What are the reasons to read Proust? Like when people read Walden they read it for the philosophy/introspection and all that, and people read GR primarily for the prose and to tell other people they read it. But what is it for Remembrance Of Things Past? Is it primarily an entertainment read or does it have some themes that are going to change your life? From the short bits I've read about it all the major themes seem fairly basic and nothing to write home about, so I'm curious to what people generally get out of it.
Thx
i read it sometimes to women before sleeping and it was very comfy
someone on lit mentioned that he read the whole seria over some years as i remember with the routine of about 1 hour reading in the morning. i guess its a good work to enjoy the prose and content, but mainly a medium for thinking about your experience and life and point of view, maybe it can give you some projection surface
with such big works, if you dont like them and its not because its too dense in content and you could work yourself through that, better lay it aside and come back or read stuff you like more imo
>>7661633
Simple: he was the French Joyce.
I read it in the original French mainly to refine my writing style.
It's also a very entertaining book, full of keen psychological insights and humorous scenes.
Took me a few months to get through the entirety La Recherche but it was time well spent. The whole novel is consistently good in spite of being unfinished in places.
>>7661746
I really don't see any resemblance between these two.
Proust was accused by his contemporaries of being behind the times, stuck in the 19th century, writing superfluous, vapid bourgeois non-sense with archaic prose, while Joyce was some kind of genre defying literary prankster.
>>7661708
>>7661753
These are good responses. I appreciate them. I suppose it really doesn't matter what books "Accomplish" for you, because lord knows none of us are going to be notable and no one is going to give a shit what you or I read at the end of our lives.
I'm terrible at reading aloud, but it does seem comfy.
>>7661633
It's in search of lost time. Remembrance of things past is such a terrible translation
>>7661793
Oh are they different translations? I honestly didn't know the text was different. I think I ordered Remembrance because of the nicer cover. But I lost it anyway, so I'll have to grab In Search of Lost Time!
>>7661633
He liked to jack off to dying rats. That in itself is pretty hardcore.
>I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, showed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveler is hurrying towards the nearby station; and the path he is taking will be engraved in his memory by the excitement induced by strange surroundings, by unaccustomed activities, by the conversation he has had and the farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp, still echoing in his ears amid the silence of the night, by the imminent joy of going home.
Ain't it purty?
I am trying to make time to read it. It is a book that I enjoy more the more that I read it. I sometimes struggle with the sentences, but the book always seems to reward me for it, if only in astonishingly beautiful descriptions of moments in time.
