Getting the jokes in Proust
Did you read Proust in lockdown? Lockdown, it seemed, offered the eons of vacancy apparently required to finally get around to À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, aka “The Big One”: a book to be attempted only by the pretentious one percent in the discharge of their services to intellectual snobbery. I did. I read it twice. I read it because it’s always a pleasure and a novelty, and because I want to get it made as a long-form television series. Proust is perfect for TV: better than anything else, the format can show the passage of time. This is the sine qua non of any Proust reckoning, and it has defeated all attempts so far to make the book into a feature film. We are doing well.
