About The Year of Reading Proust

En réalité, chaque lecteur est, quand il lit, le propre lecteur de soi-même. L’ouvrage de l’écrivain n’est qu’une espèce d’instrument optique qu’il offre au lecteur afin de lui permettre de discerner ce que, sans ce livre, il n’eût peut-être pas vu en soi-même. La reconnaissance en soi-même, par le lecteur, de ce que dit le livre est la preuve de la vérité de celui-ci, et vice versa, au moins dans une certaine mesure, la différence entre les deux textes pouvant être souvent imputée non à l’auteur mais au lecteur. (l’édition Gallimard, Paris, 1946-47 )
實際上，讀者在閱讀的時候全都只是自我的讀者。作品只是作家爲讀者提供的一種光學儀器，使讀者得以識別沒有這部作品便可能無法認清的自身上的那些東西。讀者能從書本所云中做到自身的識別證明這本書說的是真話，反之亦然，兩篇文章間的不同，至少在某種程度上，往往不能歸咎於作者，而應歸咎於讀者。
(p.237~238 追憶似水年華 VII 重現的時光 聯經版 1992)




我始終不忍評斷，這是不是一本失敗之作……
然則，「閱讀普魯斯特的那一年」，終究無法讓人感動，也難以引發迴響，原先期待可以變成一種「那一年，我們一起閱讀的普魯斯特」的共同想像，也終究成為一種幻影。

“Parallel Lives”，可說是這本書的創作重點，如同在網路書店的書籍介紹中所提到的：
A brilliant and original memoir of midlife-a writing life, a reading life, a woman's life-by the distinguished author of Parallel Lives

然而，這卻也是這本書的敗筆所在，就像幾位讀者猛烈的批評聲浪：
“Too bad I couldn't rate this 0 stars because 1 star in one too many. …She misses the whole meaning of Proust. She and everything she stands for is what he mocks.”

“After a promising opening chapter, this book proved to be a great disappointment, especially after Parallel Lives -- lots of Proustian detail but to very little point.”

在這本小說裡頭，確實很難把故事情節與閱讀普魯斯特的過程緊密結合，作者偶然提及敘事者「閱讀」所遭遇的困頓、「閱讀」如何成為一種生活儀式，好像也只有在這瞬間才能讓我覺得有趣或產生些許共鳴：
For a long time I used to try to read Proust. At first I could not. Like a heavy car with a tiny engine, I charged up the hill again and again only to stall around page 50, somewhere within the exhausting story of young Marcel’s getting to sleep one night in Combray
……
Once or twice, however, with my foot pressed even harder on the accelerator, I would chug uphill to the story of Uncle Adolphe, between pages 99 and 110. There I stalled again, but for a different reason.

Proust declined my peripheral attention. He wanted, he demanded, he got my best thought, my best energy, the best of my day.

Proust had become as much a way of life as a literary pastime, closer to a religious practice than to the usual discrete encounter with a single work of art. I retreated into my communion with the text as a way of vacationing from daily life, as a Sunday worshipper might put aside routine concerns on entering a church, returning to the way I’d read as a fifteen-year-old, when, since I had no date for New Year’s Eve, to bury my chagrin, to keep from thinking of the fun I was missing, I immersed myself in Gone With the Wind and finished it in one long celebratory night.

我始終不忍評斷，這是不是一本失敗之作……
然則，我還是無法察覺到普魯斯特究竟影響了敘事者哪些生活？哪些思考模式? 而作者透過「閱讀普魯斯特的那一年」究竟想表達什麼？

是否我也該期許自己完成「閱讀普魯斯特的那二十年」？以及還可能繼續的未來五十年呢？？


http://www.amazon.com/The-Year-Reading-Proust-Memoir/dp/1582430551
The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time by Phyllis Rose
Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Counterpoint; 1st Counterpoint paperback ed edition (December 23, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1582430551
ISBN-13: 978-1582430553

A brilliant and original memoir of midlife-a writing life, a reading life, a woman's life-by the distinguished author of Parallel Lives

Phyllis Rose, a biographer, essayist, and literary critic, finally got around to reading Proust in middle age. As Rose learned, you don't have to live through an unhappy childhood or celebrity adulthood to write an autobiography. You just need patience, candor, and a close-to-scientific passion for truth. She begins to learn how to navigate the intricacies of Proust's novels, at the same time reflecting on the course of her own life.

With striking honesty, Rose writes about marriage, friendship, childbirth, and her own mortality. As she moves from daily experience to what she's read and back again, she illuminates how the close reading of her own life reveals truths for the rest of us and how such a subtle celebration of books can help us live.