Review 1

Review 1: Marcel Proust, Days of Reading

One thing that I, bibliophile, love is a book about reading books. I love reading the words of people who have been out to sea in the world of literature, lost themselves, and, shipwrecked on some island of postmodernism, divulge the perils of their adventures. This little book is a part of the Penguin Great Ideas books. Despite the exorbitant prices for works that are mostly in the public domain, this collection is actually really nice. This particular specimen contained a few essays of Marcel Proust, including two on the topic of reading.

Marcel Proust tells of his own reading ways as a youth and how he treasures those books he read then because rereading them triggers madeleine-like memories of the places he read them at. His writing reads like a little French cottage in a remote village (in the German, romantic literature perception of a village, not French; it’s very “people in villages are so great, their ways are so simple and pure, I'm in love”, as opposed to “people in villages are so provincial and limited and cruel to little dogs”).

One of the essays (in fact, one of the two essays entitled Days of Reading, after which this blog is named) reads exactly like Swann’s Way. Now, as I am reading Swann’s Way, I find myself experiencing déjà lu and thinking of one of the essays as a prelude to the overture as the two works melt together in my mind. Proust’s writing is actually addictive. The picture of Combray amidst the field in which Marcel Proust did his reading, though which Marcel Swann walks to get to the house, is so very clear. I know it’s perhaps not recommendable to confuse the two books like this, but the writing is so similar, so clearly consistent that I feel the two works are one and the same.

The basic argument for reading, which Proust manages to make after getting lost in an elaborate, wonderful description of his reading habits in his country home, is that reading is a way in which one can have contact with people who think differently from oneself. In reading, one has access to the thoughts and ideas of someone who lived in a different time, society and/or place, thus broadening one’s worldview. It seems to be cautionary in the way that he says that he values his childhood books only because the remind him of the last, but I don’t think he regrets that his memories of childhood and preserved in the acts of reading and not in playing or running around the house.