July 7 - A Book by Proust

Welcome to week 7 of our Remedial Lit Summer Project, which features Swann's Way Remembrance of Things Past In Search of Lost Time a book by Marcel Proust.

Tomorrow I will attempt to summarize the fantastic, complex mystery that is Pale Fire.

This week, we* are reading Swann's Way, which is the first of seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time, which is what all the cool literary scholars (a far different crowd than the cool writers club) now call the novel formerly known as Remembrance of Things Past.

The man who sold me this book from Shaman Drum warned me that "the first 30 pages of this book are about falling asleep, both for the main character and reader."

The narrator in Pale Fire called it, "a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France" and of "unsufferable length" (p. 162).

Here in Jacqui's Room, we call it "beach reading."**

Who's in?

*And I realize that by "we" I mean "me and, well, just me."
** Or "literary penance for having enjoyed the vampire book so much"