On Proust's 150th birthday: Didn't you finish reading the “research” either?

Louis Begley

Yes, I read the "Research" in its entirety, from first sentence to last, while taking Professor Harry Levin's famous course on Proust, Joyce, and Mann in the spring semester of my sophomore year at Harvard College.

Read and reread many times now, God knows how.

Right now I have reached the middle of the second volume,

(“In the shadow of the young girl's blossom”).

Hard to believe - I was an eighteen-year-old refugee from Poland during the war, and nothing in my life, neither background nor experience, had prepared me for dealing with Proust's novelists - but his book proved itself many years later in my time in Paris as a reliable, often indispensable guide.

Most important and even more incredible: The fact that I read and loved Proust's novel brought me the greatest happiness in my life, courting Anka Muhlstein and marrying her.

She is a Proust specialist and, among other books, has also written “The Library of Monsieur Proust” (Insel, 2013), in which she tracks down the literary allusions and sources of inspiration of our favorite author.

The author will soon publish “Hugo Gardner's new life” (Suhrkamp).

Translated from the English by Christa Krüger.

Berit shine

Unfortunately, my reading biography is also a story of forgetting the specific content, motifs and narrative threads of the books I have read.

Instead, I remember the detailed circumstances of reading.

Of Proust's seven volumes on the search for lost time, in which memory plays a central role, I have only read the Madeleine scene, because when I was in the phase of life in which I was particularly eager to use a canon brought to me from outside I was just starting my Scandinavian studies, which is why another work with a large scope was in the foreground for me: Carl Jonas Love Almqvist's “Dornrosenbuch”.

Today, many years later, I remember this reading undertaking, especially some of the particularly dazzling characters and a kind of overarching atmosphere in the books, which I cannot, however, attach to individual parts of the text.

I also remember how I read the book, the person I was then, the smell of my shared room and my reading corner.

A memory that is much clearer in my head than the specific content of the many pages.

I wonder whether the readers of Proust's search feel the same way, whether the books themselves become a kind of madeleine, an object that causes involuntary memories of the past.

What remains of the extensive reading projects in our lives, of the many hours devoted to a literary work?

The web of meanings into which literary texts fit in our head can also be generated by studying central motifs and dealing with literary research.

In other words, to understand references to Madeleines, I don't have to read a single page of Proust.

For me, however, reading has a much more personal dimension: the texts read become memories of a past reading moment, an inscription of my present person in a sensual reading process, which from then on is inextricably linked with the book.