2013: A YEAR WITH PROUST
Multiple locations
November 8-14, free (some events require advance RSVP)
www.frenchculture.org
Earlier this week, Flavorwire posted “50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers,” which included such classic difficult favorites as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. If you’ve never made it through even the beginning of Proust’s challenging epic, you can now have others do it for you, as the Cultural Services of the French Embassy presents a one hundredth anniversary public reading of Swann’s Way as part of its major celebration 2013: A Year with Proust. “A Nomadic Reading” kicks off November 8 at the Wythe Hotel and continues November 9 at Soho Rep., November 10 at the New York Botanical Garden, November 11 at the Oracle Club, November 12 at Simone Subal Gallery, and November 13 at Le Baron Chinatown before concluding November 14, the actual centennial of the publication of Swann’s Way, at the French Embassy. All programs are free, with some requiring advance RSVP; among the scheduled readers are Ira Glass, Deborah Treisman, Jonathan Galassi, Paul Holdengraber, Judith Thurman, and Mike Birbiglia. Here’s a little amuse-bouche to get you started, from Lydia Davis’s 2003 translation for Viking:
For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say “I’m going to sleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not disturb my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed.