How do I prepare for Proust?

this. Enjoy OP, it's just great. Becomes so fun when you're used to it

know that it will require you some time and effort, that's it

anyone who's lived a little bit (15 - 16yo) can understand this book, yes, you'll find some quite deep philosophy and metaphysics but also a lot of basic universal stuff, like how we try to remember the name of someone or getting drunk to ease flirting

It's honestly, in a good way, a book made for autists. there's like 20 page scenes where it's just two guys talking about the etymology of the names of the French villages they're passing through on the train,

>there's like 20 page scenes where it's just two guys talking about the etymology of the names of the French villages they're passing through on the train
literally me

he was jewish. don't mix up narrator and author

There was a French town named 'Death to the Jews', I wonder what these guys would say about it en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mort_aux_Juifs

>Proust was raised in his father's Catholic faith.[7] He was baptized (on 5 August 1871, at the church of Saint-Louis d'Antin) and later confirmed as a Catholic.

Correction: "Raised Catholic". He'd go on to become an atheist

scene plays a huge role in his theories about art and memory. pretty much everything in the books connects with something much bigger. proust was far from being autistic

Whoever made that gets it

that's not really how it works though. his mother was jewish, thus making him a jew. judaism is both a religion and an ethnic group. you just need to see how he was treated during the Dreyfus affair and the ambient antisemitism to understand that everybody saw him as a jew and that he had strong jewish roots.

Yeah I wasn't saying it was a bad scene, I loved that sequence

I guess. I actually forgot: the caption above the comic also literally went: Whatever you do: don't let Proust destroy your holiday!

Doesn't matter. His mother was Jewish, so he is too. In the eyes of Jews everywhere and for all time, he is Jewish. You can lapse in observance of your Jewish rituals and obligations, but you cannot remove your Jewish identity; you inherit the covenant and it is perpetually binding on you. Even Proust knows that he can larp as a Catholic to win social acceptance, and can drop all semblance of a belief in God, but at the end of the day he is irretrievably a member of the Jewish tribe.

Put on your pajamas, fluff up your pillow, snuggle under a blanket and prepare to fall asleep after few pages.

Jewish identity is a bit more complicated than that friendo

When you're reading the first book, struggling through a 10 year old's mummy issues, remember that not only are all the rest of the books actual books where interesting things happen, but a solid half of the first volume is given over to an actual book where interesting things happen as well.

Nope it’s not. Orthodox Jews go around the streets of New York to invite secular Jews to pray and win them back to the fold. The entire evangelizing force of Jewry is to collect and admonish the jews who think they can renounce their covenant with unbelief. Jews believe that the Messiah would come tomorrow if only everyone born to a Jewish mother would properly observe the Law. The non-observance of those born to Jewish mothers to Halacha is looked at as the collective failure of all Jewry. If a Jew converts to Christianity, the tribe does not give him up, but bewails him as one more confused Jew who must be kept in check, otherwise his actions will bring the ire of Yahweh on the entire Jewish tribe, who are collectively responsible for him.

Anal sex

>that's not really how it works though
that's how it works.
>his mother was jewish, thus making him a jew
that's only a belief in judaism, which he wasn't part of.

that's not really how it works though.

none of you has read a single page of proust

it’s not that simple; jaw and wolf form a multiplicity that is transformed into eye and wolf, anus and wolf, as a function of other distances, at other speeds, with other multiplicities, between thresholds. Lines of flight or of deterritorialization, becoming-wolf, becoming- inhuman, deterritorialized intensities: that is what multiplicity is. To become wolf or to become hole is to deterritorialize oneself following distinct but entangled lines. A hole is no more negative than a wolf. Cas- tration, lack, substitution: a tale told by an overconscious idiot who has no understanding of multiplicities as formations of the unconscious. A wolf is a hole, they are both particles of the unconscious, nothing but particles, productions of particles, particulate paths, as elements of mo- lecular multiplicities. It is not even sufficient to say that intense and mov- ing particles pass through holes; a hole is just as much a particle as what passes through it. Physicists say that holes are not the absence of particles but particles traveling faster than the speed of light. Flying anuses, speed- ing vaginas, there is no castration.

that's not really how it works though.

that's how it works, you're not a jew just because some jews says you're a jew.

True. Another good autistic part is when he goes on describing for dozen of pages how he imagined in his youth aristocrats conversations and life, how it was to him necessarily unearthly, ethereal, and then discovers they are just as insipid as normal people.
I really felt the same thing entering university.

If you're french, try to read some of Mme de Sévignés letters and a bit of Saint Simon's Mémoires to have a better grip on the language and the themes. If you're not french then just dive directly into it. As said, he mostly is self-contained.

He does do that again and again, to brilliant effect each time. Proust is a bit of a teacher in several ways, and is certainly a potent antidote to that kind of detrimental day dreaming.

the only book I've ever written down quotes from

How does he compare to Stendhal

all those lengthy descriptions of jeune filles en fleurs / when he jizzes his pants messing about with Gilberte in a bush

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But the half of the book dealing with his mummy issues and Combray is the best part.

Her letters and his memories are translated into English.

Yeah I was just baiting really. My memory of the first book isn't great because I hadn't really hammered my brain into Proust-reading shape yet, I really need to reread it.

> My memory of the first book isn't great because I hadn't really hammered my brain into Proust-reading shape yet, I really need to reread it.
I'm on volume 5 and have been taking it slow; I read vol. 1 in 2020 and I think I'm in the exact same position as you. I did not know what I was getting into.

Yeah I read it over a couple of years too, would finish a volume and just give it a little while before picking up the next. Pretty comfy way to go about it desu

By reading his books

Start with the greeks

Is proust as degenerate and life-negating as other french authors?

Dream about sucking a few cocks before heading to the synagogue.

No. I find him very life-affirming.

no, there's hope, as much as some writers like dostoievski. salvation shall come if you're faithful enough, in art for proust

Dostojewski

Wagner. His use of music in Parsifal is what originally inspired Proust's philosophy of time and art.

>This Wagner emerges as a principal source of Proust’s thinking. He provides him with a mirror image of his own poietics and–in a slightly narcissistic way–of a creative alter ego; moreover, he supplies him, at an earlier stage in the genesis of the novel, with a work which tells of a quest analogous to that of A la recherche and which could, by association, be the work that inspires the Narrator’s revelation of the absolute. In his notes of 1913-1916 Proust writes: ‘I shall present the discover of Time regained in the sensations induced by the spoon, the tea, etc., as an illumination à la Parsifal’ (MPG:318).
>“Time here has become space.” — Gurnemanz. Is this the medieval root of the Guermantes name?

Coincidentally Wagner also inspired the first uses of stream of consciousness in Dujardin and Moore.

Who?

jews are a race

How hard is he to read in French? I can manage contemporay French okay, could read Camus and Houellebecq.

>gay french jew writes the greatest novel ever made

I've heard he uses a lot of meme tenses. But I am very much not French

ex-pat living in France...currently reading Sodom&Gom of La Recherche...

Proust is definitely more difficult than Camus and Houellebecq...

user is correct about use of more difficult tenses, which of course is a richness in the romance languages and plays well into the investigation on Time...

next you have very long long sentences (contra Camus, etc)

lastly, you a far bigger vocabulary, whilst not exactly 'archaic' in the medieval or Old English sense, it is still a vocabulary that is not common at all, that being said, I have not had major difficulties of understanding despite not knowing many words, and of course I do look up words rather regularly, out of my own desire to understand better...

It has been an up-and-down journey for me...I started reading in 2020...with long bouts of not reading...

There are of course other differences when comparing to post-Camus type French but these 3 are the essential big one's in my opinion...

So far Guermentes has been been the least enjoyable...the others have their tedious moments too but when you get into it becomes a sort of trance unlike any other literature i've ever read, the problem is getting there when you stop for long amounts of time...

There are tenses in French and Spanish that don't even exist in English.

Wrong