As someone who wonders about buying green bananas these days (will any of us be here to appreciate them when they ripen?) why take a leap into the dark with Proust, whose reputation inspires trepidation in the heart of the ignorant reader?
I knew Toby’s salon would be a safe space where I could learn from bright, committed, generous friends I had not yet even met. I wanted a fixed appointment in my week when so much of what was once a routine had fallen off a cliff . . .
The Proust Study is way more than a reason to get out of bed every Monday. It is a privilege to share the frustrations and genius of each reading, to get to know the cast of characters, their way of conversing, the class system, the politics, art history, classics, science and human nature, warts and all. I have been horrified by the anti-semitism – as a traditional but not religious Jewish woman I thought, wrongly, I knew all there was to know – and the salon has been sympathetic and equally disgusted by the vile anti-semitism from which Proust doesn’t flinch. I have learned more about furnishings, flowers, clothes, food, fragrances and trees, spires, seascapes, carriages, Paris, army life, snobbery and magic lanterns than I thought possible . . . . and I am only on The Guermantes Way (Volume III).
In a nutshell: ‘Frail, sickly, sensitive, over-imaginative mummy’s boy in middle-class French family reaches adolescence (perhaps, even, becomes an adult, Proust’s narrator changes tense so often I am never entirely certain of anything). Against a backdrop of Dreyfus, crumbling aristocracy, ennui, and the tyranny of servants who make life possible, the volumes are as much about procrastination, memory, the impossibility of love, perception, grief, longing and cake.’
Sue Fox is a journalist and veteran of many Salons
