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Proust’s Biscuits
Colm Tóibín on the Proust exhibition at the Morgan Library:
Visitors lining up to see the word “madeleine” as it appeared in Proust’s handwriting for the first time are in for a shock. What appears in a 1910 draft of Swann’s Way is the banal word “biscottes,” easy to spot in the manuscript. Soon Proust will find that this word will yield to another word that will open many doors for him in his narrative. But not yet. It is as though a draft of The Great Gatsby had, at first, a hero called Jones and Daisy was originally called Anne. Or the first draft of The Old Man and the Sea had the old man merely fishing for mackerel. Or that Molly Bloom, at one point in the composition of Ulysses, ended her soliloquy by saying “Maybe.”
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Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.
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So Much for the Granta
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
Personally I cannot understand why such a discovery should shock anyone… what is so banal about pain grille (which was the expression used by him in an even older version of a text about involuntary memory) or biscottes in comparison to madeleines? Why does it matter at all? The revelant thing is not what exactly he eats, important is that some kind of food works as a trigger for his remembrances. I understand that the shape of the madeleine plays a role for the protagonist’s poetic ruminations and that, a priori, this kind of pastry might evoke poetic connotations better than a toast or some simple baked bread. But to be honest, for me personally, the original expression gives a refreshing new perspective to all that involunatry memory business. Why not something even simpler and more ordinary for a trigger?
In particular, the comparison with The Old Man And The Mackerel is poorly chosen, no?