The Proust Project
Those readers who enter Marcel Proust’s 3,200-page novel A la recherche du temps perdu and come out the other side carry with them something extra. It’s not just pride of accomplishment—though that’s present—nor simply having taken in exquisite and penetrating prose (though with it whole hundreds of pages of forgettable societal magnification). Much of this something extra is the physical memory of hauling around and spending time with and digesting a work of art whose sheer size demands a rearrangement of one’s life. One doesn’t read Proust so much as host him.
This is, of course, intentional, as the author’s prime preoccupations—his assignments for the reader to consider—were the presence of time and the blending of memory and reality. Not unlike the teacher who gives young students eggs to babysit, thus providing them a lesson in the true scale of parental involvement, Proust hands us 3,200 pages to carry around and says, We’ll see what kind of a reader you are, what kind you will be. The answer, in the end, is a better one. And a changed one—a reader whose own relationship with time, memory and reality has shifted at least a little.
This reader experience—or reader transformation—is at the heart of the satisfying and bonding book of essays The Proust Project (Farrar Straus Giroux; 221 pgs; $25), edited by professor and writer André Aciman. As Aciman points out in his preface, there is an overlap between the theme of Proust’s book—published between 1913 and 1927 and translated either as In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past—and the reader’s very book-drawn journey. Aciman writes: “We do so with love when we go back to our first glance—why not with books? Besides, going back to nebulous, irretrievable beginnings is integral to the Proustian experience.‚Äù And later: “The Search is a novel about someone’s past that allows us—indeed, invites us and ultimately compels us—to graft, to ‘bookmark’ our own past onto his.”
The Proust Project gives us 28 such bookmarks, with an impressive group of writers (Susan Minot, Lydia Davis, and Colm Toibin among them) sharing their experiences reading the Search, along with an introduction to a favorite passage followed by that very passage. Under the direction of Aciman, who perceptively compares Proust’s long sentences to long bewildering walks that provide an ultimate homecoming, this book’s contributors take their readers by the hand to revisit—or, for those who haven’t yet read the novel, visit—their favorite stops along the way. We linger there together, the characters still coming down from a kiss, standing upon a park’s graveled path, watching a carriage roll away.
As contributor Wyatt Mason reminds us in his book-concluding essay, these walks—our experience as readers of Proust—do not end when we come out the other side. “Who finishes Proust?” Mason asks, before continuing: “For even if we do soldier across the continents of its richly remembered world, descending, as Marcel says, to a greater depth within myself; even if we plumb those depths in his tireless company; even if we do reach Proust’s big book’s small last word; we do not finish his book as we do others.”
So in this revisitation, The Proust Project—like the novel it celebrates—becomes the physical experience of its theme. The walks continue, the Search continues. Once you’re a host, there may always be another knock at the door.
