#scurf172: Reading Proust at Parties
Readers are actually little thieves, much like writers
I’ve been unwell for over two weeks now. The flu hit hard. And keeps coming back in waves. It felt so strange, still does, when I compare the pain and discomfort to what I experienced during covid.
Moving on.
Haven’t written anything in these weeks. But did read quite a bit. Turns out antibiotic addled brain can read and absorb a fair deal of fiction after all. I read a Kundera novel and ploughed half through my current Proust. The thing about trying to read Proust is that it gets so daunting a task at times that I end up picking just about any other novel to plod through and to not read Proust.
Since I started with Proust late December last year, I’ve bought three novels and read off two, in addition to fiction and nonfiction online. I’ve scribbled some notes here and there, but each time I’ve come back to Proust searching for its very alien but alluring social settings.
This is also not to say that reading Proust is a kind of school homework exercise. Its just something, I feel, that I have to get myself to enjoy. And once I get engaged, its even tougher to peel my self away from the text.
The other day some friends had come over and I was somewhere in the last few pages of Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. And something sweetly strange happened. I was deeply engrossed in the story, in the throes of its characters’ sexcapades, their social strife, litlost (state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery). Therefore, I found it tough to sit in the living room, wine glass in hand, chatting up with these friends. I kept coming back to my bedroom every half an hour or so just to be able to steal a few minutes to read some more paragraphs from the book. Almost how we compulsively refresh our social feeds to check no-one-knows-what.
Something similar happened when I was visiting some friends over the weekend while I had just entered the second half of Proust’s Swann’s Way. Since I couldn’t have carried the book with me, I prepared to quell my urge by carrying an e-book on the phone’s book app. While at their place, each time I got bored (which was SO OFTEN if not all the time), I strode over to my phone and stole reads of Proust’s Paris parties pretending to aimlessly scroll through a social media app, just like all of us.
This kind of back and forth was a bit of a time travel. Between the Paris and Prague of these novels and the now. Between those parties and these. Between who they were and who we are. Like stealing moments for myself in the middle of a party. Not “like”, this was actually siphoning time away to curl into my own comfort zone in broad daylight, in full public view. This kind of thievery, mapping, plotting, slipping has been part of my life ever since I was a kid.
Anyone who has had any kind of a secret life will attest to this way of lurking and existing simultaneously. The reading type, the less talking type, the boring type — who’d much rather nuzzle herself inside the pages of a book or an essay online over participating in any shade of banal, empty, unnecessary conversation with anyone the corporeal world.
This kind pocketing of time earlier happened in the way of actually reading a book in a different room when everyone else engaged in many forms of socialising. But as I grew up, I couldn’t get away with the sitting in the other room trope. I had to be with people. This required my to either sit there resentfully or get creative. Guess which option I chose!
Sitting in the washroom for an extra 10 minutes in the morning to start my day with a fiction piece from Granta
Reading in between work to refresh and recharge
A reading break instead of a smoke break
Conserve my reserves by giving less to people who I see absolutely no need to engage with
Reading to the end (be it an essay, a book, a poem) irrespective of whether am enjoying it or not
I realised that with time, I will have to manoeuvre my ways to conserve the energy reserves of the precocious little reader, wanderer, daydreamer within. I’m one of those readers who can’t daydream without a book in hand or a movie before my eyes. This kind of placemaking is a way to console myself and preserve the reader within.
Kofferbuch: A German word for a book that one takes along on a trip with the intention of reading, but never actually read. Kofferbuchs in this case.
Reader: I read none of these books during this trip.
Reading corner:
Everywhere I go where there are Muslims, a Yemeni coffee shop is not far: A lovely, lively, terrific little piece about Yemeni coffee shops sprouting in most of America as places of hangouts for Muslims.
Repetition by Vigdis Hjorth Translated by Charlotte Barslund
Without women the novel would die: discuss
Listen-in:
thank-you for Kofferbuch