A Great Reading Achievement

[jayne lee wilson]

My Mother, who celebrated her 90th birthday last October, has just completed her journey through A La Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust, in the justly famous Kilmartin/Enright translation. Yes, I do mean all SIX volumes. It took her 13 months to the day.

What makes this the more remarkable is that she wasn't much of a reader until the age of 83, when, laid up in hospital for around 10 weeks, she asked for "something different from the daily papers" and I took her the Penguin Book of Classic American Short Stories (Bartleby and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow were big hits). After which she romped through Russian epics and English Classics at an alarming - well, shaming, rate - specialising in pre and post-war British writers like Dorothy Whipple and Mary Webb. Various adventurings into Austen's integrale and the complete Saul Bellow followed (favourite - Augie March...). Dinner table conversations were never the same again!

So now she's arrived at the great culmination of the tale of a piece of cake, getting about 4 and a half volumes further than I ever did. (Look, I was proud of THAT...)

So tonight we celebrated with Scampi & Chips (with a side order of Prawn Salad) - and Champagne!

[Beef Oven]

My Mother, who celebrated her 90th birthday last October, has just completed her journey through A La Recherche du Temps perdu by Marcel Proust, in the justly famous Kilmartin/Enright translation. Yes, I do mean all SIX volumes. It took her 13 months to the day.

What makes this the more remarkable is that she wasn't much of a reader until the age of 83, when, laid up in hospital for around 10 weeks, she asked for "something different from the daily papers" and I took her the Penguin Book of Classic American Short Stories (Bartleby and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow were big hits). After which she romped through Russian epics and English Classics at an alarming - well, shaming, rate - specialising in pre and post-war British writers like Dorothy Whipple and Mary Webb. Various adventurings into Austen's integrale and the complete Saul Bellow followed (favourite - Augie March...)

So now she's arrived at the great culmination of the tale of a piece of cake, getting about 4 and a half volumes further than I ever did.

So tonight we celebrated with Scampi & Chips (with a side order of Prawn Salad) - and Champagne!

Wow! What a remarkable woman!!

I will remember this when I am struggling at page 180 of some weighty tome!!

How was the scampi and poo?

[jayne lee wilson]

Wow! What a remarkable woman!!

I will remember this when I am struggling at page 180 of some weighty tome!!

How was the scampi and poo?

The food and wine went down with much pleasure thankyou, and with rather less effort than the literature (especially for me...)

[Beef Oven]

The food and wine went down with much pleasure thankyou, and with rather less effort than the literature (especially for me...)

[vinteuil]

Jayne Lee - that's marvellous. Congratulations to your ma!

And do tell her - it's even better when she re-reads it for the second or third time...

[Flosshilde]

Gosh is all I can say. & well done her.

Who's idea was it to read it? and did she read just that, or did she have some lighter things going at the same time?

[amateur51]

Congrats to your mum, jlw - my parents were both big readers but mostly thrillers & tec stories so she is in a different league, especially as she's taken to marathon stuff.

for breakfast?

[umslopogaas]

Jane, who is the publisher for this Kilmartin/Enright translation? I have most of the original Scott Moncrieff version, and the complete Penguin edition in three volumes. In the Penguin version, vols. 1 and 2 are trans. Scott Moncrieff and Kilmartin, vol. 3 by those two and Andreas Mayor.

Do try and interest your mum in George Painter's biography: 'Marcel Proust', 2 vols., mine is published by Peregrine. It adds new dimensions to the story, giving the real social and political background and also the real-life models for the characters, not least the remarkable Count Robert de Montesquiou, the chief, but not the only, basis for Baron Charlus.

I must add my congratulations to your mum for taking on such an apparent literary mountain at an age when most people are content to read the obituary pages. However, I dont share the general astonishment: Proust is much more forbidding on the shelf, by virtue of the length, than he is when you actually start to read him. I found it a fairly easy read - compared with, for example, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, I am stuck on the Brothers Karamazov for the second time in my life and may have to admit than it has defeated me.

Here's an idle thought: what is the most unreadable book you ever tried to read? I can offer two: Theodore Dreiser's 'An American Tragedy' and Samuel Beckett's 'How It Is'. The latter is impossible, I admire the stuff Beckett wrote that I can cope with, but I have never got beyond the first page of that one.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

GREAT post, Jayne. for Mum, too - what a fantastic gene pool!

[Petrushka]

My father hadn't read a book since a spell in hospital in 1942 and only started up again when I pushed a book about Bomber Command (in which he served) at him when he was similarly laid up about 10 years ago at the age of 83. He subsequently read as many books about the Second World War Royal Air Force as he could lay his hands on and having rather exhausted the pool available has sadly reverted back to the daily paper alone. I am lost in admiration for JLW's aged p. and think War and Peace should be next on the agenda. I find Tolstoy perfectly readable, umslop.

At the other end of the age scale, I read all six volumes of Churchill's The Second World War during the whole of 1966, starting on January 1 and completing the course the following Christmas in what was my 12th year.

[eighthobstruction]

Brilliant !!!!

[gamba]

Great ! Congratulations !

She will now be begging you for a copy of ' Finnegans Wake.'

[Flosshilde]

Proust is much more forbidding on the shelf, by virtue of the length, than he is when you actually start to read him. I found it a fairly easy read

I haven't got further than halfway through the first vol of Penguin's 3 vol edition, but yes - I found it an engrossing read. The only thing is, you need to submerge yourself in his style & world, which is difficult if you read it in short bursts. You need to be able to devote a longish period of time. In theory retirement should provide that, but I've been far too busy

[jayne lee wilson]

Lovely responses everyone, thankyou...

Umslopogas - it's the "Modern Library Classics" edition, published by Random House, nicely presented in a stiff cardboard slip-case. It's based on the second Pleiade Edition of 1987-9. It does read very well, fluent and syntactically(!), remarkably idiomatic. D.J.Enright's note on it is too modest about his own achievements...

Whose idea Flossie? Mum came across the original Kilmartin 6th volume whilst browsing in the local library, enjoyed the first pages so I said, you really shouldn't start there... knowing her appetite it seemed irresistible when I saw the set on Amazon. But I didn't buy it without a (brief, very enthusiastic) consultation!

Unreadables? Oddly enough, neither of us can get far with Catch-22, Mum got to about page 80 I think, whereas I...
Midnight's Children - likewise.

Mum's other reading between Proust's pages - not much! - dippings back into the Persephone catalogue for an hour here and there, and The Guardian of course...

[amateur51]

Mum's other reading between Proust's pages - not much! - dippings back into the Persephone catalogue for an hour here and there, and The Guardian of course...

Ah hence the Dorothy Whipple connection