Reading Proust

And our madeleine ritual

For some time, I’ve wanted to read Marcel Proust, and I’ve finally begun. In Search of Lost Time. It’s tremendous, my favorite sort of reading: I’ll finish a passage—beautifully translated by Lydia Davis—and then I’ll stop and consider the thought or image it provokes or provides. It’s the type of writing that makes me want to think, and makes me want to write. Not all books, even good ones, beautiful ones, do that. This one does. Bonus: it’s the Penguin UK edition I got at Daunt Books in London.

But the book also has two wonderful associations for me.

The first: I was listening to a podcast interview with the writer Jennifer Egan, in which she mentioned being part of a book club that spent six years reading through In Search of Lost Time. Isn’t that marvelous, a book club sticking with the same book for six years. I won’t be upset if it takes me that long to finish all seven volumes.

But my favorite association: most Saturday mornings last winter, through January and February, my wife and I went to a local coffee shop, to talk and read for an hour or so, and on several visits, I kept seeing the same guy, reading the same massive book. If I remember correctly, he wore work boots, dark clothes, a hoodie, some days a bandanna, others a cap. It was the cap I first noticed. I take that back; it was a guy reading a book that I first noticed. It’s rare to see a man reading a book in public (possibly even rarer in private, for then there is no one to impress), and, where I live, if you do happen to spot a man in the wild reading a book, it’s generally the same book. But the cap. It was Liverpool FC, my favorite team. So the cap, the guy reading, and the book—a single volume of In Search of Lost Time. I couldn’t believe it.

On what I think was my third time seeing him, I finally approached. I apologized for my own hat, PSG, a souvenir from our trip to Paris, and tried to convince him I was really with Liverpool. (I’m not sure he bought it.) I asked him about the book. He said it was tremendous, that it possessed so much life in it, possibly all of it, and that he was glad he had read it, for he was nearly done. (I didn’t ask if it had taken him six years.) He had been wearing headphones, so I asked if he was also listening to it. He wasn’t. He was listening to music that helped him focus on the reading. It was the kind of book, he said, where you had to fully immerse yourself, and the music helped him do so.

Well, I’ll be. He might have departed the cafe those days to go build a highway or to wrangle cattle, or perhaps he was a dentist and I had caught him in his leisure wear. I didn’t ask, and I haven’t seen him again. But I did see him, reading Proust, for his own pleasure and edification, and that small light has stayed with me since.

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Miscellany

My daughter and I take afternoon tea most weekends, and madeleines are our favorite accompaniment, those delicious little cakes popularized by Proust’s book. We use this recipe, put a baking pan underneath the madeleine tray to keep them from getting too browned, and finish by sprinkling powdered sugar on top. Often, tea is just the two of us, but when we make madeleines, everyone wants to join.