Author: hkpmwalser

"As if there could be anything more interesting!" It's one of my favorite jokes in Swann's Way, and, as always in Proust, it's at the expense of everyone involved while remaining oddly merciful to them all. The narrator's adolescent friend, Bloch, whose bohemian affectations are both irritating and, for our young narrator, indispensable to his… Continue reading Le temps qu’il fait →

Even when you think you're a Proust mega-fan, there are characters you forget about entirely. Take the two aged sisters of the narrator's grandmother, who appear mostly as hilariously pretentious comic relief. These two ladies are well-intentioned and far more politically decent than most of the more famous characters in Proust: when Swann recounts an… Continue reading How to talk (or not talk) (or how not to talk) about art →

Amazon used to have a feature called "Statistically Improbable Phrases." For whatever book you happened to be viewing, you could see the bigrams that were least likely to appear in any other book in their system. I played with this feature quite a bit, and Proust — specifically, Proust in the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation, revised by… Continue reading About the title →

We all know that reading is fundamental, but one of my personal maxims is that reading is providential. In part, it's an excuse that I use to convince myself that picking up a book with no particular relevance to my work (I'm an academic) will bear intellectual or artistic dividends down the line. It often does,… Continue reading Rereading Proust →