Proust

This article was originally published on March 12, 2021.With GameStop’s stock exploding and shrinking on a weekly basis, it’s easy to forget that until recently, it was an open question whether the next-gen of gaming consoles were going to come with an optical drive at all. Physical games managed to avoid the grim reaper, for now, but little care is put into their packaging these days. A whole generation missed out on a time when you could walk into a Babbages and an encyclopedia-sized PC game box practically leapt into…

In the latest work of Norwegian author and Nobel laureate, Jon Fosse, a man sets out on a drive with no particular destination in mind. He keeps turning right and left until he reaches the end of a road in a forest. As it grows dark and snow begins to fall, instead of turning back for help, he foolishly decides to venture into the forest. As he grows increasingly cold and tired, he comes across a glowing being in the midst of the darkness. Eventually, he is lost and his encounter with the mysterious figure takes on a…

The long revered French novelist, critic and essayist is still thought to be one of the most influential authors of all time a century after this death on 18 November 1922. While Proust does have more than one work of fiction to his name - in 1896 he published the short story collection Les Plaisirs et Les Jours (Pleasures and Days), for example, and between 1895 and 1899 he wrote the autobiographical novel Jean Santeuil – when people refer to Proust they tend to be talking about A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search…

In September 2018, my reader, Anthony, opened Swann’s Way, the first book of In Search of Lost Time, on our front veranda and read aloud the seemingly innocent opening line: “I used to go to bed early”. From that moment – and almost every evening for the next four years – I was lost in a rarefied parallel reality created more than 100 years ago on the other side of the world. Marcel Proust, that neurotic frail Frenchman from the late nineteenth century, became my daily companion.Anthony took up the challenge of entering…

Before Marcel Proust went into raptures over his petites madeleines he was waxing lyrical over a rusk-like biscuit and before that a piece of stale bread.The “episode of the madeleines” as it became known, is one of the most celebrated events in his seminal work À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time), encapsulating its theme of involuntary memory.Over the space of two years, however, the passage started with a very different flavour as the French author wrote various versions of his childhood…

Azar Nafisi, bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, recounted how reading an “offensive” book with her students in the Islamic Republic of Iran posed a social threat because the act -- much like Socrates being accused of corrupting the youth of Athens by the use of sophistry -- was an affront to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s repressive regime. In such a milieu, the “deviant” characters in Vladimir Nabakov’s unique story – “the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac” – and the prospect of the…