![]() ![]() Not long ago, we were given a book made up solely of his desperately polite, querulous letters to his upstairs neighbors in one of his last apartment buildings, on the Boulevard Haussmann, complaining about the noise-and sounding exactly like a classic S. J. Perelman casual. ![]() Anything Proustian, it seems, gets published now. What comes after is mostly academic commentary.īut with the biography, the letters, and the journals long in the rearview mirror, the popular secondary works on Proust continue to appear in manic numbers. The usual run of a famous author’s remains is more or less set: first the (disillusioning) biography, then the (surprisingly mundane, money-mad) letters, and finally the (painfully naked) diaries, in which erotic obsessions that seem curious and fresh in literary prose look mechanically obsessive in daily record, as with Kenneth Tynan and John Cheever. And so, having reached the very bottom of the barrel marked “Marcel Proust,” the scraping continues, even unto the splintered wood. When one finds the bottom of a barrel being energetically scraped, it is proof, at least, that whatever was once floating on the top must have been very delicious indeed. ![]()
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