Pigeons' heart-shaped bodies

Book has arrived. However, in a show of pessimism, I also checked out two lightweight murder mysteries.

I just bought a book in Spanish, but am starting with an old Dorothy Sayers Peter Wimsey book. :)

I hope it's Murder Must Advertise.

No, I reread that a few months ago. It was (just finished it) The Nine Tailors.

And I admit -- I just skimmed the bits about the order of the bell-ringing.

Well, I've made it all the way to page 10.

I think Davis in her introduction hit on what's the problem for me.

If Proust has been reputed by some to be difficult reading, this can be attributed perhaps to several factors. One is that the interest of this novel, unlike that of the more traditional novel, is not merely, or even most of all, in the story it tells... [The book creates] a world unified by the narrator's governing sensibility, in which blocks of a fictional past life are retrieved and presented, in roughly chronological order in ll of their nuances.

In other words, it's not so much a novel as a chronological stream of consciousness.

A reader may feel overwhelmed by the detail of this nuance and wish to get on with the story, and yet the only way to read Proust is to yield, with a patience equal to his, to his own unhurried manner of telling the story.

When I read for pleasure, I don't really like to "work" at it. (For that reason, I don't read much poetry.) So far, I've had to slow down my reading speed and make sure I've absorbed the whole of a sentence or a paragraph. It's been rewarding, but not something I can keep up for long.

Davis also notes that the Moncreiff translation may be the issue for some people, as he "amplified" Proust's prose for the sake of "euphony or rhythm." For example, he replaced Proust's "said" with "remarked," "murmured," or "asserted."
>The effect of all these individual choices was to produce a text which, although it “ flows” very well and follows the original remarkably closely in word order and construction, is wordier and “dressier” than the original.

The original was natural and more direct and "far plainer than one might have guessed."

And I had to look up vetiver which is a oil derived from the root of a grass & used in perfumery.

Most loose ends are tied up by the end of the work, nutrax, and if you have reached page 10 you will have come across a character whose identity will dawn on you only much later.

Not going well. 20 pages of Proust and 4 murder mysteries in the last several days.

Proust is, frankly, boring. Starting mystery #5 today.

I just read a chick-lit type book I found on a shelf and at one point, the "hero" has gone to write in a cabin somewhere in North Carolina. He reads Proust in the evenings and when he reaches volume 5 he "begins to see the point of Proust".

Sigh. Proust 1. Nutrax 0. Book returned, three quarters unread.

I just could ot enter into it. It was like listening to an elderly relative ramble on. Every so often, something resonates, but mostly you are trying to figure out how to escape.

if you have reached page 10 you will have come across a character whose identity will dawn on you only much later.

Frankly, by page 20, I couldn't remember who might have been mentioned on page 10, it was so long ago.