In the last week or so, I advanced to Volume 2 of In Search of Lost Time. So far, we have returned to the youthful narrator’s perspective, and we are hearing about his naïve love for Swann’s daughter, Gilberte. We are also gaining more insights into Swann’s obsessive and disastrous affair with Odette, and we understand a little better how they came to be married, despite Swann having arrived at the sobering realization, at the end of Swann in Love, that Odette really just isn’t his type.

And Proust continues to do a very strange thing with the point of view; he regularly slides from his own first-person account of things to an omniscient narrator privy to everyone’s internal motivations and back again. He somehow manages to do this fluidly, without the slightest jolt to the narrative; we simply shift from, say, a dinner party at which the narrator is present, to deep background regarding events from years before the narrator would even have been born.

I experience no jolt because, I think, of the absolute trust he inspires. He could tell me about anything, however dull or otherwise not to my taste, and I’d happily listen for as long as he wished to speak, because he has proven beyond doubt that he can make insightful and profound use of anything at all, including wallpaper, furniture, mediocre Romantic sonatas — and of course madeleines dipped in herbal tea.

By a curious coincidence, my wife spotted a Proust reference in an unlikely spot. As a ramp up to the imminent theatrical release of its sequel, some cable channel has been repeatedly airing an action flick called The Transporter. At one point, a character bakes some madeleines, prompting a revery from the French police chief on the nature of memory and observation, noting that Proust, being a “details man,” would have made a great detective; he adds that in fact it had been his reading of Proust as a youth that inspired him to become an investigator.

She had just told me of this scene when we turned on the TV — and there was the movie, moments away from the very scene in question. And in a typically Proustian way, I experienced the scene twice — but the first one seemed more real, because it had been Ana’s story, and the actual film itself, upon which her version was based, seemed like a mere enactment.

(The silly Python song faded weeks ago, thankfully — except when my wife asks me, “And in the second book: what did Proust write about, write about?")

Mere pages away from the end of Swann’s Way — so close in fact that I don’t know if I should even haul it to work or not; I could finish it on the ride in this morning, and I hate lugging dead books with me. Volume 2 is somewhat larger, so I sure as heck don’t want to drag them both. Ah, the quandaries of a reader.

But more about the book itself:

It is breathtaking. He slows time down for you to draw out, over many pages, the refractions of a single moment. The narrator sees, for example, a girl through the hedge, falls instantly in love, and we then read about how the mind so often latches onto some framing detail, the colors of the leaves and flowers in the hedge, the flash of a beach ball, the sound of some distant wind high in the trees, as the crucial mnemonic detail that will forever stand in for the luminous flashing moment of first love. The mind can only grasp that first moment by approaching as it were obliquely, by way of some indirect and innocuous aspect.

The novel within a novel, Swann in Love, which I just finished, is a study of sexual jealousy, agonizing and embarrassing in its brutal and lacerating accuracy. A trainwreck in dreamlike slow motion. And Odette isn’t even his type.

I have at long last taken the Proust plunge. I began the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation about six years ago, but stalled out. I tried picking it up again this spring, and faltered once again. Then, on a whim a month or so ago, I poked around online trying to tease out what had always struck me as its bewildering history of translations in English. I found that there are essentially only two. The first is the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation. Moncrieff died before finishing, so Kilmartin rounded out Time Regained. Later, D.J. Enright worked his way through M/K, revising it considerably.

And the only other English translation, it turns out, is the one instigated by Penguin a few years ago, where each of the seven volumes has been assigned a different translator. Lydia Davis takes on Swann’s Way, and it is this volume that I bought, and am surging through on the train each day. I cannot speak yet to any qualitative difference between this and the M/K, since I’d rather not get distracted (and, frankly, I don’t remember much from my previous two incomplete passes), but suffice it to say, I have found myself completely enthralled, which is not how I would have described my previous attempts. Thankfully, I ride to the terminus of each of my commuter lines (at least on the way home), so I have not missed my stops.

One unpleasant side effect has been that I’ve been incessantly singing and humming, “Proust in his first book, wrote about, wrote about”… This will pass, I hope, once I move beyond the first book.

I am crawling slowly through Invisible Cities. It reads like so many prose poems, with each subchapter devoted to describing a different city. I am moving through it more like a collection of poetry than a novel. An odd, and uncommon, experience.

What’s more odd, though, is that I keep thinking of Richard Brautigan. A somnolence enshrouds Invisible Cities that reminds me of In Watermelon Sugar.

What would this world be like if Brautigan had fallen in with the Oulipians rather than the Beats?