November 26th is Small Business Saturday, and yes, I know the idea is backed by a certain credit card company, I like the idea anyhow. But pay with cash at your local small business, or to the person who makes the homemade gifts or grows the homegrown food, because when you pay cash, trade or barter, there are no fees, you are directly helping out your community, and you don’t get any deeper in debt.

If you are too far away to shop at your local Barritt’s store, contact me (leave a comment here or email me) for info on how to get your signed copy inscribed personally to you, or if you are buying the book for a gift, to your gift recipient. Merci!

Cyber Monday update: Parisian by Heart is also available on Kindle. Buying someone a Kindle as a gift? Give them their new Kindle already loaded with Parisian by Heart.

“The idea of Time was of value to me for yet another reason: it was a spur, it told me that it was time to begin if I wished to attain to what I had sometimes perceived in the course of my life, in brief lightning-flashes, on the Guermantes way and in my drives in the carriage of Mme. de Villeparisis, at those moments of perception which had made me think that life was worth living. How much more worth living did it appear to me now, now that I seemed to see that this life that we live in half-darkness can be illumined, this life that at every moment we distort can be restored to its true pristine shape, that a life, in short, can be realised within the confines of a book! How happy would he be, I thought, the man who had the power to write such a book! What a task awaited him! To give some idea of this task one would have to borrow comparisons from the loftiest and the most varied arts; for this writer- who, moreover, to indicate the mass, the solidity of each one of his characters must find means to display that character’s most opposite facets- would have to prepare his book with meticulous care, perpetually regrouping his forces like a general conducting an offensive, and he would have also to endure his book like a form of fatigue, to accept it like a discipline, build it up like a church, follow it like a medical regime, vanquish it like an obstacle, win it like a friendship, cosset it like a little child, create it like a new world without neglecting those mysteries whose explanation is to be found probably only within worlds other than our own and the presentiment of which is the thing that moves us most deeply in life and in art. In long books of this kind there are parts which there has been time only to sketch, parts which, because of the very amplitude of the architect’s plan, will no doubt never be completed. How many great cathedrals remain unfinished! The writer feeds his book, he strengthens the parts of it which are weak, he protects it, but afterwards it is the book that grows, that designates its author’s tomb and defends it against the world’s clamour and for awhile against oblivion.”

From the French Pleiade edition translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff  and Terence Kilmartin, First Vintage Books Edition, September 1982

Artisan Festival at Willowgait Farm

My table in 2010 with artwork in baskets

This year I’ll have copies of my book, Parisian by Heart, for sale and will be signing them as well. If you’ve already purchased a copy, please bring it with you and I’ll sign it for you.  Here’s a link to info on the Festival. Let me know if you’re coming so we can speak a howdy.

Would he have embraced a computer, with its word-processing capabilities, its immediate and seamless ability to not-literally but visually cut and paste to one’s heart’s desire? Or would he have preferred the sight and touch of being surrounded by his words, the tactile and sensual cutting and pasting, the clean slice of the scissors and the smell of the glue? Visualize Proust again, propped up in the bed, with a laptop on his knees? Or the even smaller computer called, fortuitously, a notebook?

Mais, non. Let us leave Monsieur to his writing and explain the title of this post. My love of Marcel Proust and The Novel lead me to writing my first novel around Proust and Paris and it’s title is Parisian by Heart. The following, which I have magically copied and pasted here using my notebook, is an excerpt from my book.

“As I followed Francoise back into this room, we discovered Marcel had ensconced himself in the bed and was struggling to arrange the pillows and what looked to be several sweaters around and behind himself. He had moved a small upholstered bench next to the bed and had placed his hat, which he had been holding in his gloved hands earlier, on it, along with those gloves which were of a lavender color and matched his vest. I could see his vest now because he had removed his coat and hung it on the back of the closet door.

He was still fussing with the pillows and sweaters and as soon as he saw Francoise, he fell back onto the pillows and said, “Oh, my dear Celeste, you have taken so long! Put down those things and help me please. Madame, have you any more pillows?” This last request had been directed at me. I ran into the living room and got some pillows off the window seat and returned with them. Francoise took them from me and as she did, she looked at me in such a way, her chin tucked down and her eyes looking up into mine, that I knew she was warning me not to bring up the Celeste/ Francoise problem.

She now had Marcel propped up in the bed, with pillows and sweaters piled up behind him, and on either side of him, so that he could prop his elbows on them as he ate his croissant and drank his coffee, with the tray on a pillow on his lap. Francoise stood at the foot of the bed, watching as Marcel finished his croissant and then going to fetch another as he requested. While she was gone, he lay back on the pillows and closed his eyes. At that moment, he looked so much like the photograph taken by Man Ray after Proust had died, of him lying on his death bed with his sunken eyes closed and his nose sharp with skin stretched tight over it, that I was frozen in time, staring at the face I’d never seen in reality and yet- here it was. He opened his eyes and caught me staring at him. He smiled.

“Do not worry, Madame, I will be restored soon. And then I will begin the story”. Francoise returned with the second croissant for Marcel, and a tray with more croissants and coffee that she handed to me.

“Bon appetit, Madame”, she said, and went back to stand at the foot of the bed. Marcel finished his croissant, then gently dabbed at his face with one of the linen napkins. He sighed, lay back on the pillows, and closed his eyes.

“As you can see, Madame, I am not well. Since I was eight or nine, I have been so close to death at times that my family feared they were going to lose me. The first two years of my life, I was the only child, and I was my mother’s heart’s delight. Then, when I was two, my brother was born, and my mother was no longer mine alone. And even worse, my brother was healthy and athletic and fulfilled my father’s every expectation of him. I, on the other hand, could not seem to please him in any way, although God knows I tried. My brother and I remained my parent’s only children.” He stopped here to look at me. “Same as you and your sister, non?”

“Yes”, I said, “I mean, oui.” He nodded.

“I loved my brother, but could not forgive him for having to share my mother with him. So I wrote him out of my life. I centered my life around my mother and dealing with my illnesses. It was all I had the strength for anyhow; that, and my writing.

“Our family was large and we had many other family members living around us. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins…we were all very close and spent summers together in our small village outside of Paris and the rest of the time in Paris itself. My father had his work as a doctor there, my brother and I were in school, the years went by…My brother became a doctor, like our father. For myself, when I felt well enough, I just wanted to pursue my pleasures. I adored going to the Theater, or to the Opera, or to museums…I would go to the Louvre and stand enthralled in front of Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana for hours. I did my one year of military service, and while I enjoyed the company of the other men…”

He glanced quickly at Francoise and coughed a little cough. “Well, that was not going to be for me. I got a job, just to try to please my father, at the Bibliotheque Mazarin, thinking that at least I would be immersed in literature but I just could not resign myself to being an “unpaid assistant” so I never actually went to work there. I toyed with being a museum curator, I got degrees in the law and in philosophy, but all I really wanted to do was write.

“Then, one by one, family members began to die. I lost aunts, uncles, my beloved grandmother, and then the greatest blow of all, from which I will never recover…” He covered his eyes with his hands and was silent. Francoise stood with her head bowed. After a minute or two, he spoke again. His voice was low and without emotion, as if to give any voice to his feelings would unleash a torrent that he would rather keep within. “My mother died, quite horribly, and I could do nothing but watch. My father and my brother, both doctors, could do nothing. I did not know why, or even begin to comprehend, how I could go on living myself, unless it was to somehow give testimony, through my own life and my life’s work, to her having been my mother and to have been loved and so loving to me, by me…”

He lay back again, and his breathing became shallow and labored. “I must finish quickly now. My mother, along with all the other things she gave me in life, gave me the key, albeit unwittingly, that I am about to give to you. One day, as I came home tired, dispirited and cold, for reasons that are not important now, she offered me a cup of tea and a petite madeleine to dip into it. I did not usually take tea, preferring coffee, but that day I accepted the tea and the madeleine. I dipped the madeleine in the tea. Little bits of it broke off and floated in the amber liquid. I spooned them into my mouth and was instantly transported back in time to when I was a child and would have a cup of tea and madeleines with my Aunt Leonie. There I was, sitting on the side of her bed, smelling the lime blossoms she used to make her tea and feeling the warm spring air of Combray on my face from her open window.” He looked at me out of his deep-set, dark eyes that contained an intensity within like that of a hypnotist. “Do you understand what I am saying, Madame?”

“Yes, I think so”, I said. ”You experienced an “involuntary memory”, the first of several you would have, that opened up to you the realization that memories and experiences are contained within physical objects, or certain sensory events…”

“Non!”  His hands flew up before his face as if he wished to shut out all sight and sound, then he slowly lowered them back onto the tray before him. “You do not understand. I physically went back in time. I became a time-traveler, not just in my mind or thoughts or memories but in my body as well.” He leaned closer to me. “Do you understand now?”

His eyes held mine for what seemed like an hour but could only have been seconds. Something flickered within me, as if a long-buried memory was trying to come to the surface, but I could not grasp it. I shook my head. Proust lay back among the pillows and remained quiet for so long, his breathing growing deeper and deeper, that I became sure he was asleep. I looked at Francoise. She shook her head at me, warning me not to speak and to be patient.

She had not moved from the foot of the bed, and I would come to know that she would remain that way for hours, so that when Marcel did wake up, she would be there and he would not have to call for her. I motioned towards a chair, she shook her head again, and pointed towards the tray she had brought for me. I had forgotten about it. The coffee was still hot and had milk in it, the croissant was warm and buttery and flaky, melting in my mouth like nothing I had ever eaten before. Francoise smiled, and motioned for me to take another. I obeyed.

After some time had passed, Francoise moved quietly to the side of the bed and began to arrange some bottles and a small box of some kind of powder on the table there. I don’t know where these things came from, somehow they were just in her hands. She came around to the other side of the bed and on the dresser there, began to lay out some notebooks that had cardboard covers and were very worn and frayed at the edges. Could these be the notebooks, the cahiers that I had read about, that Marcel had written In Search of Lost Time in? I looked closer. They were, and I had the disorienting and dizzy feeling that suddenly I was in a cathedral or temple, standing in front of an altar on which lay the Holy Grail. My vision contracted inward, so that everything else in the room disappeared and all I could see were the notebooks. I felt faint. Francoise, or was it Celeste, was at my elbow and she whispered in my ear, “You see, Madame, Monsieur is a Magus”.

The next thing I was conscious of was that I was lying on the floor looking up at the ceiling. I was alone.”

Parisian by Heart

Parisian by Heart is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other book retailers. It was chosen as a quarter-finalist in Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award. Kindle edition available here.

“Early in the year of 2005, I began reading what I had heard was one of the greatest works of literature in the 20th century, In Search of Lost Time (previously translated as Remembrance of Things Past), by Marcel Proust.  My main impetus for reading it was that my husband, Rod and I had finally decided to take our long-desired trip to Paris in the spring of that year.  So being the reader that I am, I decided to prepare myself by reading French authors like Zola, Hugo, Colette and Voltaire.  And, of course, Proust.  Of the seven volumes comprising In Search of Lost Time , I had heard also that it was not an easy read and that many people who began the novel, never finished, for various reasons: the famously long and convoluted sentences, the pages of seemingly unrelated and trivial events, the sheer size of the work and the resulting concentration of mind and investment of time required.  But I was determined to read the entire novel and set myself the task of doing so, despite what I had heard.  But the task soon became a pleasure, and the more I read the more I wanted to read, until what began as an assignment to myself of reading Proust before going to Paris became a sincere appreciation of the work, a deep interest in the author, and a greater understanding of what made this work truly one of the greats of literature.”

I’m on my second reading now of Proust and since that first reading I’ve read probably another 20 books or so on or by Proust, including Tadie’s biography of him, Celeste Albaret’s book about Proust, books that compiled letters of his, and Proust’s earlier works. So my interest continues and so, I suppose, will this blog. Here’s a photo of my boy taken by Nadar:

Marcel Proust, aspiring writer

A bien tot!

“Francoise now had Marcel propped up in the bed, with pillows and sweaters piled up behind him, and on either side of him, so that he could prop his elbows on them as he ate his croissant and drank his coffee, with the tray on a pillow on his lap.  Francoise stood at the foot of the bed, watching as Marcel finished his croissant and then going to fetch another as he requested.  While she was gone, he lay back on the pillows and closed his eyes.  He looked so much, at the moment, like the photograph taken by Man Ray after Proust had died, of him lying on his death bed with his sunken eyes closed and his nose sharp with skin stretched tight over it, that I was frozen in time, staring at the face I’d never seen in reality and yet- here it was.  He opened his eyes and caught me staring at him.  He smiled.  “Do not worry, Madame,  I will be restored soon.  And then I will begin the story”. 

Man Ray's death photo of Marcel Proust

“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?

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.

“To create is to live twice.  The anxious groping search of a man like Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers and tapestries and states of anguish has no other meaning.”  Albert Camus

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871, and so would be 138 years old on this, the anniversary of his birth.  Was his search an anxious groping one, as Camus says?  Was this the only meaning of Proust’s search, to live twice?  Or to live once, forever?