On Reading Proust Slowly by Orlando Bartro
Sometimes, you like a book so much you don’t want it to end.
If you’re lucky, the book will be long, with many beautiful passages that you’ll want to reread slowly, thereby extending your reading experience to . . . I don’t know . . . how about twenty-four years?
I began reading Proust’s gigantic, seven-volume novel at my grandmother’s house, twenty-four years ago, in a bedroom that used to be golden, with the headboard of its bed against the unused fireplace, and with three wooden models of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria on a dresser across from me, reflected, along with my face, in the mirror.
Those three old boats that once landed on a new world are, in retrospect, symbolic of my reading journey which, after twenty-four years, has reached port today on an outdoor second-floor porch beneath an orange umbrella, through which the sun presents as a fiery, four-spiked disk.
It’s been my habit to read many books simultaneously. (I’m currently reading seventeen.)
But throughout my finishing and rereading of many other books, Proust’s À la recherché du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past; or In Search of Lost Time) has persisted on its voyage, until I’ve become so accustomed to its company that its last page is like the long expected death of an old friend.
The novel is among the greatest ever written. No novel provides better access to a character’s consciousness.
Tomorrow, I begin it again on page one.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, available at Amazon.