Crumbs

832/sr=1-7/ref=sr_1_10_7/026-5906907-5609234″>Proust Among the Stars“:

The hyperbole put at the service of this effort can be absurd: the dust jacket of Proust among the Stars even ventures to claim that it “sends Proust into orbit and sends back truly startling pictures of our world.” What, in earth or in heaven, can this possibly mean? Naturally one hesitates to pay too much attention to jacket copy, but then again Bowie’s text is itself not entirely free of such overheated and borderline perplexing rhetoric. (“Proust’s political imagination plunges with abandon toward the abyss.”) Nor does he refrain from tedious professorial posturing. (“There seems to me something unsatisfactory about any reading of the book that does not resist as well as endorse Le temps retrouvé in the performance of this harmonizing and integrating role.”) Divided into seven chapters, each devoted to a major Proustian theme—self, time, art, politics, morality, sex, death—Bowie’s study (whose precise, unhurried prose moves at a pace rather reminiscent of Proust’s own) intermingles long quotations, plot paraphrases, commonsensical explications, the occasional genuine insight about syntax or perspective, and loads of hyberbolic huffing and puffing about paradox, ambiguity, “the ‘self’” as “mobile force-field,” and suchlike.

Bawer doesn’t mention the thinker to whom Bowie is most indebted in his analysis: Jacques Lacan. What a regrettable enterprise – to try and explicate Proust, the clearest, most lucid, most intelligent of French writers, through Lacan, who, um, isn’t.

Second link is to the Crumb Museum. No substitute for having his stuff in print (I was going to recommend this, till I saw the price), but anything to do with the maestro is welcome.