1997

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton (25 Books in 25 Days #14)

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I still haven’t read any Proust, but I have read three books about reading Proust, or about Proust more generally. One was a few days ago (Proust’s Overcoat), and Phyllis Rose’s wonderful The Year of Reading Proust wasn’t that long ago. I’ve now made it a trio with 1997’s How Proust Can Change Your Life, published when Alain de Botton was only 28.

It’s an intriguing book that combines many different genres. It’s styled as some sort of self help guide – or rather a Proust help guide, where a reading of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu can help give life lessons. This covers all manner of things, from friendship to romance to how to read a book. But there are layers – and de Botton incorporates biographical details of Proust and a literary analysis of his writing. Indeed, it often seems like he is making no distinction between Proust’s letters, his fiction, and his actual life events – all are mixed together to draw out potential advice, filtered through a philosophical lens. Each section ends with a ‘the moral?’ conclusion.

The moral? To recognise that our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and to avoid the gratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time, and the weather.

What holds it all together is de Botton’s engaging prose and his wit. And it’s often a very amusing book, being light with Proust’s life as well as the various friends, relatives, and critics who popped up in it. It’s all an odd concoction, and perhaps on that would make more sense reading after I’d read some Proust – but with enough verve and confidence to keep me enjoying it throughout.

David Sedaris and the female David Sedaris

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One of my books for A Century of Books is David Sedaris’s 1997 collection Naked. One of the other books I’ve read recently, albeit not for A Century of Books because 2016 was already taken, is Miss Fortune by Lauren Weedman – which I read on the strength of seeing her described as being the female David Sedaris. One might think that Amy Sedaris fit the bill there – or, more accurately, that the description was primarily marketing copy – but it convinced me, and I’m glad it did because Miss Fortune was great.

But Naked first. It’s exactly what you expect to get from David Sedaris, if you’ve read anything by him before. Like all his books, it has funny, bizarre, moving, and self-deprecating stories from across his life. I assume everything in all the collections has at least a foot in the truth, and I don’t quite know how one life has fit all of this in.

Then again, perhaps it is just his talent for turning the ordinary into the quirky and unusual. He writes about living with his injured grandmother, about finding a dirty book, about working in a cafeteria. Quite a few are about hitchhiking, at times with a quadriplegic friend. Each has its bizarre moments that Sedaris frames with deadpan sardonicism. Nobody could call him cheerful. His persona is mildly grumpy and cautiously optimistic – only to hit brick walls of people everywhere he goes.

Here’s a good example of how he writes – in this instance, about his experiences while experimenting with mime as a child:

I went home and demonstrated the invisible wall for my two-year-old brother, who pounded on the very real wall beside his playpen, shrieking and wailing in disgust. When my mother asked what I’d done to provoke him, I threw up my hands in mock innocence before lowering them to retrieve the imaginary baby that lay fussing at my feet. I patted the back of my little ghost to induce gas and was investigating its soiled diaper when I noticed my mother’s face assume an expression she reserved for unspeakable horror. I had seen this look only twice before: once when she was caught in the path of a charging, rabid pig and then again when I told her I wanted a peach-coloured velveteen blazer with matching slacks.

I think my favourite Sedaris remains Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, but that is chiefly because it’s the first one I read – and I think there is a lot to say for the first time one discovers his humour. It’s such a joy (without being remotely joyful in tone) that happening upon it is something to treasure. Naked was written a while before Dress Your Family, but the tone and the world are unchanging.

And what about Lauren Weedman? Well, I can certainly see why she is described as the female David Sedaris – she definitely has his way with a pithy sentence (“You know what bothers me about the idea of death? It’s so hard to look forward to, and I love planning”), shrugging at the absurdity of the world and contributing her own heavy doses of ridiculousness. In Miss Fortune (subtitled ‘fresh perspectives on having it all from someone who is not okay’), she focuses mostly on her the past decade of her life, with a few jumps further back in time. And that part of her life is dominated by marrying, gaining a stepson and a biological son, and getting divorced when her husband has an affair with the babysitter.

One of my favourite chapters/stories was about a stranger on Facebook contacting her to say that he’d killed nine people and would she write his life story. She takes this in her stride – getting in touch with their mutual friends to find out how likely he was to murder her, and then engaging in an occasional conversation with him. Like Sedaris, she refuses to sound too surprised.

It has been three days since Scott entered my life, and I can think of nothing else. “What would you do if someone told you that they had killed nine people?” has replaced “How much sand can a kid eat before it becomes a medical emergency?” as my opener in all social situations.

There’s also a lot about being pregnant and having a baby, about struggling as an actress, and about body image. Almost all of these stories – not so much the pregnancy ones – are, indeed, things I could imagine Sedaris writing about. She also writes about being adopted, and having two mums (since she reunited with her birth mother) – there is relatively little about this, and I think it might have been covered more thoroughly in her previous book, A Woman Trapped in a Woman’s Body. I have to say, this snippet about her (adoptive) family makes me want to read much more about them:

My mother and father had decided that instead of leaving us money after they died, like nice parents do, they wanted to spend their money while they were still with us. Our inheritance would be the memories we created together of touring vanilla bean factories and learning how to make a coin purse out of a coconut.

All in all, I think the Sedaris comparison is warranted and isn’t undue praise – indeed, I actually liked Miss Fortune even more than Naked. Her comedic balance of a sentence is exemplary. I guess the book is confessional, though with so much observational humour that you only realise afterwards that it has been confessional. It’s certainly extremely funny, and I hope she writes a lot more.

The Year of Reading Proust by Phyllis Rose

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Year of Reading ProustI actually read The Year of Reading Proust (1997) by Phyllis Rose round about the time I read her book The Shelf, which I loved so much. Indeed, like The Shelf, I bought and read The Year of Reading Proust while I was in Washington DC in April, reluctant to part company with an author I’d so quickly learned to love.

Fast forward four months, and somehow I still haven’t written about this book. It’s a difficult book to write about. But it is extremely good and enjoyable, so I didn’t want to overlook it altogether.

Perhaps the main difficulty is that the book doesn’t pay much attention to Rose’s project. While The Shelf took the shelf of a library as a starting point for many tangents and explorations, it remained a fixed and vital point for the whole book – Rose kept returning to the books on that shelf, explaining them and framing her discussions through her readings of them. I expected more of the same from The Year of Reading Proust, but Proust makes surprisingly few appearances. Instead, it’s essentially what the subtitle says: ‘a memoir in real time’.

It was while reading the introduction that I cottoned on to what Rose was trying to do. She doesn’t explain her project; she talks about the hamburger she ordered when she heard that JFK had been killed. Now, I haven’t read any of À la recherche du temps perdu (which is where her experiment with Proust begins and ends, perhaps unsurprisingly – you probably weren’t expecting this to focus on his handful of other works). But I do know, of course, about the madeleine that kicks things off at the beginning of the first volume: Rose was doing the same thing with a hamburger.

From here, I learned the key to the whole book. Rose described how Proust’s writing meandered and interwove, taking events separately and creating a pattern from them; using mundane incidents to discover profundities, and taking introspection to a new level. Ambitiously, Rose attempts the same. From dealing with her mother’s serious illness to buying a vase, she documents her life over the course of a year. She discusses her neighbour’s trees more than she does the text she is reading, yet successfully demonstrates how coming to love Proust illuminates her own experiences.

Proust had shown me the underlying laws. Like the Marxist who boasts that if you really understand history you can predict it and sneers at those who, not understanding it, are condemned to repeat it, like the Freudian smug in the face of human aberration because he thinks he can explain what produced it, I felt privileged, exempt, suddenly the master of the life I was observing. I had been given a key, a free subscription to some hitherto locked-out cable channel which in front of my eyes lost its frustrating distortion and transformed itself from blurred, wavy, taffy-pull mystery shapes into a clear and enjoyable picture.

As it’s been quite a while since I read it, I don’t remember many of the details that Rose shares – and I suppose it is a hallmark of the type of book she’s written that I don’t remember them. They aren’t individually significant (to the reader at least). But what I do remember is how much I enjoyed the experience of seeing the year through Rose’s eyes, and the glimpses into what she thought of Proust. Though she doesn’t write about the novel in any great depth, she does convey how much she valued reading him – and how she broke through, after not particularly enjoying the beginning, into near besottedness. The Year of Reading Proust did what nothing else had hitherto done: made me want to try À la recherche du temps perdu at some point.

So, I didn’t love this book as much as I loved The Shelf, but it is an entirely different creature. If not quite the book-about-books that I was hoping for, it was a rather brilliant memoir – and a very ambitious one, in trying to echo what is considered one of the greatest ever literary works. Maybe it would have made more sense under a slightly different title, but I’ll forgive Rose that.

Even though The Year of Reading Proust wasn’t quite a book-about-books, it has helped confirm how dearly I love that category – so any suggestions for those are heartily welcomed…

 

Old Books, Rare Friends by Leona Rostenberg & Madeleine Stern

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You know what it’s like with book reviews on Stuck-in-a-Book – they’re like buses; you wait a month for one, and then three come along at once. (If you’ve ever waited a month for a bus, then – please – just give up and get a taxi.) In the weekend last year where I coincidentally read a bunch of books I bought in America, one of them had the enticing title Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths and Their Shared Passion (1997) by Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern. (Who first told me about this? Was it YOU?)

I’m not the sort of man to walk away from a book about loving books, particularly one penned by older women, and so I was excited to read this. But it was quite a while ago, so I’m going to review this one in bullet points… let’s call it an experiment.

Leona and Madeleine take it in turns to narrate chapters, starting with their childhoods (perhaps unsurprisingly) and through the schooling and college education. 

The main point of interest here is that one of them was refused her doctorate, mostly because her supervisor disagreed with her argument. (That is NOT acceptable supervising.)

I could never really tell Leona and Madeleine apart from their writing styles, so their lives intertwined for me.

They set up a rare books business together, buying and selling, and this is where my interest was piqued.

They make catalogues! I could read about the preparation of catalogues forever.

They’re only interested in very old books, so my love of 20th-century literature was never really satisfied. But, oh well.

And they discovered sensation magazine stories that Louisa M. Alcott had written under a pseudonym – which led to a minor sort of literary fame for them.

I really enjoyed it! Reading about the books business, particularly in a time before the internet made book hunting both easier and less filled with surprises is always fun.

Here is my caveat (for which I have slipped out of bullet points). I love reading about readers; about people who hunt for books because they are desperate to read them. Rostenberg and Stern hunt for books for a living, and so (naturally enough) are concerned more with profit than anything else. Still, I couldn’t help weary a little at the number of times they said how much they’d paid for something and how much they’d sold it for – particularly on the occasions when that effectively meant diddling a seller out of money, because the seller had sold a book for less than it was worth. Which made it rather a surprise to come across this paragraph in the epilogue:

We have become keen observers of the generations who have succeeded us. Every age is critical of the next, and we are no exceptions. Although we admire and befriend many young dealers who do not confuse value with price, we deplore the all too popular conception entertained by many dealers that books are to be regarded primarily as investments. Such booksellers go in for dollarship, not scholarship.
I wonder how they think they differ from this? Perhaps as bibliophiles, albeit bibliophiles who get money from their love, rather than simply gratification.

But, this quibble aside, I found it fascinating and fun. It’s not up there with Phantoms on the Bookshelves or Howards End is on the Landing – the works of true booklovers, and lovers of 20th-century fiction into the bargain – and it’s not quite the book that I thought it would be, but Old Books, Rare Friends will still retain its place on my books-about-books bookshelf.

Blinking, Bells and Butterflies

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Doing well on yesterday’s challenge, people – keep up the good work!

I read another Oxford Book Group book today – in fact, had to request it to a reading room and read it all in my tea breaks. Luckily it was quite short. That’s what happens when the entire book is dictated by the winking of an eyelid.

I don’t know how familiar people are with Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly? A film is coming out soon, so perhaps that has helped it leap to the public eye. It is basically the selective autobiography of an editor-in-chief of Elle magazine who has a major stroke and is left with locked-in syndrome. As he points out, the first (and he suggests, only) character in literature to have this condition is Noirtier in Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. He can no longer move any of his body, except his left eyelid, but retains total cognitive ability. The French term for it, “maladie de l’emmuré vivant”, literally means walled-in alive disease.

How does one make a book out of this? Well, if it weren’t true, it could only be used as a tasteless or lazy gimmick in the background of another narrative – as it is, Bauby writes an honest but witty account, heart-rending but not chest-beatingly gloom. Alongside day-to-day occurences, like the visit of his two children, Bauby intersperses nostalgic recollections, ironies, witty musings and a very human frustration and spirit. He is able to see the humour in a desperate situation – one of my favourite bits, which had to be translated for the version I read, was when he asked for his glasses, only to be stopped early and asked why he wanted the moon (lunettes; lune). And in some ways (forgive me if I stretch a point) that is what The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly performs – the mundane alongside the extraordinary; the glasses alongside the moon. Though a slim volume, Bauby has created a beautiful elegy to living and a pathos-filled account of life as an observer rather than participant. You will finish this autobiography recognising the fragility of existence, but laughing at the pomposity of any such idea in the face of Bauby’s humour and stubborn refusal to let even the most extreme situation crush him.