Proust Curious

Hosts Emma Claussen and Hannah Weaver join the narrator for one last search for lost time, rejoicing with him as he finds it by stumbling on a paving stone in the courtyard of the Princesse de Guermantes’s house, and dreams about the book he finally knows he can write – if he can only live long enough. The shadow of mortality is cast not only by the Great War, which ends some time before this ‘regaining’ of lost time, but in the iconic ‘bal des têtes’ scene in which the narrator suddenly notices that he and everyone else he knows has gotten older as time has passed. We giddily discuss Proust’s vision of art and his theory of time, and how he brings his ‘unfinished’ novel to a virtuosic conclusion. Plus, we answer the question, “who is your favorite heroine?”. Join us as we search for lost time and remember things Proust.

This is the volume of Albertine’s disappearance, first from the narrator’s home, then from life, and finally from the narrator’s memory. Hosts Emma Claussen and Hannah Weaver contemplate Proust’s extended meditation on oblivion, love, jealousy, grief, and death. We discuss the careful rhythm of the volume, the transitory nature of the self, and the proliferation of doubles and specters. We travel to Venice, which for once disappoints us more than it does the narrator. Plus, we answer the question, “What is your favorite occupation?” Join us as we search for lost time and remember things Proust.

Having returned to Paris with the narrator, hosts Emma Claussen and Hannah Weaver enter the claustrophobic and surveilled world of the household he has set up with his object of obsession, Albertine. In concert with the narrator, we ask: What does it mean to love someone? How (or to what extent) can we know anybody? How could jealousy be the key to understanding time? Plus, we’ll answer the question, “What gift of nature would you like to have?” Join us as we search for lost time and remember things Proust.Resources:Proust QuestionnaireIn Search of Lost Time (trans. Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Mayor; rev. Enright)Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and RelaxationVictoria Baena, “In Search of Albertine”Logo imageFor a transcript, visit our corner of Public Books, an online magazine of arts, ideas, and scholarship.

Join hosts Emma Claussen and Hannah Weaver for the fourth installment of Proust Curious. Perhaps more than the previous volumes, this volume really has an overriding theme: sexuality, and particularly homosexuality. The book comes back time and time again to the narrator’s fearful but obsessional interest in homosexuality, which swings violently in tone from condemnation to detached amusement. It worries over the tangled relationship between jealousy and love. But it also turns a page in the calendar of feeling as a physical action leads the narrator to remember his beloved, dead grandmother when he returns to Normandy for a second visit. Plus, we wallow in the question, “What is your idea of misery?” Join us as we search for lost time and remember things Proust.Resources:Proust QuestionnaireIn Search of Lost Time (trans. Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Mayor; rev. Enright)Logo imagepublicbooks.org