Notes from the inaugural meeting of the Fear No Book: Club of One.
Welcome to the inaugural meeting of Fear No Book: Club of One. I can see that I am all here. In honor of the 100th anniversary of its publication, the reading assignment was Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which had a cameo in a favorite book of this year, A Tale for the Time Being, and features the famous madeleine that people constantly name-drop, whether they have read the book or not.
Here is a handy summary:
Part 1, Combray: In which a young boy at his summer house in the South of France does not like to go to bed whenever the neighbor drops by for an evening visit, for it means that his mother, whom he loves very, very much, will not come up to say goodnight to him.
Part 2, Swann in Love: That neighbor is M. Swann—a man of the highest aesthetic sensibilities, a darling of the upper echelons of Parisian society, and also a bit of a lecher—who becomes obsessed with a woman far below his intellect and social standing.
Part 3, Place Names—The Name: The young boy from Combray is now a Parisian schoolboy, impossibly precocious and hopelessly in love with Swann’s daughter, Swann, and Swann’s wife, whose identity is finally revealed in a surprise ending.
Gripping stuff, eh? Apparently, many publishers disagreed, and Proust racked up the rejections, including one that said, “I fail to understand why a man needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns before he falls asleep.”*
And it’s true, Proust’s sentences are like drops of ink in a sink of water, gorgeously curling and diffusing until eventually the whole basin is turned black. Long, beautifully crafted run-ons stack up to make run-on digressions about everything from asparagus and the way it turns his “chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume” (the book club is a sucker for any writer who describes asparagus’ lingering olfactory effects; see also Love in the Time of Cholera) to an evocative passage on the trees of the Bois de Boulogne.
After Proust was turned down repeatedly by all the best publishing houses, he turned to Bernard Grasset, offering to pay all the expenses for publication and marketing, and even throwing in a percentage of the sales.*
Yeah, you read that right: Swann’s Way debuted as a vanity project!
As is the way with book-club discussions, Fear No Book starts to wander off topic, discussing Sergio de la Pava’s PEN Award-winning A Naked Singularity—originally self-published before being picked up by a university press, and patting itself on the back for not having been lured in by any profit-blinded, scared-rabbit, big-house editors—which places the club’s singular member in the rarefied category of Proust himself.
*William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life, Yale University Press, 2000.
