Reviews for Marcel Proust (Bloom's Modern Critical Views Series)

The average rating for Marcel Proust (Bloom's Modern Critical Views Series) based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-10-20 00:00:00 Gordon Gower As a collection of essays The Cambridge Companion to Proust blows this out of the water. Not to disparage the essays contained herein: each is interesting enough (well, interesting if Proust and japonisme, Proust and telephones interests you,) and published by the requisite Clever People. I know it's bad to compare, but I will because it illustrates Bloom's shortcomings. The difference with Bales' collection is that he and his editorial team have given their book a definite telos and structure. I am pretty sure that new essays have been written for/published in it too. So in Bales we see Proust's work situated historically and then interrogated and engaged with from many angles; its structure is discussed, its narrative voice is investigated, its very conception and construction is analysed from birth to close. There is so to speak, an arrow of Time in Bales. The trail from essay to essay makes sense. Situation. History. Early attempts at writing. His agon with Ruskin. His turn from Sainte-Beuve toward ISOLT proper (Carter's examination of this "The Vast Structure of Recollection" is also in Bloom) and onwards till Bowie's lovely concluding essay. Bales is both comment and biography all in one. By contrast, Bloom's essay collection is a hodgepodgey mishmash, essays plucked from the air on a whim, chef Bloom tossing his ingredients into a pot, hoping for gustatory excitation, but achieving only a turbid stew: not quite utterly unpalatable, not without some nutritive value, but its something which looks unappetising when scrutinised and you have to chew fast and gulp down, sometimes going from one morsel to the next, not knowing WTF you'll encounter in the next mouthful. Sometimes putting chocolate on snails, or salt in your jam or beer in your ice-cream can yield culinary awesomeness. Tastebuds tingle, are ambushed by difference and the result is a pleasant, evocative, delightful whole. And sometimes the result is something you'd feel bad giving you canine poubelle of a pooch. Harold, I like you, but were this petfood, I wouldn't offer this to my companion animal. Just say no. Back to Bales, who feels like a well graduated, stately guided tour of the beautiful, majestic demesne that is In Search of Lost Time. Bloom's more like a house viewing with peeks into rooms you'd rather not venture into. Do I really need an essay on Proust and Bicycles? how The Telephone was such a marvellous invention? No. This is pretty obvious. Taken separately most of these essays are ok. As a whole, it's disjointed, and dare I say, it felt like a bit of a chore to read, not to mention that some essays are utterly exasperating (the bikes and phones weren't the worst of it. Looking at my status updates from this volume, I think I actually loathed Susan Stewart's effort, one of the few times I have passed a mental edict of damnatio memoriae on anything. Mental scrubbers on full, brain chelation therapy engaged.) So that's my main problem: the tone of the whole collection is uneven and unbalanced. One moment we get John Porter Houston's deploying a genetic approach to Proust's notebooks, his detailing in absolutely painstaking precision a certain section of Swann's Way, and at essay's close there's a very idiosyncratic authorial intrusion which only comes with the desire to make strong statements to stir things up in journals and periodicals. Houston basically restructures the novel in line with the evidence thus presented, tells us it is closer to Proust's original vision, and then eggs on the interested reader to follow his advice and read some bits out of sequence. (Proust greatly benefits from this with a second read, and Houston makes his case well, but in this instance, I'm not sure his plan works.) Thusly, Houston. The next minute all this deep textual exegesis has vanished; we're onto Jean Santeuil (*snore*) ("Jean Santeuil and the Notion of avant-texte") as forerunner for the book (or at least I think this was the content of the essay because since reading it, I have totally forgotten). Avant-Houston, we have Albertine's bike and a load of toss about women in France, and how historical milieu determines fictional albedo/content (duh!). Most egregious to my reading mind was Wassernaar's essay on Self Deception/self justificatory processes in Proust. It's basically the Introduction of her book of the same/PhD thesis lifted wholesale. All this does is make you think "ok, so...?" rather than "neat!" because, not following a traditional essay type approach, never being intended to be culled and slapped into an essay collection, it has nothing to offer except as possible advertisement for her book. Bloom's introduction is itself pretty poor, focussing as it does (and as he always does) on the psychosexual element in the novel, which is to ignore 70% of the rest of the novel's major themes, and worse, is to do disservice to his own collection that is badly in need of some editorial hand-waving to try and knit the thing together. Good essays: Kristeva. Carter. I forget the rest. So. Summary: My view. For essays, try Bales or Proust in Perspective: VISIONS AND REVISIONS. Read this if the idea of a dogs dinnered collection of essays on an early 20th French Writer saying about how awesome telephones were when people started using them more gives you a thrill. IN FIVE WORDS: Bloom: Sparagmos. Bales: Perpetual Adoration.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-02-29 00:00:00 Ross Jendrzejczak Okay, I was reading the first edition of this so the essays were different. I now have a greater understanding of Proust. But I still don't care about Proust. I tried. I really did. And maybe like 7 of the essays were good. And only two seemed to be by women, which is not surprising. But, c'mon. I got something out of this. Mainly I do not need to read anymore Proust. Enough bourgeois ennui for me.