The History Book Club discussion

JANUARY


1. Lawrence Rust Hills (no photo)
Finish date: January 3, 2013
Genre: Non-Fiction, Writing
Rating: A
Review: 208 pages. Maybe the lit majors would give this a different rating. For a reader like me studying the literature itself without any background in literature beyond basic school requirements, this is a terrific guide that lays out the basic meat of a short story without pegging the writer into a certain style. This is important since I've been reading creations of wildly diverging styles.

2. Gaston Bachelard
Finish date: January 10, 2013
Genre: Philosophy
Rating: A
Review: 282 pages. I read this in preparation for Proust 2013. The poetic of consciousness is the interconnection of the image with language such that time becomes inconsequential. The mental space of memory and experience flows with our living space and the space of things. A house becomes more than its structure and a container holds objects of personal meaning.

Good job, Aloha. Looking forward to your book selections.

Thanks, Bryan!

3. William C. Carter
Finish date: January 15, 2013
Genre: Literary Criticism
Rating: A
Review: 280 pages. William C. Carter, the Proust biographer, focused on Proust’s love life and how it relates to his writing. Proust faced difficulties as an upper crust homosexual in 19th century France. He had various love affairs marked by passion and repulsion, illusion and reality, and unrequited love. Of significance was his passion for his driver, Alfred Agostinelli, who was portrayed as an androgynous woman, Albertine, in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Although love became love lost, Proust was a man who saved himself through his writing and his moral convictions, which revealed itself in biting satire on an anti-Semitic society hostile to homosexuals.

4. Marcel Proust

Finish date: January 24, 2013
Genre: French Literature
Rating: A
Review: 770 pages. In this second volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the sexually awakened youthful Narrator traveled to the fictional resort town of Balbec, to escape his wretched romance with Charles Swann’s daughter, Gilberte. There, he encountered metaphorical blossoming flowers (young women) in the changing 19th century, with its electricity, locomotion and independent women on bicycles. It introduced the mobile Albertine on her bicycle, the love interest who stirred in the Narrator a maddening passion reminiscent of Charles Swann for Odette. The Narrator met his second artist mentor, the painter Elstir, who taught him how to capture the essences of objects beyond their mundane reality, the laying of magical brushstrokes to depict the spirit of the sea.

5. Gilles Deleuze
Finish date: January 27, 2013
Genre: Literary Criticism, Philosophy
Rating: B
Review: 160 pages. This is Proust’s writing interpreted by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze made masterful interpretations of the various linguistic meanings in Proust’s text and as it relates to some of the characters. Some of his explication I agree with and some I find strongly of his personal interpretation.

6. Marcel Proust
Finish date: January 31, 2013
Genre: French Literature
Rating: A
Review: 576 pages. This is my second reading with a different translator. The Lydia Davis translation is most faithful to the French text, which is critical since Proust's work is full of linguistic symbolism.

Modern day usage of the leitmotif. Star Wars classics music medley:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofke-D...

Wagner’s Ring Cycle Leitmotifs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvA54D...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitmotif

“Now, scarcely a few minutes after the young pianist had begun playing at Mme. Verdurin’s, suddenly, after a high note held for a long time through two measures, he saw it approaching, escaping from under that prolonged sonority stretched like a curtain of sound hiding the mystery of its incubation, he recognized it, secret, murmuring, and, divided, the airy and redolent phrase that he loved. And it was so particular, it had a charm so individual, which no other charm could have replaced, that Swann felt as though he had encountered in a friend’s drawing room a person whom he had admired in the street and despaired of ever finding again. In the end, diligent, purposeful, it receded through the ramifications of its perfume, leaving on Swann’s face the reflection of its smile. But now he could ask the name of this stranger (they told him it was the andante from the Sonata for Piano and Violin by Vinteuil), he possessed it, he could have it in his house as often as he liked, try to learn its language and its secret.”

-Swann’s Way (Lydia Davis translation)

More so than the famous madeleine scene, this paragraph in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) introducing “la petite phrase” best captures the central theme of the nature of love, its sober realism versus its illusive nature, and the cycle of pleasure, desire, pain and loss.

Proust was inspired by Richard Wagner’s cycle of four epic operas, The Ring of the Nibelung, in particular Wagner’s usage of the leitmotif or a repeating musical phrase to represent an object, person or idea. The orchestra becomes a major player in sounding out the major “motif” or motive of a scene. To get the most out of the Ring, the focus has to shift towards the orchestra instead of naturally towards the singers. Wagner’s monumental usage of the leitmotif also inspired modern movie making such as in the music of the Star Wars series. Instead of flutes and horns, Proust’s instruments are in the form of phrases, music, flowers, colors, light and shadow, societal and church structure embedded in the operatic stage of Combray and its vicinity. His “la petite phrase” dances within his sentences, hiding and revealing, teasing us with its sentence structure and multiple meanings as we witness the agony of Charles Swann when he falls under the spell of Odette de Crécy in the first cycle of love, pain and loss of Proust’s seven volume literary operatic cycle. Wagner's work is a drama cycle of forsaken love from the dwarf to Siegfried. Unlike the ugly dwarf in Wagner’s opera who renounced love for the gold, Swann renounced his world for the love of Odette.

In the prelude of ISOLT, the taste of the madeleine soaked in lime-blossom tea brought on the narrator’s flash of memory that lasts over four thousand pages with the setting in Combray, the Narrator’s childhood home town and a “church summing up the town, representing it, speaking of it and for it...” The narrator of this vignettes of memory is rescuing himself through the recovering of his lost time unfolded from the retelling of exquisite details of the beloved church steeple that oversees the town and the divergent paths of the Méséglise (Swann’s) way and the river scenery of the Guermantes way. It is through the sifting through of each of these vignettes that the narrator can recover what he has lost thereby saving himself.

The Méséglise way passed by Charles Swann’s house with its line of prickly pink so “pretty, all these trees, these hawthorns!” that the child narrator remember “beginning to be fond of.” The child’s grandfather said to him, “ ‘You love hawthorns - just look at this pink one. Isn’t it lovely!‘ Indeed it was a hawthorn, but a pink hawthorn, even more beautiful than the white ones.” After the humiliation of encountering Swann’s snobbish daughter Gilberte, the boy hugged the prickly branches of the hawthorn, “ ‘Oh, my poor little hawthorns,’ I said weeping, ‘you’re not the ones trying to make me unhappy, you aren’t forcing me to leave. You’ve never hurt me! So I will always love you.’ “ So begins Proust’s tale of pleasure and pain in the love cycle with remembrance of the prickly pink hawthorns, the pretty woman in the pink silk dress eating the orange tangerine, and Odette in her pink, orange and white striped room and abundance of chrysanthemums serving orangeade.

The sensory instruments of light and color sounding out desire and pain dominates Volume 1.



The magic lantern that sent artificial images dancing over the child narrator’s room commences Proust’s orchestra of light, flowers, colors, word phrases and musical pieces. The orchestra played while the cultured Swann pursues the pretentious Odette with her profusion of the popular chrysanthemum and her love of “smart” fashion. The instrument of light, real and artificial, danced while the perplexed Swann tried to deduce whether Odette was having an affair on him. Light became the illusive, the deceptive and torturous light. After denying Swann a Cattleya (symbol for sex)



Odette sent him away asking “him to put out the light before he went, he himself closed the curtains of the bed and left. But when he was back at home, the idea came to him abruptly that perhaps Odette had been waiting for someone else that night..." The artificial light of the lamplight threw cardboard shadows of deception and supernatural dreams on Odette’s window. When Swann was contemplating about Odette being a "kept woman", he couldn't think because he had "extinguish all light in his intelligence, as abruptly as...when electric lighting (was)...cut off..." Light reflects from Odette onto Swann:

"If, ever since he had fallen in love, things had regained for him a little of the delightful interest they had once had for him, but only insofar as they were illuminated by the memory of Odette,...but for a truth that was likewise interposed between him and his mistress, taking its light only from her,..."

Odette reflects her light differently depending on her object. As uncle Adolphe said to Swann, "Not everyone sees Odette in the same light as you and I..." The hapless Swann takes comfort in the real light of the moon as “He was greeted by the little phrase from the sonata played in the garden on the restaurant piano..." Sometimes the real light of the sunlight shining on Odette, "...good feeling...would spring from her eyes like a beam of yellow sunlight..." Even in the natural moonlight with "no lights on and he must play the 'Moonlight Sonata' in the dark so we can watch how things become illuminated."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Tr0ot...



Along the Guermantes way “orange light emanat(es) from that syllable antes.” The orange tree represents love. It made its ominous entrance in Swann’s Way when the gardener’s daughter tripped over it causing her to cut a finger and break a tooth. Like love, an illusion and “an image which was not of the same kind, was not colorable at will like those which had so readily absorbed the orange tint of a syllable, but was so real that everything, even the little pimple flaring up at the corner of her nose, attested to its subjection to the laws of life,...whereas we had not been sure if we were not looking at a simple projection of light.” From painting the narrator’s infatuation with the Duchesse de Guermantes, the orange showed up in the orangeade given to the pianist after playing the phrase of music that marked Swann’s falling for Odette and in the pink, orange and white striped room where Odette received him. In the light’s figment, Odette is like Botticelli’s Venus in the orange grove offering him the sweetness of love. The bright orange shining in love’s light becomes muddy brown in love’s shadow. "And so at these moments, while she was making orangeade for them, suddenly, as when a poorly adjusted reflector at first casts on the wall around an object large fantastic shadows..." After a day tormenting himself with jealous suspicions, Swann went to bed with a "light heart", but the moment he "put out his light", started sobbing. Light and shadow hides and reveals, brightens and muddies, and creates illusions, much like love.

This first of the love cycle is but a taste of Proust’s innovations within the seven volumes. The instruments in Proust's orchestra includes his crafty play of words some of which gets lost in translation from French; non-linear usage of time to better match the internal time; shifting point of views (first person, omniscient, etc.) but maintaining the narrator's point of view; usage of key words as dabs of paint throughout the novels as symbolism and as unifying "paint strokes"; symbology of music; symbology of sound; symbology of names as markers of place; symbology of art; symbology to the gothic church; idea of expectation vs. disenchantment; social classes and status; love, jealousy, sadism, pleasure, desire, and pain; sexuality, homosexuality, and androgyny; and artistic and experiential authenticity vs. photographic reproduction.

As in the importance of the orchestra in Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the details are the actors and attention must be paid in order to get the most out of the Proust operatic cycle.

Fascinating, Ahola, especially the connection to The Ring Cycle and Proust.

I would caution on the amount of material you add to your review, though. We usually present it in a short summary.

Good stuff, though.

Marcel Proust

I rarely write a review but when I do, they're long. I was copying and pasting from my review and updates.

Thanks, Bryan.

Hey, this is cool Aloha! It just shows you how big and busy Goodreads is. I've been a member of this group for years and I've never posted here. So glad you've drawn my attention to it again.

Btw, goodness--did you actually read Deleuze and find him okay? I admire your devotion to Proust to go to such lengths. I hope its okay if we post in each other's threads, I suppose I should carefully read the rules... I apologize to the group moderators if I'm breaking any.
Gilles Deleuze Marcel Proust

I hope we can have a discussion in here if I follow the citations rule. :o) Bummer if we can't talk. Yes, I did read Deleuze and find him...creative. Not sure I agree with some of it but I do admire his willingness to stretch it. Proust was a lot of fun and I apologize to the group for my short attention span. I posted page number because the books are getting longer and longer. It's an interesting note.

Gilles Deleuze
Marcel Proust

I promise just one more quick comment: (I grab at any opportunity to get Deleuze off my chest, because not many people read him). I love your tactful and euphemistic description of Deleuze's style and prose. "...find him...creative. Not sure I agree with some of it but I do admire his willingness to stretch it."

That is priceless! :)

Okay, I'm tip-toeing out again...
Gilles Deleuze Marcel Proust

Dip your toe back in now and then, Trav. I miss our discussions. I should visit Kindred.

Don't forget to cite the author

Gilles Deleuze

Done. Thanks, Bryan.

FEBRUARY

7. Marcel Proust

Finish date: February 8, 2013
Genre: French Literature
Rating: A
Review: 872 pages. In this third volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the Narrator moves from the familiar world of the Méséglise (Swann’s) way to the aristocratic world of the Guermantes way. Within the inner world of the Duke and Duchess of Guermantes are snobbery and anti-Semitism, and factionalism surrounding the Dreyfus affair. Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a French officer of Jewish descent who was falsely accused of treason due to falsified documents planted by a fellow officer. Within this circle, we see more of Charlus, the homosexual Baron who is the Duke’s younger brother. He will be featured prominently in volume four.

8. Paul Hoffman
Finish date: February 18, 2013
Genre: Biography
Rating: A
Review: 336 pages. A human look at the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos who loved numbers more than anything. Instead of being a cold analytic, Erdos was a compassionate person who shared the best part of himself with others. Making money off his talent was not important to him but sharing math was. He had selflessly paired his talents with countless others who seek to solve mathematical conundrums and traveled where he was needed. A wandering monk of mathematics, he gave away what he earned to charities, living on little except what he needed to continue his work. He’s had so many collaborators that a term “Erdos number” pertained to him. Someone who had co-authored with Erdos is assigned number 1. This is an enjoyable read for those who are interested in mathematics. Mathematical references and anecdotes abound, such as the Four Color Map Theorem, or that if “a mathematician tells you that you're a 220 to her 284 (et vice versa), or a 17,296 to her 18,416 (v.v.), then you're pals, since they are proper divisors of each other”, and a "minimal guest list needed to guarantee a foursome of friends or a fivesome of strangers" is 25.

9. Marcel Proust
Finish date: February 20, 2013
Genre: French Literature
Rating: A
Review: 768 pages. This volume begins with the Narrator witnessing an implied sexual encounter between the Baron Charlus and the tailor Jupien. The ambiguousness of sexuality is further detailed with the Narrator questioning the sexual relationships between the group of women he met at the Balbec resort which includes Albertine, his love interest. Albertine drives the Narrator mad by being available for him sexually yet never committing to him, causing the Narrator to obsess over her love affairs with male and female.

This book contains one of the longest sentence in literature. It reveals Proust’s frustration with society’s hypocrisy and shutting out of classes deemed unsavory.

Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet who one day was feasted at every table, applauded in every theatre in London, and on the next was driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: "The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!"; excluded even, save on the days of general disaster when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round Dreyfus, from the sympathy--at times from the society--of their fellows, in whom they inspire only disgust at seeing themselves as they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them, accentuates every blemish that they have refused to observe in themselves, and makes them understand that what they have been calling their love (a thing to which, playing upon the word, they have by association annexed all that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism have contrived to add to love) springs not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable malady; like the Jews again (save some who will associate only with others of their race and have always on their lips ritual words and consecrated pleasantries), shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not desire their company, pardoning their rebuffs, moved to ecstasy by their condescension; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism that strikes them, the opprobrium under which they have fallen, having finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel, with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with which he who, more closely blended with, better assimilated to the opposing race, is relatively, in appearance, the least inverted, heaps upon him who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and even some corroboration of their own life, so much so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of which is the vilest of insults), those who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it they readily unmask, with a view less to injuring them, though they have no scruple about that, than to excusing themselves; and, going in search (as a doctor seeks cases of appendicitis) of cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Israelites claim that Jesus was one of them, without reflecting that there were no abnormals when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-Christians before Christ, that the disgrace alone makes the crime because it has allowed to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to every example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so peculiar that it is more repugnant to other men (even though it may be accompanied by exalted moral qualities) than certain other vices which exclude those qualities, such as theft, cruelty, breach of faith, vices better understood and so more readily excused by the generality of men; forming a freemasonry far more extensive, more powerful and less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic, glossary, and one in which the members themselves, who intend not to know one another, recognise one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs which indicate one of his congeners to the beggar in the street, in the great nobleman whose carriage door he is shutting, to the father in the suitor for his daughter's hand, to him who has sought healing, absolution, defence, in the doctor, the priest, the barrister to whom he has had recourse; all of them obliged to protect their own secret but having their part in a secret shared with the others, which the rest of humanity does not suspect and which means that to them the most wildly improbable tales of adventure seem true, for in this romantic, anachronistic life the ambassador is a bosom friend of the felon, the prince, with a certain independence of action with which his aristocratic breeding has furnished him, and which the trembling little cit would lack, on leaving the duchess's party goes off to confer in private with the hooligan; a reprobate part of the human whole, but an important part, suspected where it does not exist, flaunting itself, insolent and unpunished, where its existence is never guessed; numbering its adherents everywhere, among the people, in the army, in the church, in the prison, on the throne; living, in short, at least to a great extent, in a playful and perilous intimacy with the men of the other race, provoking them, playing with them by speaking of its vice as of something alien to it; a game that is rendered easy by the blindness or duplicity of the others, a game that may be kept up for years until the day of the scandal, on which these lion-tamers are devoured; until then, obliged to make a secret of their lives, to turn away their eyes from the things on which they would naturally fasten them, to fasten them upon those from which they would naturally turn away, to change the gender of many of the words in their vocabulary, a social constraint, slight in comparison with the inward constraint which their vice, or what is improperly so called, imposes upon them with regard not so much now to others as to themselves, and in such a way that to themselves it does not appear a vice.

10. John Berger

Finish date: February 20, 2013
Genre: Art, Philosophy, Memoir
Rating: A
Review: 160 pages. Beautiful musings based on minuscule observations that can only happen by slowing down and interacting directly with the object. The musings in this book was predicated on the fact that the philosopher and lens grinder Benedict de Spinoza (Bento) was said to have kept sketchbooks that were lost. John Berger wondered what Bento’s sketchbook would have been like.

...I wasn’t expecting great drawings in the sketchbook,...I simply wanted to reread some of his words,.., whilst at the same time being able to look at things he had observed with his own eyes....Then...a Polish printer...friend...gave me a virgin sketchbook...This is Bento’s!...I began to make drawings...

That virgin sketchbook began Berger’s journey of being and observation. This gem of a book is interspersed with Spinoza’s writing, and the author’s experience of drawing and verbally detailing what he sees. It will bring you back in touch with why you want to draw and write from impressions.

11. Marcel Proust

Finish date: February 26, 2013
Genre: French Literature
Rating: A
Review: 957 pages.
This volume contains The Captive and The Fugitive. In The Captive, the Narrator has Albertine live with him at his parents’ house. He came home and surprised Andrée leaving Albertine in a dubious environment. The suspicious Narrator began to suspect Albertine and her various lesbian lovers and increased his surveillance on her, making Albertine his prisoner. He increasingly isolated Albertine from their friends, afraid that others will be attracted to her. Under such environment, Albertine grew increasingly secretive, which exacerbated the Narrator’s suspicions. While this was going on, society’s other characters continued their activities. Albertine eventually leaves.

The Fugitive has the narrator despairing over Albertine’s leaving and consoled himself by taking a little girl home and rocked her on his knees. This did not soothe him and he sends the girl home with money. The girl’s parents filed charges against him. He was released since there was no evidence he molested the girl. More losses occurred with Albertine and the Narrator is forced to move on. He met up with Gilberte and found she’s marrying his best friend Saint-Loup. Saint-Loup becomes homosexual after marrying Gilberte.

MARCH
12. Jean-Jacques Nattiez (no photo)
Finish Date: March 2, 2013
Genre: Literary Criticism
Rating: A
Review: 140 pages. Proust's world is full of sensations in which music plays a dominant role. Jean-Jacques Nattiez sets out to demonstrate how music is in the structure of Proust's work. In Proust's masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu, Wagner comes top of the list with thirty-five mentions, Beethoven second with twenty-five, Debussy appears thirteen times..." Richard Wagner's cyclic form in Der Ring des Nibelungen inspired the cycle of love, pain and loss of the characters in À la recherche, while Vinteuil's la phrase plays the dual role of the seductive musical phrase and the metaphorical seduction of Proust's phrase.

13. (no image) The Shape and Style of Proust's Novel by John Porter Houston (no photo)
Finish Date: March 5, 2013
Genre: Literary Criticism, Philosophy
Rating: A
Review: 141 pages. A lean and mean book analyzing Proust's verbal structure geared for people who are fluent in reading about the noumenal realm. The book is separated into three sections. The first deals with the intellectual structure of Proust's work, the second deals with the fiction writing techniques he employed, and the third deals with the verbal texture. A unique book if you want to delve deeper.

Great, Aloha, you are cranking them out.

-Don't forget to add the March on message 22.

-Great first effort on citation 13. These are the trickiest. I am confident you can handle the moderator's standard for this:

(no image) The Shape and Style of Proust's Novel by John Porter Houston (no photo)

Give it try :-)

Edited! Thanks, Bryan.

Great, thank you.