marcel proust as rising star

             There are developments, trends -- I don't know quite what to call them -- that pique the interest because they don't quite make sense; they are culturally paradoxical. We could all see Survivor coming -- it's the perfect marriage of technological scopophilia and our growing appetite for real-life spectacle. But I would not have guessed, ever, that we should in the millennium year find ourselves in the middle of what looks like a Proust boomlet. That's Marcel Proust, author of In Search of Lost Time (still widely known as Remembrance of Things Past) -- the longest, and in many ways the most taxing, novel in the whole literary canon.
             I can think of any number of good reasons why not Proust, beginning with our incredible shrinking attention spans and our post-Hemingway distaste for most species of ornate prose (Proust favors the sentence-as-steeplechase approach), and moving on to our great democratic repudiation of social snobbism (the man was legendary, even in his own time, for his obsession with class and caste distinctions) and the general postmodern sense of bemused detachment from the steadily growing midden of history, the nightmare from which Joyce's Stephen Dedalus was famously trying to rouse himself.
             But the evidence is not to be ignored. The stock of M. Proust is trading actively on the literary Bourse. I can cite the appearance this year of two mammoth biographies: William Carter's Marcel Proust and a translation of Jean-Yves Tadie's Marcel Proust: A Life (which most scholars agree utterly supplants George Painter's two-volume biography, the standard for some decades now). There is also Edmund White's mini-biography -- sketchy but readable -- in the new Penguin Lives series. Moreover, apart from the expected steady flow of scholarly studies and dissertations, we find recent books like Phyllis Rose's The Year of Reading Proust (1997), Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), Malcolm Bowie's Proust Among t...

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