Microscoping Proust

[Ross Levine used to be Morphizm's main politico before he decided to go off and write a book. But I'll take him whenever I can get him. And I got him to review NBM's expansive graphic novel adaptation of Proust's sprawling classic Remembrance of Things Past. Or In Search of Lost Time. It all depends on your translation. Mine isn't so good. Ross Levine's is much better. Read on! -- ST]

Microscoping Proust
[Ross Levine, Morphizm]
Here you will find all the places Proust reinvented in his memory -- the village of Combray (Proust's name for Illiers, France) with its splendid cathedral; the bedroom of his invalid and neurotic aunt Léonie; the kitchen where plain-speaking housekeeper Françoise held sway; the lovely countryside along the Guermantes' way; and the sumptuous Grande Hotel in seaside Balbec (Proust-speak for Cabourg, France) where young Proust passed summers under his grandmother's watchful eye. The back cover of the second book features one of my favorite images, Balbec's Grande Hotel at night, its interior lights ablaze, with an inset of the village poor peering into the hotel windows, and the mordant, Marcelian caption: "An important social question is to know whether the pane of glass will always protect the feast of the marvelous beasts and if the obscure people peering at them through the night will not come and pick them out of their aquarium and eat them." In this way, the comic version serves to illuminate some of the novel's best lines and may actually make them stick out more in our own, less inspired memories, since they are no longer engulfed by the tsunami of prose in which the master embedded them...
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