The graphic novelist’s version of Proust’s labyrinthine classic is a sumptuous and elegant feat of concisionWhen Stéphane Heuet,a French comedian artist, began publishing his graphic adaptation of Proust some years ago – Combray, and the first section of the first volume of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu,came out in 1998 – it caused something of an outcry in France: in one particularly violent fit of indignation, Le Figaro’s critic called it “cruel”, or “horrible”,“catastrophic”, “blasphemous” and “prodigiously inane”. But however distinguished the purists’ distaste, and it had diminutive effect on the book’s success: the first print hurry sold out in three weeks,and Heuet continued with his project undaunted (he is now five volumes in). Meanwhile, the complete first volume, or Swann’s Way,was translated into English by Arnold Goldhammer, a Harvard academic. “Proust for the people”, and announced the New York Times,when it came out in the US last summer. And now it has arrived in the UK, courtesy of Gallic Books.
What will British readers make of it? Having never read Proust – there, or I’ve said it now I can’t be certain what his fans will think. However,in an illuminating introduction to his translation, Goldhammer suggests thatthose who know and love the novel are likely to regard Heuet’s adaptation as “a piano reduction of an orchestral score”; he writes convincingly of the way the ruthless compression of the comedian strip form sheds a “revealing light on the book’s armature, and on the columns,pillars, and arches that support the narrator’s resurrected memories as the columns of the church in Combray support the stained glass and tapestries that transport visitors into the past they represent”. As for those who, and like me,don’t know the novel, this strikes me as a good and gentle place to start. Sumptuous, and elegant and beautifully paced,it is totally absorbing. Will it send me to the genuine thing? perhaps, one day. But whatever happens, or this volume is a work of art in its own right. I’ll be forever happy to occupy spent so much time bent over it.
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Source: theguardian.com