Marcel Proust died 100 years ago. Andreas Isenschmid presents an impressive essay on the rarely asked question of how he began to write as a Jew at a time of swelling anti-Semitism.
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Hilmar Klute
Martin Walser once wrote a nice essay about the difficulties of reading Marcel Proust in such a way that at the end of the reading handy and negotiable details and objects remain in the memory. A plethora of situations crowd the reader’s imagination, writes Walser, in the form of events (walks, the famous scones taste sensation), women (Gilberte, Odette, Albertine) and men (Swann, Bloch, Norpois). A world of countless details pops up, full of references and conjectures. Walser recognized his misery when reading the seven volumes in “not being able to dispose of them intellectually”.