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A review by casparb
The Albertine Workout by Anne Carson
OKAY for the meme maybe I did indeed do three or four thousand pages of prep reading for this. anything for u anne <3
THIS BEING SAId imagine my surprise that the three or four thousand pages of prep reading felt like they were needed, that I wouldn't have loved this pamphlet half so much if I hadn't swanned through (har har har) all of proust
going to spiel but this is just A Great Piece of Literary Criticism she's so precise, incisive, and knows when her point has been made. ..
I'm with anne in that the autobiographical reading of the novel 'is a graceless, intrusive and saddening hermeneutic mechanism; in the case of Proust it is also irresistible'. This I think puts it perfectly. There are so many colours to this tiny (38page) pamphlet. I think if you read this without context you could be persuaded (or feel you'd been persuaded) to hate proust, and Carson is absolutely, rightly, stressing the more concerning, problematic elements of MP's representation of Albertine asleep, of plant respiration. but she's also, unsurprisingly, wiser than tapping the big sign that says PROBLEMatic & calling it a day. The extraordinary pathos with which Carson draws attention to the real-life death of Proust's lover, his chauffeur Alfred Agostinelli, in an aviation accident (in a plane Marcel bought for him, under the name "Marcel Swann", with the Mallarmé inscription 'un cygne d'autrefois'...) made me ache. I think I've been obsessing about planes in Proust for as long as they're in the novel, as a fresh piece of technology. Carson seems to tie this all up.. o the dark-wing dove... I'm tatters
I luv that she has fun reading proust too, , devises a little catalogue of adjectives throughout as they are applied to 'air'.... what would we do without you anne
thank you kate !mwah
THIS BEING SAId imagine my surprise that the three or four thousand pages of prep reading felt like they were needed, that I wouldn't have loved this pamphlet half so much if I hadn't swanned through (har har har) all of proust
going to spiel but this is just A Great Piece of Literary Criticism she's so precise, incisive, and knows when her point has been made. ..
I'm with anne in that the autobiographical reading of the novel 'is a graceless, intrusive and saddening hermeneutic mechanism; in the case of Proust it is also irresistible'. This I think puts it perfectly. There are so many colours to this tiny (38page) pamphlet. I think if you read this without context you could be persuaded (or feel you'd been persuaded) to hate proust, and Carson is absolutely, rightly, stressing the more concerning, problematic elements of MP's representation of Albertine asleep, of plant respiration. but she's also, unsurprisingly, wiser than tapping the big sign that says PROBLEMatic & calling it a day. The extraordinary pathos with which Carson draws attention to the real-life death of Proust's lover, his chauffeur Alfred Agostinelli, in an aviation accident (in a plane Marcel bought for him, under the name "Marcel Swann", with the Mallarmé inscription 'un cygne d'autrefois'...) made me ache. I think I've been obsessing about planes in Proust for as long as they're in the novel, as a fresh piece of technology. Carson seems to tie this all up.. o the dark-wing dove... I'm tatters
I luv that she has fun reading proust too, , devises a little catalogue of adjectives throughout as they are applied to 'air'.... what would we do without you anne
thank you kate !mwah