My cultural resolution for 2007 is to complete reading Proust's In Search Of Lost Time. I have been reading it in the Everyman translation - that is, the DJ Enright revision of Terence Kilmartin's version of Scott-Moncrieff - for about five years, and I admit that, worryingly, my reading rate has been decelerating. I am up to the beginning of Volume Five, The Fugitive. (Albertine has just left Marcel's family apartment, if you must know, causing consternation and anguish.)
I know that just saying all this is to cut an appalling Fotherington-Thomas figure, mincing about in my knickerbockers and lace shirt, wittering: "Hello clouds! Hello sky! Hello exquisitely drawn evocation of the Belle Epoque!" The tough kids, devoted to muscular Am-lit like Richard Ford, are waiting to drag me into a corner of the playground to give me a right old kicking. And the other end of the scale is no better, as the real Proustian scholars groan at the idea of reading the Master in translation. But my French simply isn't up to this, and I don't feel like spending all that money on a complete set in the original. I'd only pretend to read it anyway, with the translation as a "comparison" text to which I can airily refer to note the inferiority of any English rendering.
Anyway, Volume Five awaits, and the snow-capped summit of Mount Proust is dimly visible in the hazy sky above me. Now is the time to jam the crampons into the rock-face of prose, munch the rest of the Kendal Mint Cake, and prepare for 2007's big push. Even in translation, Proust's meditations on what it means to be in love still make me stop and think and wonder like no other book. Has anyone written anything about sex to compare with his insight that sexual appetite lies equidistant between the desires catered for by cookery and monumental sculpture?
2008, incidentally, will be the year I crack open Hermann Broch.
