Time Regained - post IV

War inevitably brings death, excess and a chance for some to make money - all ingredients of the days reading

Bullet points between pages 850 - 920

* Having seen M. de Charlus being held in chains and abused and beaten Marcel has satisfied his curiosity and really doesn't need to stay in the hotel, which is acting as a gay brothel, so he goes downstairs and asks to settle the bill

* As he is waiting with the men hired to satisfy the customers Jupien appears and is in sick that Marcel is there and takes him into a secret room and from there Marcel can see Charlus leaving and paying the  men for their services

* Jupien then comes into see him and says that he has no remorse about making money in this way because he also shares the same tastes and says to Marcel that if he ever wanted to share them he would be welcome

* You almost miss it but a medal is found outside the hotel and then as he gets home Marcel is greeted by Francoise who tells him that Saint-Loup has been there asking if he dropped his medal earlier on

* Marcel is then struck by grief after being informed that Saint-Loup has been killed in action coveringthee retreat of his men and stays in his room for days - a grief that is also shared by Gilberte

* Marcel then seems to go away because of illness again and the story returns to Paris after the war and Charlus is a white haired invalid being looked after by Jupien

Then around page 900, or 200 pages in for those reading a standalone volume, Proust has his Road to Damascus moment and suddenly understands what he could write about

* On his way to a social evening at the Guermantes home he has a series of movements and sounds that remind him of places he has been to in the past and he realises that he could write about the past rather than waiting to find some sort of inspiration from the present

* You can see his mind working and he shares his raison d'etre with the reader making it also interesting for those readers with aspirations of their own in the literary sphere

More tomorrow...

Albertine Gone – lunch post II

The story is following the version of The Fugitive that was read last week but it is more concise and as a result it feels more immediate.

Highlights from the next few pages

* Saint-Loup is dispatched to try to bring Albertine back but before going he expresses amazement that Albertine is the cause of all the problems

* Marcel continues to view the departure as a way of increasing the pressure to get more out of the relationship

* He gets asked to go to the police station to answer over charges of minor abduction - the girl he found at Albertine’s he invited back to his room – and despite his protests nobody takes him for being innocent

More tomorrow…

The impact of Web 2.0

I recently accepted the post of World Literature Editor on a voluntary basis at Poet's Letter and wrote a couple of pieces for the next issue, one for print and one for web. It seems apt that I share the piece I wrote for the web on the blog:


The world of Web 2.0 is changing everything as it blurs economic reality in a way not experienced since 1998 and hands the power over to anyone with the dedication to press the upload button.

In response to the billion dollar deals of Google and YouTube there is a growing appreciation that the web is becoming human and the power to generate thousands of hits and grab the headlines is now in the hands of the dedicated individual.

Things are moving fast and the impact that all of this personal content could have on the literary world is only just starting to be seen.

Pop stars have been discovered in their basements, bands gaining worldwide fame after their self promotion on MySpace leaving the world waiting for its first signs of a talented writer using the web to sidestep traditional routes into publishing.

Apart from the aspiring writer that other community that are handed tools in the faster web world are the readers, that get a chance to interact with literature in a way that at the moment is done in a group setting.

In a recent lecture to promote his book How to Read A Novel, John Sutherland told an assembled audience that there had never been a period with more interaction between a reader and an author.

He listed reading groups, book festivals and the power of fan fiction as examples of the growing interaction but a glaring omission from his list was the growing influence of the lit bloggers.

Growing in number and able to discuss books in a very personal way the bloggers are starting to generate the sort of traffic and interest that would make national newspaper book sections start looking over their shoulders.

Literary blogging is usually done by one person with a personal viewpoint on the world of books. But by taking content from a number of sources these bloggers are able to make the Internet a much more level playing field and in the new era of the web the human network has the potential to make us all book reviewers and hand us the chance to comment on releases and authors.

With faster broadband speeds the Internet is going to get used in different ways and the world of literature should be braced for change as the way books are written, recommended as well as purchased is all going to evolve in the future.

Time regained - post III

There are echoes of earlier revelations with Jupien and M.de Charlus popping up again but this time it is even seedier

Bullet points from pages 800 - 850

* Marcel bumps into Charlus who witters on about all sorts of things but reveals that he is sympathetic towards the Germans and hints that he half wants them to win

* He discovers that Charlus is even more homosexual, without knowing it is obvious, staring after men in uniform and talking about the lack of good looking waiters left around because most have died in the war

* This evening's reading ends with Marcel checking in briefly to a hotel, one of the last ones that has remained open, to discover Jupien helping Charlus to get his sexual kicks by being chained up and abused by young men who have more than a passing resemblance to Morel

More tomorrow...

An active quarter

The BBC online picks up on the latest Technorati tracking report that there are 100,000 blogs created every day with 1.3 million posts being made. What stands out though among the figures and the claims that it is good for democracy is the definition of an ‘active’ blog, which apparently is something that has been updated in the last three months. Being active I would have thought meant doing a bit more than that?

More in three months...(actually tonight and tomorrow as usual).

Albertine Gone - lunch post I

When I went to the library to renew the Marcel Proust to read Time Regained I noticed on the shelf a slim volume also produced by Chatto & Windus entitled Albertine Gone.

This is a version of The Fugitive that was found after Proust’s death but because of the radical revisions it contained, this is according to the introduction, it was not used by the family when they produced Remembrance of Things Past.

The main changes surround the location of Albertine’s horse riding accident, which confirm she was close to Madame Vinteuil, the woman Marcel is paranoid about.

Highlights from the first few pages

* Compared to the version that was read last week this is slightly sharper with the truth of his feelings and fears spelt out and as a result you can sense the shock of her departure more and share the expectation that she will return once he offers marriage

* He dwells on the conspiracy theories about the reason and timing of her departure but you sense there is a sympathetic anger building quicker than in the original version

More over lunch tomorrow…

Time Regained - post II

The war is raging and having quite an impact on people as well as the country. Marcel is isolated because he is not in the army, has been ill and so is removed from the build-up to the war.

Bullet points from pages 743 - 800

* Marcel meets up with Saint-Loup who has lost touch with Morel, who is a deserter, and the war seems to have made him focus on issues of military strategy and as a result he seems to be more intelligent

* Gilberte returns to her home in Combray despite the fact it is on the front line and saves her home from the fate of many other homes in the area, which are destroyed by Germans and troops from the French side

* In a couple of paragraphs you discover that some of the Verdurin's closest circle have died with Cottard and M. Verdurin dying

* Marcel comes across M. de Charlus who is still exiled from the Verdurin salon and there is a passage where the contrasting fortunes of the old man and the woman who dislikes him are compared with the conclusion being that both are alike in many respects

More tomorrow...

book of books - The Fugitive

We are getting ever closer to the end of Marcel Proust's epic and ths volume is the one that makes you appreciate, even more than he does himself, the isolated world that Marcel is falling into following Albertine’s death.

Plot summary
With Albertine gone and then killed in a horse riding accident there is a period of grief that Marcel goes through and then he seems to forget her after investigating her past. He goes through some sort of pain barrier with revelations of Albertine’s lesbianism and then visits Venice and despite getting a telegram that is so badly written it looks like Albertine is actually alive he feels nothing. It turns out to be from Gilberte, his old flame, who is marrying his friend Saint-Loup. It appears that the poison that Morel has been spreading not just with M. de Charlus but also with Albertine and many others has now infected Saint-Loup and the volume ends with Marcel holding back the tears after discovering his friend has become a homosexual entwined with the violinist.

Is it well written?
The problem with The Captive, the preceding volume, was that it was tightly constrained to almost a single location – Marcel’s apartment. This volume is easier to stick with because it changes the pace and the backdrop with a trip to Venice and the rapid developments socially with Gilberte’s marriage and the changes to Saint-Loup. The description that Proust is so well known for re-emerges as he describes Venice and apart from a brief section concerning the diplomat Norpois you would hardly know that Marcel is travelling across a continent destined shortly for war. It has more of a pace than some of the other volumes but you still continue to wait for the moment when Marcel either makes something of his life, spills the beans on some of his acquaintances or creates some other diversion away from the naval gazing he can fall prey to.

Is it worth reading?
As has been said with all the other volumes it’s hard not to read it of you plan to read the whole series but as a volume it is more enjoyable than The Captive. The slight note of caution surrounds the obsession Marcel has with his character’s sexuality and the claustrophobic feeling that his detailed passages on the social scene sometimes induce. But because this is the penultimate book in Remembrance of Things Past there is a feeling of nearing the summit that makes it easier to get through.

Leads to
Inevitably the final volume Time Regained, which I am reading this week.

Version read – Chatto & Windus hardback 1982

Time Regained - post I

At last we start the final volume of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past with I'm afraid a very low number of pages read. Apologies for that hopefully will be back on track tomorrow.

Bullet points between pages 708 - 743

* Marcel is back in Combray, where the saga started, being friends with Gilberte and trying to get on with the changing Saint-Loup who is almost unrecognisable to his friend since becoming a homosexual

* He finds an unpublished book that describes an evening at the Verdurin's and as a result loses faith in his ability to ever become a writer and then dramatically concludes he will not make in the world of literature and that coincides with an illness that forces him into hospital

* He only comes out of the sanatorium in 1916 with the war in full flow and for the first time since the book started there is a reference to an external event that is actually live, rather than the Dreyfus case which had happened in the past

We wait to see tomorrow how Marcel will fit into a war torn Paris...

Weekend paper review

There was plenty of book coverage in the nationals at the weekend and rather than do several different posts I’ll put them all in together.

One article, which you can’t help at chuckle a bit at, was in The Independent on Sunday, which reported that celebrity biographies are not selling well and publishers were starting to regret signing up so many football players and reality TV stars. With some books only managing to sell 4,000 copies in the last month – Ashley Cole’s book for instance – maybe there will be fewer of these types of titles next year.

One alternative approach might be to follow the US example and aim specialist titles in a specialist environment. A piece in The Guardian on Saturday reported that books about wine and home maintenance were being sold in the equivalent of off licences and DIY shops as well as on home shopping channels. To help solve the Caleb problem perhaps those books should be sold in stores that sell televisions and at football grounds?

Finally Amazon is looking for growth by offering its supply and logistics expertise to other companies. The Independent on Sunday runs a Business Week piece that quotes Jeffrey Bezos, CEO of Amazon, as saying it will start to increase activities like renting out its warehouse space to other companies. Apparently Wall Street is twitchy because the scheme might not work as well as he is painting it out to be.

That’s what I got from my weekend reading and it makes you wonder if the Caleb books are doing so badly now and publishers have to resort to creative product placement how will things fare this Christmas when a ton more Caleb books are coming out?

bookmark of the week

I picked this up on holiday in the USA earlier this summer in a bookshop which had a whole display dedicated to Curious George. I bought a book and this bookmark, of George in a spacesuit for my eldest son who is obsessed with rockets and space travel.

book of books - the Ghost-seer

The reason for choosing this book was that I started it on Halloween and it seemed appropriate to read it not just because of the theme but also because it is a chance to read something by Friedrich von Schiller, the famous German author.

Plot summary
The story evolves around a Prince who tries to remain incognito but loses his secrecy after he becomes involved with a conman who claims he can summon the dead. In the run up to the séance the Prince keeps coming across a mystery Armenian who seems to know about things that he couldn’t possibly know about unless he was some sort of mind reader or had supernatural powers. In an attempt to explain away what the Armenian summons up, the ghost of his friend, he loses his faith and falls in with bad company. He slides towards disgrace with debts spiralling but what saves him is the Armenian who returns at the end to make things right and restore his faith.

Is it well written?
It has a special feel to it that is hard to create and only a few authors have that ability to produce a sense of anticipation without over hyping it. The thin line between the natural and supernatural is being crossed all the time and as a reader you are given plenty of chances to try and second-guess what is going to happen next. The main characters of the Prince and the Armenian are both shrouded in mystery, one self generated and the other created by others. The key message seems to be that the immoral and faithless will run aground but those with belief will flourish.

Should it be read?
The novel is split into two parts and Book I is a great example of building an atmosphere and there are some genuine spooky moments. Book II is different, partly because the narrator changes, but also it feels that the story doesn’t have as much cohesion and is a series of letters describing events in a jumping type of way that is not as rich as the first part. But, and it is a significant but, bearing in mind that this was written back in the 18th century the story still challenges the reader and even afterwards you are left thinking about the true identity of the Armenian and so it has to be applauded for having that sort of impact.

Leads to
Personally this reminded me of some of the Sherlock Holmes books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and there was a sense of danger that despite the setting did remind me of Jack the Rippers London.

Version read – Hesperus paperback

The Ghost-seer - post IV

You can hardly call this a lunch post so apologies for the lateness but it was after work I managed to read the second concluding part of the book. It weaves an atmosphere that reminds me of Sherlock Holmes, the thin line between the natural and supernatural, plus the sense of mystery.

highlights from book II - the second half of the book

* The Prince loses his faith as a result of reasoning away what happened in the seance and slips into bad company and his personality changes and he becomes a free-thinker

* The narrator from book I has left so the story is told through irregular letters that take events on by jumps and starts

* The Prince develops a gambling habit that leads to debts and he is about to settle his accounts and leave Venice when he comes across a beautiful woman in a church who transfixes him and he stays to find out who she is and how he can be with her

* The woman is linked with the mystery Armenian and in the end the Prince does get to know her and you discover that she dies and the Prince is ruined and taking refuge from his debtors in a monastery

* The story ends with a letter being sent revealing that all is saved and it is the mystery Armenian who has restored the Prince;s faith and his fortunes

I will post a review over the weekend.

I'm a celebrity author get my book out there

The rise in popularity of celebrity children’s books is examined in a piece by Ed Pilkington in The Guardian today with the conclusions being that the market for celeb written books is more crowded than ever. Combine that with the celeb mania for memoirs at the moment and it’s a wonder that normal non-celeb authors haven’t come out in some sort of strike to get publishers to recognise and promote real talent.

The Fugitive - post V

Well that’s the end of Volume VI and my certainty that Albertine had not died has been knocked after it turns out the telegram that it looked like had come from her in fact came from Gilberte.

Bullet points from pages 662 – 706

* Despite believing that Albertine is alive Marcel neither reacts to the news or does anything about it and continues to tour in and around Venice

* On a train journey back with his mother she opens a couple of letters that reveal that Gilberte is marrying his friend Saint-Loup and that Jupien the tailor’s daughter is marrying Legrandin’s nephew

* Marcel himself has a letter which is from Gilberte who asks why he never reacted to her telegram and it become obvious as he checks the handwriting that the original telegram he thought came from Albertine was in fact from her

* Again he doesn’t seem to react to the disappointment of discovering she isn’t a live and returns to a social whirl of weddings and changes to the social structure as people who were once on the fringes get invited in

* The volume ends with Marcel discovering that Saint-Loup, his friend through nearly all the previous books, has in fact turned into a homosexual and is having an affair with Morel the violinist who plagued Baron de Charlus

I will post a review tomorrow and start the final book Time Regained on Monday