The Proustian Marathon

Starting tomorrow, I'm taking on the marathon of the literary world, the Serious Reader's herculean task: I'm reading Proust.

And I'm attempting to read every beloved word of it, in one year.

In Search of Lost Time, (or Remembrance of Things Past, as some prefer to translate the title from the original French A la recherche du temps perdu) was written by Marcel Proust in 1913, and was almost immediately reputed to be a masterpiece. Not to mention, one of the longest (and in some circles, boringest) books ever written. The English translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff weighs in at more than 3,000 pages, with more than 1.25 million words. It's split into 6 volumes, and the paperback boxed set, which I will be reading, is a tubby 8.5 pound doorstop.

Why read Proust? For starters, I like reading, and that's pretty much a requirement if you're going to spend a year reading a 3,000-page book. Luckily, I also enjoy a challenge--and since I am a self-proclaimed "word nerd," I especially savor a reading challenge. I'm fairly competitive as long as no physical exertion is required, and my favorite competitor is me, so here we are.

Secondly, I spent a little bit of time in Paris while I was in college, drifting around the Left Bank, and occasionally attending classes at the Sorbonne, and during this time I decided that France in general and Paris in particular is a fairly superlative place to be. I'm told that most of the action (such as there is) in In Search of Lost Time takes place in Paris, so that will be a pleasant aspect of the challenge.

Thirdly, Proustian relevance has reached a bit of a peak in the last few years, most notably through the efforts of one Mr. Jonah Lehrer in his wonderfully thin little bestseller, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, which I read but did not understand, probably because I had not yet read Proust. I plan on reading it again, once I'm finished with ISoLT, kind of like a literary dessert. It even has a madeline cookie on the cover, which wraps that idea in a neat little package.

Like any good marathoner, I've been training: since April 1 of 2008, I've read 50 books. You can see a list of them here. Anyway, I did the math, and 50 books a year is roughly a book a week. And no, I didn't just read comic books, though I did read quite a few that were simply superb, ahem--the average page count of those 50 books hovers right around 346 pages. At that rate, I could, mathematically speaking, finish Proust in less than 3 months, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

I will be blogging this entire experience right here on Proustian Marathon, where I'll update you on my progress, summarize what I've been reading, make some generally feeble attempts at literary analysis, and probably serve as a cautionary tale to readers everywhere. I invite you to join me on this quest! I can promise adventure, lively discussion, and possibly cupcakes. Except I was joking about the cupcakes.