John Samson of the Weakerthans here. Some of us on the Rolling Tundra Revue have been reading The Way by Swann’s by Marcel Proust, and have started a club to discuss it together. You can join us right here.  The first chapter of The Way by Swann’s, by Marcel Proust, begins with a long and lovely exploration of the weird spaces between consciousness and sleep, specifically those times when you drift off with a book in your hands: “…it seemed to me that I myself was what the book was talking about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francois I and Charles V.” Seems like Proust is setting us up to see the scope of his ambition for the novel in our hands to include pretty much everything, and it is a nice welcoming sentiment that implies he needs us, the reader, to complete his writing.I was especially struck by this relevant statement a couple pages in: “A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the sequence of the hours, the order of the years and worlds. He consults them instinctively as he wakes and reads in a second the point on earth he occupies, the time that has elapsed before his waking; but their ranks can be mixed up, broken.” This is the best description of waking up on a tour bus ever. Mixed up and broken.  So, so far, so good. Almost too easy. Then we start to read about the young narrator and his home town of Combray, and wander into a long description of his trouble getting to sleep. The description of the magic lantern that the narrator’s family gives him to allay his fears of the dark impressed Weakerthans bass player Greg Smith. Greg is our most accomplished reader—he often takes a classic on tour with him (last time it was Joyce’s Ullyses) and reads for a couple hours every night before the show. Predicatably, Greg seems most enthusiastic about the book so far. Cons guitarist Steve Lambke and myself, however, found these pages about the narrator’s tortured relationship with sleep and his mother pretty rough going. Lambke went so far as to confess that he briefly thought he might have to resign from the club. I found it getting claustrophobic and whiny and had the dreadful feeling that we were in for 3000 pages more of this. But then it all lifts with the beautiful and justly famous “petite madelines” scene. The narrator eats a french cookie type thing and the past comes flooding back, washes over him. Suddenly his memories of his youth at Combray are more that just “the theatre and drama of my bedtime,” which I had feared would go on forever. Now I assume we are prepared for a deeper exploration of time and memory as we move to Chapter 2.  Cons bass player Dallas Wherle is just finishing The Day of the Triffids, and will start in on The Way by Swann’s shortly.  Documentary film director Caelum Vatnsdal just rejoined the tour today, so hasn’t been present at meetings, but he sent this helpful link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwAOc4g3K-g  Please chime in with any comments. Let’s try to have Chapter 2 read for, say, next Thrusday, April 30^th.  Yours Truly, JKS, Secretary, RTR BOOK CLUB 

This entry was posted on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 12:41 am.