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Proust and Reading

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In those times when I'm reading Proust or listening to Gulzar do I sometimes feel that my own linguistic inadequacy prevents me from expressing my own thoughts with the transparency and delicacy that I hold so dear in the language of some of the masters. There is something about Proust's prose, for example, which not only tells you, the reader, a story but transports you into the shoes of the narrator himself. From that point onward his fears and happiness, his visual memory, his observations are all yours and you feel being torn apart by grief and by exhilaration, you feel someone else's memory affecting you with such intensity that it comes as a surprise that you are merely reading someone else's account. If only you are ready to be swept away not by the words on the page but by the images those words are evoking, it will become a ride like none other. Your own love stories, not having been put in such perfection of thoughts, would appear bland, your own life, not having access to such sensitivity, would appear worthless. And while you are perfectly aware that there is nothing particularly heroic about his recollections and that there is none of the glamour of adventure that we associate with interesting tales, you are aware that there is something far more poignant about what he has to say. He speaks about life. Imperfect, immoral, nervous and weak life and he speaks about it in the only way it's worth listening to. There is nothing of the blandness of mediocrity, supplicating for your attention and sympathy. His artistry demands attention and you cannot look away.

I believe that this is one of the foremost purpose of art. To make life presentable. To free it from its sorry drudgery, to liberate it from its already penned down certainty. Love stories are a dime a dozen but good love stories are few and far between. Human struggle is a mighty boring subject unless it's narrated by a good raconteur. There is no limit to which I would not go in order to avoid listening to the heartbreak of love but if it's the story of Swann, ah, that's a different thing. Reading literature for the story sounds unappealing to me. Reading it in order to gain some life perspective out of it is a positively disgusting idea. I love reading for the style of it and for the fact that through its misty vague glasses the jagged edges of life appear smooth, its torn troglodytic appearance seems presentable, even beautiful, and because life in its original unadorned form is too crude, too uncivilized, and too vulgar to be a satisfactory subject of cogitation.

In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way

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I have often wondered why is it that English translations of Russian authors seem to be much more widely available and read than writers from other languages. We have all heard of the great triad of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gogol and have come across the names of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gorki, Nabokov and more but our familiarity with literature from other parts of the world is composed of randomly scattered, sparsely populated and vaguely remembered names of books and authors. So while Gabriel Garcia Marquez holds the torch for the entire region of Latin America and the literature emanating from there is spoken off in broad generalizations of 'Magical Realism,' it is Miguel de Cervantes with his heartbreakingly naive hero Don Quixote who dispenses off with the requisite responsibility from Spain. Germany is represented by the mighty Kafka, Italy by Dante and Eco, France by Camus, and Japan by Murakami. Other smaller countries, and vast regions from Asia and the middle east do not evoke appreciable neural impulses in my mind to list them here. The most important reason why this may be the case, in my assessment, is the fact that Russian literature dealt with the facets of life which are very immediate to the common man. The broad subject of a life which in reality is contradictory to its idealized version which exists in our minds is as universal as they come. It may take the shape of an unsatisfying marriage, a stifling economic situation, or unrequited love but one can be sure that any and all of such situations have the potential to appeal to almost every human being. The Russians, maybe driven by the severity of weather, the relentless wars, the constant bleakness of an autocratic rule, have expatiated on this general subject extremely comprehensively.

Nevertheless, I decided to check for myself what the rest of the world has been up to and I chanced upon this wikipedia list of the most acclaimed books from around the world and found a book by the french author Marcel Proust titled 'In Search of Lost Time.' The book is in seven volumes and I completed the first one, as translated by Lydia Davis. I have discovered that Proust's meandering discourse, his delectable remembrances, and his exquisite sensitivity, with which the book is replete, are some of the finest things I have come across in life. This book is absolutely not for those whose idea of good literature is coherence both in plot and language and who feel frustrated when they cannot decipher an underlying order. But if there are certain things in life which endows one with an unbearable happiness, pure and poignant, which are absolutely useless in the worldly sense, almost trivial in objective assessment, and yet they are the wellspring of such pleasure and giddy euphoria that one is left stunned at their acuteness and unexplainable origins; this book will be a treasure to that person. Like an exquisitely crafted piece of dessert whose charm is more than the sum total of the perfection of its ingredients both in quality and proportion, whose appeal lies as much in taste as in other intangibles including its geometrical and chromatic harmonies, in whose essence lies, as one might imagine, hundreds upon thousands of years of suffocated human protests against the utilitarian gauge of efficiency, this book encompasses within its bound covers both a torrential outpouring of emotions and a surgical dissection of life.

As an example, Proust is describing a lady who is removed from her lover,

'And I watched her, as she returned from some walk along a road where she had known that he would not appear, drawing from her submissive fingers long gloves of a precious, useless charm.'

and the image of a beautiful girl dressed elegantly in black waiting for her lover instantly flashes in my mind. She knows, by intuition and social conditioning, that her actions are relentlessly dissected in this great game of matchmaking and that they stand for much more than what is dictated by mere utility. Her eyes, those merry vehicles of infinite suggestion, are leaping ahead of her conscious self, and her gestures are the sharp edges of a whole which was especially constructed to be a dagger in many a hearts. Her graceful action of pulling out the gloves from her fingers, therefore, is as suggestive and charming an action as such an exquisite creature can ever by accused of committing. The fact that there is no one to see it , at least none towards whom it might be subconsciously directed, makes it oddly sad and useless!