Beyond the Recherche

Join your hosts Emma Claussen and Hannah Weaver for a bonus episode discussing the lasting influence of Proust on today’s literary culture. We discuss memoirs, translations, and the transformative power of Proust, particularly two books that profoundly influenced our reading: Laure Murat’s Proust, roman familial (forthcoming in English as Proust, A Family Romance) and Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory. Plus, we reveal what we appreciate in friends in our final round of the Proust Questionnaire.

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

Hosts Emma Claussen and Hannah Weaver enter the glamorous and bleak world of fin-de-siècle Paris through the ironic gaze of the narrator. With new access to the chicest salons, their witty denizens, and their gauche intruders, the narrator finds himself a spectator at the drama of social interaction – even as his beloved grandmother grows sick and dies. We talk about the advent of new technology (the telephone) and hot debates (the Dreyfus affair). As he enters the world of salons, the narrator uncovers the relativity of truth and the hypocrisy of society through the lens of the Affair, the signal anti-semitic scandal of the time. The architecture of the novel emerges alongside the narrator’s growing social acumen. Plus, we ponder the question, “Where would you like to live?” Join us as we search for lost time and remember things Proust.

In the second episode of Proust Curious, hosts Emma Claussen and Hannah Weaver slog through the narrator’s first love on the Champs-Élysées and emerge onto the dazzling shore of Normandy, where he travels with his grandmother. We notice that Proust begins to introduce concepts critical to the project: the ongoing tussle between habit and novelty, the social kaleidoscope, the subject matter of art, and the essential perspectivalism of all human relations. We dissect a passage about toenails, classical statuary, and living nymphs. Plus, we’ll answer the question: “What is your favorite virtue?” Join us as we search for lost time and remember things Proust.Produced by Michael Goldsmith in partnership with Public Books; visit publicbooks.org for transcripts and more information.Resources: Proust Questionnaire In Search of Lost Time (trans. Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Mayor; rev. Enright) Emma and Hannah discuss this volume further Logo image Madame de Sévigné (seventeenth-century French author) Céline Sciamma (dir.) Bande de filles (‘Girlhood’) Rubens, Marie de’ Medici Cycle

In their inaugural episode of Proust Curious, hosts Emma Claussen and Hannah Weaver begin their plunge into Proust with the first volume of the Recherche, Swann’s Way. Proust’s humor can often be lost in the haze of canonization, but that’s where our curiosity turns today. We talk about psychedelic lime blossoms, seeing people through paintings, and the original deeply feeling kid. We consider the unity of this frequently-excerpted volume. Finally, we engage with Proust’s careful misdirection about the nature of time at the end of the volume, which he wrote in a letter was “the opposite of [his] conclusion.” Plus, we’ll answer the question, If not yourself, who would you be? 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)Emma and Hannah discuss this volume furtherLogo image

Welcome to Proust Curious, a podcast about the experience of reading Proust's "A la Recherche du temps perdu" in its entirety. Hosts Emma Claussen and Hannah Weaver hold PhDs in French Literature, but neither of us works on Proust or his period. By getting out of our lanes, we aim to dramatize the experience of reading critically for discovery and even, dare we say, pleasure. Proudly in partnership with Public Books; visit publicbooks.org. Write us at [email protected].