June 2018 book review

THE GUERMANTES WAY, by Marcel Proust
Volume 3 of Proust’s masterwork finds our hero and narrator entering the rarefied atmosphere of Parisian high society. His parents rent an apartment in the grounds of the great mansion owned by the Duke and Duchess of Guermantes, situated in the heart of the Faubourg St Germain, where all the leading members of the French aristocracy have their Paris homes. He instantly (as is his way) falls in love with the duchess, folllowing her around in what would today be termed stalking, and certainly irritating her. Despite this he is ‘adopted’ by the family, for reasons that are never made clear. Is it because he has already made a mark on the literary scene, or perhaps because he has made friends with the duchess’s nephew?

Whatever the reason, he finds himself invited to all the best parties and salons, and now he meets Baron de Charlus, the Duke’s younger brother, and a man of great refinement, intelligence and rather odd personality. Not that that’s unusual in this setting. Immense privilege and an overwhelming sense of entitlement has made many of the aristos our hero comes across extremely eccentric characters, to say the least. But what they are obsessed with most is their pedigree, and that of everyone else. If they “had to buy their own furniture” as Alan Clarke would have put it, or even if they could only trace their ancestry back a mere 3 or 4 hundred years (the Guermantes being able to trace their family back to before Charlemagne) they were barely worth talking to, unless they possessed an unusual talent, like being a prodigy of some kind. And even then they were strictly ‘flavour of the month’, ready to be abandoned when the next extraordinary talent came along.

But amidst this heady, intoxicating new world he has entered, the narrator’s beloved grandmother, after a long illness, finally succumbs to a stroke, bringing forth from Proust one of the most sublime passages in the whole series. Here is a brief extract:
          ...As in the far-off days when her parents had chosen for her a bridegroom, she had the features, delicately traced by purity and submission, the cheeks glowing with a chaste expectation, with a dream of happiness, with an innocent gaiety even, which the years had gradually destroyed. Life in withdrawing from her had taken with it the disillusionments of life. A smile seemed to be hovering on my grandmothert’s lips. On that funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the Middle Ages, had lain her down in the form of a young girl...”

By this stage, as we can see from the above, we are thoroughly under Proust’s spell, following the narrator’s journey, almost breathless with anticipation at what will happen next, all the while hypnotised by the magnificence of his prose style. Don’t stop me now. I’m half way through and the best is yet to come...

WHITE TEETH, by Zadie Smith
Two men, Archie Jones (English) and Samad Iqbal (Bengali), are thrown together during WW2 and remain friends from then on, even after marrying and having their own families. Living close by in north London, their children become friends too. Then they get mixed up with a high achieving, upper middle class Jewish family that represents everything they don’t. Whatever. This is Zadie Smith’s home turf: the complexities of cultures clashing and meshing in ways we couldn’t imagine. We couldn’t, but she can...

I hate Zadie Smith. She’s young (relatively), beautiful (very) and talented (extremely). I just don’t think it fair that God should shower his gifts so progiously on one soul, but there it is. Zadie is one of our best writers, and we should be grateful for her contribution to the art of the novel. Try this as a sample:
          “...He continued like this, one word flowing from another, with no punctuation or breath and with the same chocolate delivery - one could almost climb into his sentences, one could almost fall asleep in them...”
            See?