Two for the Price of One

You may already know that Marcel Proust is my favorite author.  Hence, this blog and my website, Madeleine Moments.  But do you know who my second favorite is?  I’ll give you a hint: his pen name was Boz.  Need another hint? 

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Yes, Charles Dickens.  The picture below is an 1873 set of Dickens’ works (all but 2 or 3 volumes which we have since acquired) which I read, in order of Boz having written them, one after the other.  It took me just over one year.

Works of Charles Dickens

 So yesterday was my lucky day, because I had a Proust sighting and a Dickens sighting in the same sentence!  How’s that for excitement??  You’re overwhelmed, I can tell, as I was.  And it was in my favorite magazine- can you guess?  I won’t make you guess- it’s the New Yorker, the September 21st issue, to be exact, in Caleb Crain’s article entitled “It Happened One Decade: What the Great Depression did to culture”.

Here’s the sentence:

“(Dickstein) praises Henry Roth’s ‘Call it Sleep’ (1934) for its Dickensian polyphony of voices and Proustian sensibility.”

Dickensian and Proustian.  Doesn’t get any better than that. 

Bonus Proust sighting:

Peter Schjeldahl in the Sept. 21st issue of The New Yorker:

 ”…the ailing writer Bergotte weighed the value of his life against that of a ‘little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof’ in Johannes Vermeer’s “View of Delft”…”

 Schjeldahl goes on to say: “It happens to be erroneous.  There is no yellow wall under a sloping roof in Vermeer’s cityscape. (There is a yellow sloping roof.)  Scholars have earnestly debated what Bergotte saw, failing to consider that, like the rest of us, Proust had a lousy memory.”

For shame, Peter Schjeldahl.  Where is your Proustian sensibility?

Post-Proustian Sighting

Every now and then I see Marcel Proust mentioned or referenced somewhere and I post them here as sightings.  Sometimes the connections are uncommon or a little hard to see, as in this naming of  an “antioxidant skin-care product” called Combray.  Maybe someone can get back to me on why a product made of grapeseed oil would be named Combray?

Anyhow, other sightings are much more common or, shall we say, the connections are easy to make.  These sightings usually involve madeleines, as in this post by my favorite ex-pat food blogger David Liebowitz.  Not only does he seem to be a great cook, he’s a great read as well.  And he lives in Paris…sigh.  Here’s the link: http://www.davidlebovitz.com/archives/2009/08/mad_about_the_madeleines.html

And here’s a challenge: Go read David’s post and find his Proust reference.  Then come back here and tell us about it in a comment.  Your prize will be a (used) copy of Paris Requiem by Lisa Appignanesi.   What’s this book’s connection with Proust? It takes place where and when Marcel lived and worked.  No, not Combray.  That’s an antioxidant skin-care product.