Proust

Since finishing Ulysses, I was getting restless without a book to copy out, so I decided to do Proust’s Swann’s Way (the new Lydia Davis translation). I’m about halfway through. I chose it because there’s a reference to it in Zelazny’s Amber books (in The Courts of Chaos: “My heart leaped with a kind of Proustian joy”) and because I came across a quote from Lovecraft in which he acknowledged that Proust was the greatest contemporary writer because of his ability to manipulate time. I also wanted to take a closer look at some really long sentences, because a few people in my fiction workshop last semester felt that I write with too many short, clipped sentences. Is this true? Do I? I don’t know. I kinda like ’em. Short sentences, that is. Clipped ones. But anyway, I decided it was worth pondering. I wasn’t expecting to particularly like the book itself, but so far I’m really enjoying it. My first reaction was: “Holy crap, this sounds exactly like the voice in ‘The Fifth Head of Cerberus’ [by Gene Wolfe].” A quick google search reveals that I’m not the first person to have noticed this. Wolfe’s ability to mimic Proust’s voice is eerie and uncanny. And due to this similarity, and since I read ‘Fifth Head of Cerberus’ first, the whole time I’m reading Swann’s Way I can’t escape the impression that there must be some shapeshifting aliens lurking about, which I think makes the proceedings a bit more lively, though no shapeshifting aliens have actually put in an appearance (yet — as I said, I’m only halfway through).