Hi folks! It’s good to be back!
Proust Update
Three and a half months later, I’m reading The Guermantes Way, Proust’s third volume, translated by Mark Treherne. Here’s a cheat sheet of the settings so far:
Volume One: Childhood in the countryside summers of Combray. Obsession with Gilberte.
Volume Two: Adolescent summer in Balbec (in a coastal resort hotel). Obsession with Albertine.
Volume Three: Life in new apartment in Paris near the Guermantes family, also frequent visits to the barracks where Marcel’s good friend Robert bunks. Obsession with The Dreyfus Affair, the military generally, and Madame de Guermantes.
Marcel is growing up, his grandma is getting sickly, and he’s grasping at the military masculinity that isn’t accessible to him because of his asthma.
But my favorite part so far is his description of the testy French phone operators. Marcel has to run to the post office every time his grandma wants to speak to him. Literally run!
(from p 127 of the Penguin edition)
For this miracle to happen, all we need to do is approach our lips to the magic panel and address our call—often with too much delay, I agree—to the Vigilant Virgins whose voices we hear every day but whose faces we never get to know, and who are the guardian angels of the dizzy darkness whose portals they jealously guard; the All-Powerful Ones who conjure absent beings to our presence without our being permitted to see them; the Danaids of the unseen, who constantly empty and refill and transmit to one another the urns of sound; the ironic Furies, who, just as we are murmuring private words to a loved one in the hope we are not overheard, call out with brutal invasiveness, “This is the operator speaking,” the forever fractious servants of the Mysteries, the shadowy priestesses of the Invisible, so quick to take offense, the Young Ladies of the Telephone!
This made me smile. Oh, Marcel. What would you have done with Twitter?
On the writing front
I’m doing a whole-draft revision of my manuscript! This is a new stage for me, and I like it a lot. It’s much easier to work with what I’ve already written than to write from scratch. I have a deadline coming: April 26th. So I’ll be writing daily until it’s in the best shape I can manage. Then my coach and I will talk it over for another revision. Soon after that, I’ll be shaping up my query letter to pitch it to agents!!!
I’ve been writing this book for close to five years, and though time has flown, I’m excited to wrap it up and start another project. Something *not* about teenagers, but adults? Essays about the intersection of medicine and writing? I don’t know yet!
Stuff I’m into right now:
Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen
Happy Monday, everyone!!!
Jess