Proust in the News

The thud of a volume of Proust hitting the ground is among one of the first hints that the talented Chilean director Cristián Jiménez might be up to something far more narratively ambitious than it may initially seem in "Bonsái."

Read the article, "Lies, Damned Lies and Literature" here on the New York Times website.

Maxine P. Fisher published an interesting article, “F. Scott Fitzgerald and Marcel Proust: Literary Soul Mates,” in the October 2011 issue of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review. Read the abstract here.

Read the article, "F. Scott Fitzgerald and Marcel Proust: Literary Soul Mates," here on the Wiley Online Library website.

Raúl Ruiz, a Chilean director who presented a labyrinthine, cryptic picture of individual psychology and social relations in “Mysteries of Lisbon” and more than 100 other films, died on Friday in Paris. He was 70.

Read the article, "Raúl Ruiz, Prolific Director of Cryptic Films" here on the New York Time's website.

This article, "Persistence of Memory and the Comma Bacillus," about Dr. Adrien Proust's role in stopping the cholera epidemics that used to ravage Europe appeared in the November 2011 issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases. Cholera, we learn, like the persistence of memory, can resurface any time and any place "when sanitary conditions are compromised and the causative agent is present."

Read the article, "Persistance of Memory and the Common Bacillus" here on the CDC's website.

The piece, "Depth of Field," by Janet Malcolm about German photographer Thomas Struth, contains a mention of Eugène Atget's Paris photographs as being the "visualization of Marcel Proust." This claim is debatable. You will find the article under the heading "Annals of Art" on pages 95-103. It begins with a remarkable official photograph by Struth of Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh to be part of an exhibition of paintings and photographs of the Queen commemorating her Diamond Jubilee in 2012.

On January 21, 1910, Paris suffered its worst flood in modern times as the Seine overflowed its banks and kept rising. The Figaro reported that the Gare Saint-Lazare, which was not far from Proust's home, was inundated by water from a broken drain as well as from the flooding river. By January 29 the water, still rising by a centimeter an hour, overflowed the lake that had formed on the west side of the train station and turned boulevard Haussmann into a rushing river. Marcel, writing to Simone de Caillavet, said that he would try to answer her mother's letter, although he would "probably have drowned in the meantime." (Encore serais-je sans doute noyé.) Much of central Paris remained closed to traffic until February 2, when the waters receded. Clocks and elevators that depended on forced air stopped working, as did the pneumatic mail service. Many buildings were without gas and electricity. At the Comédie-Française, the curtain remained up and actors performed on a stage lit by acetylene.

The November 2009issue of Vanity Fair magazine has an article by editor Graydon Carter, announcing the publication of the magazine's back-page Proust Questionnaire in book form: Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire. The article contains amusing caricatures of some of the celebrities by the book's illustrator Risko, along with their answers to certain questions.

Two recent issues of The New Yorker had articles featuring Proust: "Imaginary Concerts: The Music of Fictional Composers" by Alex Ross in the August 24, 2009 issue and "Dutch Touch: A Visiting Vermeer at the Met" by Peter Schjeldahl in the issue of September 21, 2009.

Alex Ross tells us that in creating the fictional composer Vinteuil, "Proust ventured into an esoteric subcategory of fiction—stories about composers who exist only in the pages of books."