on. Christopher Prendergasts splendid new book, Living and Dying With Marcel Proust, revisits all the various threads woven into this intricate tapestry. Sometimes reading him feels like, say, seeing all of Venice in a gondola, seated beside a patient, smiling, all-knowing art historian though at moments we just want to be quiet and listen to the water.

Most of Prousts devoted readers concentrate on characters and on the roles of time, memory, art and love in his vast masterpiece. Prendergast, a fellow of Kings College, Cambridge, and the general editor of Penguins reissue of Prousts work, has drawn on his encyclopedic knowledge to cohere Prousts wide-ranging, scattered references: everything from the crucial device of metaphor to a wonderfully playful chapter on food, especially naturally pastry. A madeleine dunked in a tisane may catalyze the entire novel, but the narrator is equally beguiled by dishes prepared by his childhood cook, Franoise, the boeuf la mode served to a vacuous diplomat, the wonderful croissants accompanying his breakfast coffee, even the look and taste of asparagus, steeped in ultramarine and pink. Asparagus leads him into a discussion of Chardins still lifes as well as to the post-asparagus stench of the chamber pot.

But what of the titular living and dying? Prendergasts organization is more fruitful than logical. His chapters, typically, are named Days, My Name Is Might-Have-Been or The Quiver of Life. These headings allow Prendergast to quarry nuggets of gold from the vast complexity of Prousts book. He reminds us again and again of the delights of daily life, of sex, food, music, painting (though not of friendship, for which the narrator has little respect), but also of the equal and final majesty of death. Prendergast feels the entire long novel is death-haunted and cites Prousts verdict: Our love of life is no more than an old affair that we do not know how to discontinue. Its strength lies in its permanence. But death, which interrupts it, will cure us of our desire for immortality.

Prousts techniques of foreshadowing, of weaving anecdotes, of extended reveries, of philosophical summary are all developed here. Prendergast is not biographical or historical, though he is able to draw on his knowledge of Prousts tastes and foibles. He can relate asthma to the labyrinth of his sentences (Prendergast reminds us that Walter Benjamin traced the very syntax of Prousts sentences to his ailment) and to his devotion to music in his compositional practices.

As Prendergast knows, Proust rated abstract intelligence very low, compared to the ecstasy of art or the warmth of family love. In his words: Daily, I attach less value to the intellect, while arguing that only the intellect can see through its ephemeral blandishments.

Edmund White is the author of Marcel Proust: A Life and 30 other books, most recently the novel A Previous Life.

LIVING AND DYING WITH MARCEL PROUST

By Christopher Prendergast

256 pp. Europa Editions. Paper, $17.

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How to Navigate the Proust-Industrial Complex - The New York Times