Marcel Proust’s novels are long, intricate, a structure of the most complex relationships, the mastery of which seems to presuppose, at least temporarily, what its author was granted: a life without other mundane obligations and material worries. We have now read it in many articles on the occasion of the 150th birthday, and no one can doubt it.
But you can also abandon yourself to your text, let yourself be carried away by it and be drawn into it, not only when reading in silence, but also when reading aloud, as the success of Peter Matić’s reading proves, which one has been listening to bit by bit since spring RBB culture can hear. Such hearing can lead to very own experiences and discoveries, of which a spontaneously recorded diary sheet may give an idea.
The other day on my bike, on a tour of the increasingly deserted landscape east of Berlin, I got a very nice, older radio play audio book based on Proust’s “Combray”, the first part of the cycle “In search of lost time” excellent translation by Michael Kleeberg with Sylvester Groth, Juliane Köhler, Thomas Holtzmann and Doris Schade (published by Hörverlag), which lasts only two and a half hours, and yet contains everything that is famous, about which even those who have never heard a line know have read from Proust: the magic lantern when falling asleep, the Madeleine dipped in the linden blossom tea, the hawthorn hedges, the church towers changing places as you drive past, the stubborn cook Françoise, the grandmother, Aunt Léonie, Swann and the talk about him.
The lonely cyclist particularly liked the fact that in the audio book the narrator’s long, long sentences were repeatedly divided into two voices, as if there was a handover, a friendly division of labor: Come on, give it up, I’ll continue if you feel like it becomes long and difficult when you run out of breath. These handovers are always well set in the wonderful audio book, at a point when a parallelism, one of Proust’s vastly ramified so-ws, changes from so to how. One could also think of a string quartet in which the violins and violas take up each other, repeat melodic phrases and continue.
The reconstruction for the outdoor catering mixed with the praise of the river Vivonne
The birth-like process of remembering, the slow bringing up and then jerky, painfully exhilarating emergence of Marcel’s memories of his childhood, and the physicality of memory in general – this was particularly lively through these voice changes.
So I cycled against an increasingly swelling, warm and dry wind that rushed loudly into my ear in my own private Proust bubble, increasingly blissful and overwhelmed by the fresh beauty – because I last read “Combray” for more than 25 years back – until I got near a small train station.
A look at the clock and the timetable app told me that I had almost exactly the one hour that remained in the audio book until the next train came. Since the wind had become too noisy for me on the almost bare Ice Age heights north of the Spree, I sat down between an old village church and a restaurant called “Erbkrug” to continue listening.
In the “Erbkrug”, on that Saturday, the opening of the outdoor catering was still being worked on by setting up beautiful new wooden tables and benches, obviously just delivered by the carpenter, on the back in the inn’s garden, very fresh, reddish wood. This hopeful, confident work for the missed and longed-for sitting together in the open air was mixed with the praise of the river Vivonne, the walk from Combray to the Guermantes, with the description of the medieval church portals and their rural figure physiognomies – and suddenly something of the homeland beauty shone , who “Combray” also has, on the Brandenburg brick church, on the “Erbkrug” and its busy operators (the landlady, I read on the net later, is a Polish woman from Masuria, who enjoys the very best reputation and of the community Was selected by a majority in an introductory process in 2019).
So I sat on the swing to continue listening while eating an apple
The medieval Brandenburg village church is of course much simpler than the one in the little town of Illiers-Combray, which I visited a few years ago, and of course it has no glowing glass windows with stories of saints – that ended in Brandenburg as early as 1525 with the Reformation. Between the church and the “Erbkrug” there is nothing to sit down on apart from a wagon wheel-sized tree stump in a meadow. But behind it there is a playground with sand, slide and swings. So I sat on the swing to continue listening while eating an apple.
Luminous stained glass windows with stories of saints: the interior of the Saint-Jacques church in Illiers-Combray.
(Photo: Lamberto Scipioni / imago)
And all of a sudden I began to swing, swinging further and further and forgetting like I used to do as a child, when I loved it and did it for half an hour. That harmonized so perfectly with the long Proust sentences, with the praise of the landscape around the Vivonne, yes it increased what I had heard so convincingly that I couldn’t stop. The swinging of these almost endlessly long sentences had also reached me physically – in the state of the pleasant pulsating blood flow that already generated an hour of cycling – as otherwise only epic verses with their regularity can do.
Miraculously, neither from the “Erbkrug” nor from a small road construction site at the back of the church, which was guarded by an ancient gray dog that had only raised its head briefly when I drove up, strange looks that showed astonishment at the adult man who hung there for a full hour in the children’s swing and swung up and down.
Oh, is that cheesy, I thought at the same moment that I became aware of the weirdness of the situation. On the other hand, I still had so much to do, to keep following the long sentences, to understand the new handover of the connections with their entering an ever higher level, that the aesthetic precariousness of my own situation at that moment was not given any weight, no Could put on fat. It remained a fleeting shadow that only took on a certain consistency afterwards when you wrote it down.
At least I was awake enough to catch the train back to Berlin. I heard the last minutes in which the first-person narrator Marcel experiences the happiness of the very first authorship (on a carriage, so also in motion) in the empty bicycle compartment of the regional train from Frankfurt an der Oder.