A trove of charming correspondence from literature’s most famous “noise phobic.”
Recently discovered letters from Proust to a Paris neighbor show the author’s kindness even when he complained about the noise.
One might wonder why a man as sensitive to noise as Proust chose to live in a Paris building where someone might set up a dental practice two floors above him. That’s what happened in the early 1900s, when a harp-playing artist named Madame Marie Williams and her husband, an American dentist named Charles, moved into Proust’s building at 102 Boulevard Haussmann. Despite the noise, Proust and the Williamses developed a close friendship, as is documented in these letters written between 1908 and 1916. Proust may have soundproofed his apartment with “a marbleized, decorative cork,” as Davis writes in her translator’s note, but that wasn’t enough to keep out sounds of hammering or carpet beating. Yet it’s hard to imagine politer requests to keep it down: “If in the morning there is hammering above me it’s all over for the whole day for resting,” Proust writes in 1909, a request for silence that included a gift of four pheasants. The tone of these letters, as Proust scholar Jean-Yves Tadié notes in the foreword, is that “of ever growing intimacy” between Proust and Marie. He shows her sections of what would become Volume 2 of In Search of Lost Time and expresses sadness over the World War I bombing of Reims cathedral. Marie’s responses, thought to be lost, would have made the book more engaging, but Proust’s letters are as poetic as one might expect. They also show his self-deprecating wit. In 1911, he writes that, when repairs to Marie’s apartment are finished, “the silence will resound in my ears so abnormally that, mourning the vanished electricians and the departed carpet-layer, I will miss my Lullaby.”
A trove of charming correspondence from literature’s most famous “noise phobic.”Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2411-6
Page Count: 128
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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