In September 2018, my reader, Anthony, opened Swann’s Way, the first book of In Search of Lost Time, on our front veranda and read aloud the seemingly innocent opening line: “I used to go to bed early”. From that moment – and almost every evening for the next four years – I was lost in a rarefied parallel reality created more than 100 years ago on the other side of the world. Marcel Proust, that neurotic frail Frenchman from the late nineteenth century, became my daily companion.
Anthony took up the challenge of entering Proust’s sentences, gliding through the infinite subordinate clauses with graceful ease. He read, I listened. Before Covid, we travelled and read in bars, gîtes, and village squares and then, during lockdowns, at home. I discovered how being read to lifted the words off the page so that they created a vast, suspended architecture of sound and rhythm. It was as if Proust’s words only reached their full three dimensional extension when they were read aloud. I watched them unfold like little scraps of paper in a porcelain bowl, becoming detailed and enduring characters, villages, cities, just like the famous moment in Swann’s Way when the madeleine cake dunked in his cup of tea begins to do its work of unfolding a vast maquette of houses, individuals, a society and a period of history:
