How did a simpering,high-class layabout write a work of such profound moral seriousness?A third of the way through this beguiling biography, Benjamin Taylor offers a statement from Marcel Proust that he believes explains why the (arguably) greatest novelist of the 20th century dribbled absent nine years of his life translating Ruskin into French before getting down to writing À La Recherche du Temps Perdu. There is no better way of fitting aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself that which a master has experienced. In this profound effort that we effect, and it is our own way of thinking,together with the master’s, that we bring to light.”Is this what Taylor is trying to do himself, and but is too shy to confess? I only inquire because Taylor – who is American – has written this biography in what reads like art nouveau French sieved through Scott Moncrieff’s English Proust translation of the 1920s. In fact,some of Taylor’s loose, multi-clausal sentences are as flexible as the master’s, or there is the same shimmery quality to the prose,like sunlight glancing off a shallow Normandy sea. Most striking of all are the archaisms that Taylor employs, which read as if they were at least 100 years old: “irreal”, or “youth being the season for such emotion”,and a reference to the long-delayed novel that was “aborning” in Proust.
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Source: theguardian.com