Backlisted - A La Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust

Episode Date: December 25, 2019

Marcel Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu AKA In Search of Lost Time is the subject of this bumper Christmas special episode, which was recorded live at the London Library on December 11th 2019. Joining John and Andy are novelist Lissa Evans plus a couple of surprise guests along the way. Other books discussed include Cooking In Ten Minutes by Edouard de Pomiane and Ulysses by James Joyce. Please note: this is the last episode of Backlisted until spring 2020.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)2'59 - Cooking In Ten Minutes by by Édouard de Pomiane8'07 - Ulysses by James Joyce11'31 - Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp by Józef Czapski, 13'02 - A La Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights.

There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness ends July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books, or as Proust would say, la malade imaginée de recondition et de toutes les vélans et bientôt les mentions. My name is Lisa Evans and I'm the author of several novels, including Old Baggage, Crooked Heart and Their Finest Hour and a Half.

I have appeared on Backlisted several times as a guest, including the very first episode on JL Cars A Month in the Country, which was four years ago. But for one night only, I shall be acting as the host of this show. Hello. This evening, you find us not around a kitchen table, but in front of a live audience in one of London's most hallowed literary spaces, the London Library, home to writers, readers, scholars and explorers since 1841, and where, incidentally, those novels I just mentioned were written. It was this same library that inspired Thomas Carlyle to observe that the good of a book is not the facts that can be got out of it, but the kind of resonance that it awakens in our own minds. And tonight that resonance is

unmistakably French, as we allow our imaginations to wander back in time and space to a small village in the region of Chartres. It's church bells ringing in the evening hours as a small boy lies in his bedroom, listening to the hum of adult conversation downstairs and waiting for his mother to come and kiss him goodnight. The book we'll be discussing is Marcel Proust's seven-volume novel, A La Recherche du Temps Pertus, known by its English title as either Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time, depending on preference and translation. The first volume was published in 1913 and the last three posthumously, and Proust was rewriting and revising his work right up to his death in 1922. Joining me to shed some light on this great work of literature are two guests who need no introduction, but have insisted on one nonetheless.

John Mitchison is the publisher at Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books that they really want to read. He is also the co-host of the award-winning literary podcast, Backlisted. Thank you, Lita. Thank you. Very nice to be here. Also joining us is Andy Miller. Andy Miller is a reader, author, reader and editor of books. He's also the co-host of the literary podcast, Backlisted. He is shit hot at reading.

It's true. That's very kind of you, Lyssa, to read out what I wrote yesterday. But before we get to Proust, John, what have you been reading this week? I thought, given that we're doing Proust, perhaps we should do something at the other end of the scale. But with a similar Gaelic flavour, I've been reading Edouard de Pommier's Cooking in Ten Minutes. A classic, a book that everybody in this room should have in their kitchen, or rather sadly, I have to have now on my phone. It was published in 1930. It translated to English 18 years later.

Edouard de Pommier was a food scientist. He wasn't really a chef, but he wrote a book that was controversial at the time and predated all the kind of cooking in speedy kind of Nigel Slater, fast food, Jamie Oliver cooking in 10 minutes. And it is a brilliant collection of 300 recipes. But what makes it even better than that, it sparkles with a kind of wit. It's written in such a great, great punchy style. I'm going to read you a tiny little bit. He's got great tips all the way through and how you can make your cooking quicker. So no elaborate desserts, no stews. You know what Pommian actually suggests, don't don't you he says if you're preparing a dinner party you only need prepare one really good dish yeah and then just buy the pudding he does he says

he says that he's great because because your guests will be so dazzled by the main course they won't care about anything else i mean apart from it being an incredibly short book it is also a very very funny book and a very very, very useful book. I use it all the time. He kind of invented a style where he is cooking with you, tasting with you, encouraging you to taste. So I'll give you a little flavour of it. And this is very Pommian. He's given you that basically the how to cook a cheese omelette followed by filleted veal with green peas, followed by salad, followed by fruit, followed by coffee. So you've done everything.

He says, everything is finished. No, it is only just beginning. Put the coffee pot back on the gas for 20 seconds. Watch it like a lynx. Whatever happens, the coffee must not boil. Warm a cup by rinsing it out with boiling water. Fill it with hot coffee. Sink into your comfortable armchair.

Put your feet on a chair. Light a cigarette, Turkish or Virginian. According to your particular weakness. Send a puff of smoke slowly up to the ceiling. Sniff up the perfume of your coffee. Close your eyes. Dream of the second puff, of the second sip. You are fortunate.

At the same time, your gramophone is singing very softly, a tango or a rumba. Of course, if there are two of you, you will need two fillets of veal, two cups of coffee, and two cigarettes. But ten minutes is sufficient for preparing the main dish. In this case, I should advise you to drink your coffee in the dining room, your elbows propped on the table, chat pleasantly. Do not dream, because lunchtime is quickly over. One has just time to eat and a moment or two for laziness. Oh, it's great.

It's just great. Lovely. It has been republished by Serif Books. It is available as a small paperback and indeed as an e-book. The other thing about Pomian is he has a brilliant gallic shrugging brevity to some of his recipes. This is my favourite recipe of his. This is from a book called Cooking with Pomian, which is also a masterpiece. This is a recipe which I myself have prepared for pork chops with rhubarb. And I'm going to give you the recipe in its entirety.

So anyone listening at home, go and get a pen and a piece of paper. You will need three pork chops, a bundle of rhubarb, one ounce of butter and two lumps of sugar. Wipe and trim a bundle of rhubarb. Put it into a saucepan with cold water and boil it. Add the sugar, add the butter. Fry three good-sized fat pork chops, serve the chops surrounded with the rhubarb. This is a very good dish. Now, I prepared that, and I must tell you, while it was quite nice nice it was a bit more like eating pork chops and rhubarb at the

same time than i was comfortable with he's got a brilliant tip for a poached egg which is that you put the egg in an egg cup okay and then you tip it very slowly into the water and it holds its shape if the water's boiling so instead of going mental and into... Very clever, you know. It's a French, they've thought these things through. They did a little adaptation on TV actually with Jim Broadbent playing him. Oh, how brilliant did they? Yeah.

He's amazing. He's a mentor to Raymond Blanc and all kinds of people. I mean, Elizabeth David was a great friend of his. But he's prized by, I think, anybody who likes the kind of the short punchy recipe. Andy what have you been reading? Talking short and punchy I think I know. I've been reading a novel by James Joyce called Ulysses. Oh for the third time. So I haven't read Ulysses for about 30 years and I wanted to get ahead of myself before next year's Christmas episode of Batlisted. Which will be on.

Ulysses, so you've all got a year. Also because I was reading, when we started Batlisted four years ago, I was reading Finnegan's Wake. So it seemed nice to bring this back round to Ulysses. And also this year I've read or re-read Dubliner's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, some of the poetry. And I just thought, you know what, although we've got a Proust episode coming up, and although people would rather I were reading Lee Child, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to read James Joyce's novel Ulysses, because why not? So I read it and the two things I thought were, well, this is amazing.

And also this is still quite difficult. I found it quite challenging when I was 20. And I found it quite challenging 30 years later, there's nothing wrong with being challenging. But also, I thought Ulysses, James Joyce does have a link to Marcel Proust, apart from being two of the great novels of the 20th century, which is that, of course, on May the 18th, 1922, as recorded inard davenport hines's book a night at the majestic proust and joyce had dinner together in the company of stravinsky and diagolef and ford maddox ford and picasso so as a result of that this feels like a very low rent gathering the dinner was not judged a tremendous success.

Topomium wasn't cooking, right? It took too long. There was a conversation between Proust and Joyce, and we have various accounts of what transpired. One of the versions of it is that they had a chat in which all they did was compare their ailments. But another one is that they had a short chat in which all they did was compare their ailments. But another one is that they had a short chat in which they admitted to one another that neither had read the other's books.

Now, the thing is, the source of that version of the chat was picked up two years after the dinner. It was picked up in 1924 by the poet William Carlos Williams, with whom you may be familiar. What's interesting is that William Carlos Williams went on to write a poem about what he imagined Proust and Joyce said to one another, and how he imagined the poem might go. And I've got the original manuscript here. I've got the original manuscript here. So this is William Carlos Williams' poem about the meeting between James Joyce and Marcel Proust, and this is a world premiere. This is just to say...

I've yet to read the book that is a sensation and which you were probably scribbling for ages. Forgive me. Do you have a job or a family? And it's definitely him because he signed it William Carlos Williams 1924. So there we go. Lisa, what have you been reading this week? Well, a couple of months ago I was phoned up by somebody who said,

would you like to present a programme on Proust, knowing, laughing at the fact that I had never, ever read a single word of Proust. So in the course of the last two months during which I've read the first two volumes and a great deal of other stuff my favourite of the great deal of other stuff is a book called Lost Time Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp by Josef Chapsky and honestly if if you told me I was going to say that sentence two months ago I wouldn't have believed you but it it's an absolute gem, and I've read it twice, and maybe we'll talk about it later.

I'm sure we will talk about it later. If the budget could stretch to it, we'd all be sending you away with a copy of that book in your Christmas stockings, whether you'd read Proust or not. It is fantastic. Oh, sorry. My name says John here. And before we properly begin,

we should wish an especially Merry Christmas to backlisted listeners Claire Parsons and Mark Seymour. Come on. Those of you who trudge after us on Twitter will know that Mark made Claire an advent calendar this year comprising books which we featured on the podcast. One a day, which was amazing to see. Including two of my choices, A Month in the Country

and The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton. Merry Christmas, Claire and Mark. Yeah, because nothing says Christmas quite like a Patrick Hamilton novel. Hey, it can't all be book chat. Smoke Chesterfields. So where were you when you first read A La Recherche, which I can't even say, John? When I first read it or when I first was aware of it. Or when you first became aware of it.

Yeah, I think when I first read it, it was about six weeks. No, not true. I finished it the day before yesterday. Or maybe that was just yesterday. I can't remember. It's all gone into a kind of a Proustian sort of haze. I was aware of it the first time when I was searching around. I was in New Zealand and I was at school and I was looking for a subject to do my special essay on for my, what was then, they call it school certificate out there.

And my mother said, well, the one they all say you should read is Proust. My mother's taste was broad. So I went and checked out Proust. And I just went to the school library and found it and thought, no, that isn't going to happen. But I did keep the French theme and I did end up doing Balzac's short stories. But since that moment, I've often wondered whether my mother was right, of which more later. Well, I also have a mother-based first awareness of Proust, because my mum in the 1970s, she was a voracious reader, but she decided to read the whole of Alaricese. And she got all the books, the Chateau editions out of Litchfield Library,

and she grimly read them. And I remember her saying, I hate them, I hate all these awful people. I hate them, I hate them. But she read every word. I first became aware of A La Recherche de Tom Perdue and Marcel Proust. I know exactly when it was. It was Christmas 1981. And I was 13.

And I was given a book for Christmas called From Fringe to Flying Circus by Roger Wilmot, which is a terrific book which I read so many times I could probably recite chunks of it still by heart. And it's a book about beyond the fringe and all the comedy like Monty Python that followed it. And there was a description in the book of a Monty Python sketch that I'd never seen or heard called Summarise Proust. And I didn't know what proust was

or why it was funny but like so many python things the combination of the words is sort of magical like there's loads of jokes in python about dennis compton i still don't know who dennis compton is it's still funny right so what i remember about the book is it said that the character played by graham chapman that his summary of Proust was actually quite good. And looking at it again, it is quite good. I've written it down. You may hear it later. But why don't we hear the bit from the summarised Proust sketch that since we announced this episode,

people have walked up to me in the street and sung at me. And now, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like you to welcome the last of our All England finalists this evening. From Bingley, the Bolton Choral Society and their leader, Superintendent McGough. All right, Bingley, remember, you've got 15 seconds to summarize Proust in their entirety, starting from now.

Proust in his first book, wrote about, wrote about... Proust in his first book, wrote about... He wrote about Kraus in his first book, wrote about, wrote about... He wrote about, he wrote about, he wrote about... He wrote about, he wrote about, he wrote about... Kraus in his first book, in his first book, wrote about... LAUGHTER Which is quite a laugh, but in fact the least successful of the evening. They didn't even get as far as the first volume.

So, in that spirit, in lieu of reading the blurb, as we usually do on Backlisted, I would like you both to attempt to summarise Proust. Andy, you go first. Okay, so I'm going to summarise Proust now by referring to an author who we featured on Backlisted in the past. He wrote a book called How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. Batlisted in the past. He wrote a book called How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. And his name is Pierre Bayard. And in 1996, he published this book, which is called Le Haut Sujet, Proust et la Digression. Off topic, Proust and digression. This has never been translated into English. But I have translated a couple of paragraphs for this purpose tonight. And the idea of the book is it's an attempt to imagine what

à la recherche de Temps perdu would be like if you took all the digressions out. One of the things he talks about is there are two ways of doing it. You either throw a load of relevant stuff away or you try and summarise it. A bit like the synopsis at the back of most editions of English versions will have kind of 100 pages talking you through the narrative. Anyway, so if you summarise it, where do you get to? This is what he wrote. It was probably literary theorist Gérard Jeunet who pushed a reductionist approach as far as possible when he suggested a summary of the entire A la Recherche de Tompe-Perdue

could consist of a single phrase, Marcel becomes a writer. Vigilant readers were quick to object, including Professor Evelyn Berge-Witts, who requested that Jeannette be more exact. Accordingly, he addressed himself once more to the question of precise Proustian pracy in his book Palimpsests, conceding that Professor Bergewitz had been, quote, legitimately shocked by the hyper-reductive character of my summary. She proposes this correction. Marcel eventually becomes a writer. Before adding magnanimously,

this time it seems to me everything is there. Good try, Andy, in very nice posture. John? OK, I have two. I have one in the same vein from the very excellent Alain de Botton book, which is Young Man Unsure Whether or Not to Propose Marriage, which is quite short. But I thought, no, let's do it. Let's make it a bit more performative. I thought there's a great description that I've based this on. I want to do it in my Werner Herzog accent because I feel it works better. The book is about habit.

Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning conductor of his existence. Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit. And then he goes on.

The periods of transition that separate consecutive adaptations represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual. Dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious, fertile. When, for a moment, the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being. is replaced by the suffering of being. Yeah, not bad, not bad. But you know what? I really wish we had a Proust expert in the house.

Good Lord! Good Lord. But we do. Who is it, John? Good Lord, it's Professor Sarah Churchwell. Don't fall off the stage, Sarah. I think that all the actual Proust experts in the world will be falling off of their chairs, however, at that introduction. I'm a Proust aficionado at best.

Aficionado, we like it. Well, would you like to summarize Proust for us anyway? An Italian word for a French thing. Exactly, a Hemingway word for Proust. Yes, I would like nothing better than to summarize Proust in less than a minute. It was a challenge put to me that I tried to accept. I don't know what I can do. I think I got there. Okay, so I put this to the room.

I have just put this together. But I would say to you, it is a rake's progress, but toward consummation, not dissolution. It is Henry James in French, remembering Sodom and Gomorrah while he writes a pilgrim's progress about rising above the fallen world of decadent society into the triumph of art. Woo-hoo!

Woo-hoo! That was brilliant, but I'm afraid the public have had enough of experts. Back to me. Now, because it's Christmas and because Alaray Shesh is a massive and somewhat convoluted work of literature, we have devised a special method of approaching it. Well, we, Andy has devised a special method of approaching it and he's going to explain.

Thanks, Lissa. Right. Pay attention, everyone. So, it's Christmas. You're listening to this. Maybe you're listening to this on Christmas Day. You're either getting the lunch ready. Maybe you've had lunch. Maybe you live alone. And you're listening to your friends, John and Andy and Lisa,

who care about what happens to you. So what I've done is, because obviously Proust is such a massive book, and because it's Christmas, and because we want to try and cover off lots of bits without getting too bogged down, I've devised a way of breaking up the book, which I'm calling the 12 Days of Proustmas. And that starts with the first day of Christmas. Proustmas. Proustmas, sorry, yeah. On the first day of Christmas, Monsieur Proust gave to me

a madeleine dipped in a cup of tea. Yeah, that wasn't worth anything, was it? LAUGHTER Oh! Oh, that was... Only another 11 to go, everyone. So what we're going to do is we're going to go through the 12 days of Prusmas and at the end we're all going to sing the 12 days of Prusmas. Oh, God, no, people shout. But we definitely are.

Audience interaction is encouraged. If it doesn't work, it doesn't matter. We'll cut it out and there'll be a very short podcast. So we start with, on the 12th day of Christmas, Monsieur Proust gave to me 12 dreamers dreaming. That's the end of the podcast. Well, the book actually opens with a scene about sleep and about dreaming. So Andy is going to read that out.

Yeah, it's a book about dreaming and sleep and consciousness and what consciousness is. And also it was written in bed. Proust, as we'll come on to discuss, Proust's work routine revolved around bed. as we'll come on to discuss, Proust's work routine revolved around bed. And what you find in A La Recherche is that those themes are stated plainly at the very beginning of the book, the famous beginning of the book, which I'm going to attempt to read. If I don't get this right, everybody, because we're recording a podcast,

I'm going to stop and have another go at it because I want to I want it to work you're not going to read the whole book though are you no you're not going to read in French though just checking so this is how this book begins for a long time I would go to bed early. Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself, I'm falling asleep. And half an hour later, the thought that it was time to look for sleep would awaken me. I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands and to blow out the light. I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading. But these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn. It seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book.

A church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francois I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I awoke. It did not offend my reason, but lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a previous existence must be after reincarnation. The subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to apply myself to it or not. And at the same time, my sight would return, and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for my eyes, but even more,

perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, something dark indeed. I would ask myself what time it could be. I could hear the whistling of trains, which now nearer and now further off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, showed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller is hurrying towards the nearby station. And the path he is taking will be engraved in his memory by the excitement induced by strange surroundings, by unaccustomed activities, by the conversation he has had and the farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp that still echo in his ears amid the silence of the night and by the happy prospect of being home again. You!

I have to say that as a Proust virgin, and I presume there are other Proust virgins in the audience, anybody never read a word of Proust? And I haven't, thank you. I found the first part of the first volume is called Compré, and it's the story of his youth or his childhood. And for me, it was an easy way in. It was a glide.

It's like the overture. It's a book that has a lot about music in it, and it's about the overture in which all the themes come up and are briefly glimpsed, and they will form the themes of the whole overarching volume. And I found it a really beautiful read, and not hard. Can I say? It wasn't hard.

No, it isn't hard. One of the early people who read the the manuscript did say this though a man has insomnia he turns over in bed he recaptures his impressions and hallucinations of half sleep some of which have to do with the difficulty of getting to sleep when he was a boy in his room in the country house of his parents in combray 17 pages that was where one sentence at the end of page four and five goes on for 44 lines. That's it.

That was one of the reader's reports. That was one of the reader's reports. It was Jean Medelaine from Fasquel. So it's the first thing you notice with Proust, isn't it? That the sentences are long and the pace is incredibly... It's not exactly that it's slow. It's just it involved the detail. The accumulation of

detail is incredible phrasing is so good that although i went into it knowing there were going to be huge long paragraphs in fact they're not hard to follow the sense through because it's so internally sprung it's so well put together that in fact it just takes you through well the thing about a la recherche is it's seven marathons rather than a sprint you know the reason why the sentences have that incredibly long but beautiful circumlocutory way of expressing themselves is he know that he's stretching out for the duration of 3 000 pages he's also trying to be truthful he's also trying to get to the bottom of what he what he thinks and feels and so that takes time and it is about it is It's about time. Well, we'll never get through this if we

don't. I can see our producer, Nicky Birch, pointing at a giant alarm clock. Speaking about time, yeah. So on the 11th day of Prusmus, Monsieur Prus gave to me 11 Pipers Piping, because this is a book about music. It uses musical themes and it's also a book about art and books. One of the things that occurs in Proust is a little phrase of music that Swan hears and comes to define his relationship with Odette. And there are several candidates for the piece of music on which this was based. It's a composer, a bourgeois composer called Vantai.

He's not... In the book. Yeah, in the book. He's not nothing special. It might be César Franck, but here is a piece. It proves to himself, said it was Saint-Saëns, though he may have been lying, which he said inspired Vantois' sonata. In the book, Swan goes to a salon and they realise

that this piece of music means a lot to him and they sort of play a little theme tune whenever he comes into the room. It's like the theme from Frozen, every time he comes into the room. He makes Odette play it over and over again while he creeps around her, doesn't he? And then it kind of gets passed on to the narrator of the book as well as something significant because of his love for Swan, admiration for Swan. But the thing I love about that whole Vontai thing is that what Proust does

is also so clever. One of the narrator's first inklings of adult behaviour that is complex and difficult and freighted with sexual significances, he overhears Vontoy's daughter and her lover, her female lover, having a conversation. And it sort of haunts him in a way like a musical theme through the book. And without giving any spoilers, but i'm going to give it anyway the way that that proust works that in towards the end of the book yeah which is that it discovers that von toy had only ever had the sonata that swan loved that was the only piece of music that had ever been transcribed but the

lesbian lover of the daughter, it turns out, because she'd lived in the house with him, was able to transcribe all the rest of the music that he'd left in a state that nobody else could have deciphered. And the narrator goes to a concert and is blown away by it. So it's a kind of perfect example of the musical structure of the book. So it's a book about music but it also is structured like a symphony you know we heard the overture there in concombre in the in the

opening sections of the book here's a clip from a film from the early 90s the thought that this would be on tv now is mind-boggling but anyway it's called 102 bouvard Houseman, which was Proust's address for much of his life. And it was written by Alan Bennett. And it is a film version of Proust's made Celeste Albaray's book, which we will talk about in a little while. But here is Alan Bennett writing as Proust with Alan Bates talking about music. Is your novel about music, monsieur? Music occurs in it. Music recurs in it.

A particular piece of music. The César Frank? Not exactly. No, it will do. But then novels are like that. People think this tune must be that tune. That this character is modelled on so-and-so, this other is a portrayal of someone else.

It isn't like that. Art does not correspond to life. It is life. OK, and the next one is Ten Lords a-Leaping. Lissa. Yes, I was going to say that if you're going to run aground in the early volumes of Proust, the rocks on which you're going to run aground are the Faubourg Saint-Germain,

basically the Toffs. There are a lot of them. And I got to the stage fairly early on where when another duke de forcheville hove interview i i flicked ahead just just to hope he was going to do another flashback to his childhood the thing about the narrator of a la recherche ton perdu and let's be honest proust is that he is an appalling Ari Veist. Isn't he? He's a terrible social climber. Yeah, I mean, he's trying to say, look at me, I'm really observing these,

look how well I'm observing them. But he's also thinking, God, this is a brilliant party, look at me. That's the thing, though. He's very harsh on himself as well. He sends himself up, he kind of loathes himself for his sort of toadyism and his Arivistism. There's a really lovely thing that Clive Jones wrote in a book called Gate of Lilacs, one of his late books of poetry, a verse commentary on Proust. And Clive read it slowly in French, as is his want. But he says, swan snobbery was Proust's. And yet Swan's love for Odette, which included her bad taste, assures us of Proust's seriousness, of how within the limits

of his birth and class and poor health and of being just one person, he made the whole of his life his stamping ground. Even our jealousies and weaknesses, a synthesis he introduced by linking the paper flower and the little cake, all his precision and his subtlety flaring to life from a mixed metaphor. That's very good. So on the ninth day of Prismas, Mr. Proust gave to me nine ladies dancing. So much of the action of à la recherche takes place at balls or salons or dinner parties. And there is one dinner party in particular, which seems to last for about 10 years in the middle of the book.

in the middle of the book. But the point is that Proust has, those are the settings for Proust's incredible eye for the minutiae of human behaviour. I mean, for me, the most wonderful thing about reading him was feeling the precision with which he viewed the world. All of his rewriting was obviously paring away, trying to get the most perfect imagery so that the reader would see exactly what he was seeing.

It's a very controlling way of writing, in a way. He doesn't want to give it an impressionistic view. He wants you to see what he's seeing. And that gimlet eye is taken to everywhere. And it also gives him an excuse to use his brilliant stunt similes, right? Here's a lovely bit from the first book where he's just describing the moon. It's that thing of the moon up in the sky during the day. Sometimes in the afternoon sky, the moon would creep up, white as a cloud,

furtive, lustreless, suggesting an actress who does not have to come on for a while and watches the rest of the company for a moment from the auditorium in her ordinary clothes, keeping in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself. Just love it. I mean, literally every page is groaning with amazing one-liners another quick one madame swan the arrival of madame swan prepared for me by all those majestic apparitions must i felt be something truly immense i strained my ears to catch the slightest sound but one never finds a cathedral a wave in a storm a dancer's leap in the air, quite as high as one has been expecting. The eighth day of Prusmas, eight maids are milking it.

That's good Andy. Yeah very good, very good. The role of servants, the role of servants in Prus fiction which particularlyancoise who is a recurring character in the book she's one of the great characters and may have been partially based on an essential person in proust's lives celeste albaret who became his maid and housekeeper and amanuensis and listener and constant presence in about i think it was 1917 and she was there no it was earlier than that wasn't it yeah and she was there right till the end of his life and that's his deathbed and people begged celeste begged celeste to tell her story and it wasn't until she was 80 yeah she published a book called monsieur proust and there's a review on the back here by our much

loved former backlisted subject angus Wilson, in which he says, this book can be read, I think, only with the most continually warring emotions, admiration for Proust's courage to endure the slow suicidal routine on which he believed his great novel depended, and admiration for Celeste's courage in adapting herself to such a monstrous service. There is a tiny bit of Mrs Doyle in Celeste, I have to say. There's a scene in Father Ted where Ted gets up in the middle of the night

and he switches on the living room light and there's Mrs Doyle with her tray just waiting there. And there is a little bit of Celeste. And Celeste adored him. She adored him. Anyway, you're going to read a bit, aren't you? Yeah, so this is from um monsieur proust and litter and i both made one another weep laughing uh earlier with this description of

the very specific requirements that proust had if he was to work you must imagine this is celeste herself nicolas explained everything to me very carefully. The arrangement was that when I arrived, Monsieur Proust would have already had the café au lait and croissant he sent for when he woke up, so I didn't have to worry. The only thing was that Monsieur Marcel took his coffee in two stages. After the first cup, with which he ate a croissant, he had a second, and for this, a second croissant was kept ready. If he hadn't sent for the second croissant before Nicolas left, I might have to take it to him on a special saucer that matched the coffee cup that would be left ready.

There were days when the extra croissant was not required. But in case it was, or in case Monsieur Marcel needed me for any other reason, Nicolas had shown me the long passageway leading from the kitchen and the panel on the wall with a black disc for each room. I might hear the bell ring twice and one of the discs would turn white. Always the same one, the one for the bedroom. If the cro croissant was still in the kitchen I'd know what I'd had to do what was so amazing was that she he could not have written without so well

luckily we have the shade of Celeste Albrey here to tell us how she felt about it Albaray here to tell us how she felt about it. And I will die soon and you will witness the evolution of my work. Sistenda took 30 years to be known and then with a very naive air. But at the same time, smiling and full of the same imagination. But Marcel Poucy Maitre has only 50 years. Well, I'm sure you all understood that. She was saying, I hope in the future some English people will record a thing called a podcast about Le Maître himself. Seventh day of Prismas, seven swans are stewing. This is a book about jealousy. I think it is the greatest book ever written on the subject of jealousy.

It's so claustrophobic to read because first of all he talks about swan's jealousy which makes you prickle with discomfort and then it goes on to repeat the same thing with marcel's jealousy which makes you bang your head on the table but at the same time the genius of it the cycle of it the in-depth mortification of the self to dredge it that stuff up the talent for self yeah and happiness it's just extraordinary that suffering in itself is a good thing as well that the theme that you need you need suffering through the through the book the book has thousands and thousands of words about bad love about jealousy about the the agonies of unrequited love. Does it have anything about good love? Oh, yeah.

I mean, it's the most wonderful euphoric book about love, not just of people but of moments of euphoria. You know, what is Priest in love with? He's in love with, he's always looking for that moment, the flower that he might find or the musical phrase or the book that transfigures him it's true edmund white says something wonderful he says that proof second guesses all your thoughts it's that feeling you go through that those tiny little intimate things that you have you catch a glimpse of a face of a woman on a train and you know he then

reconstructs the life of how he might live in the country and how their life might be and how he might she might greet him for supper and what they might eat that's that sense of uh he does that better than any other writer I think that the kind of the internalised sense of it's fantasy, but it's also it's exhilaration as well. Yeah. The novelist Andrew Sean Greer, who wrote a great favourite of ours, Less, which won the Pulitzer Prize. He gave an interview that I read where he said, when I read Proust, I read his writing about love. And I thought, oh, my God, someone's written this down. This is true, but you don't see it in books but you find it in Proust yeah and there's also a wonderful scene in Les I'd

just like to read this one paragraph I asked him when I met him this happened to Andrew he's put it in the character of Les but it happened to him. It was one of the grandest and most dismaying experiences in Les's life, Marcel Proust that is, and the 3,000 pages of In Search of Lost Time took him five committed summers to finish. And on that fifth summer, when he was lying abed in a friend's Cape Cod house one afternoon, about two-thirds of the way through the last volume, suddenly, without any warning at all, he read the words, The End. In his right hand, he held perhaps 200 pages more. But they were not Proust.

They were the cruel trick of some editor's notes and afterword. He felt cheated, swindled, denied a pleasure for which he had spent five years preparing. He went back 20 pages and tried to build up the feeling again. But it was too late. The possible joy had departed forever. That was very good. Day six.

Who can remember what happens on the sixth day of Christmas? Six geese are laying, or in this case, six guys are laying. Let's discuss the issue of homosexuality in I read a lot of very good books about Proust written not very good book about Proust which I'm not really going to mention but it's a nice summation of of this aspect of his life in that year his father faced him with the necessity of a career and Proust faced his father with the necessity of a life of letters, all resulting in a job at the Mazarin Library. He remained thus largely free to continue the social round, holidays in Normandy, occasional travels just beyond France, his own minor incursions into the literary world, and now

a passionate entrance into the latest province of exclusion, the Freemasonry of Sodom. There's something like a handshake. Anyway, yes. One of the greatest characters in French literature and world literature is the Baron de Charlus. Woo! One of the greatest characters in French literature and world literature is the Baron de Charlus. Baron de Charlus, who is based on at least two real people in Proust's life, Robert de Montesquieu.

The claim to fame of Robert de Montesquieu, amongst other things, is he's also the model for Des Essentes in Aribourg by Huysmans. So he gets to be two sacre monsters for the price of one charlouis is based at least in part on oscar wilde yes that's right and i forgot to look it up so i can't tell you any more about that i can here's one i prepared earlier well no it's just to say that that um when proust was exiled to paris he would sort of visit or have pity taken on him by members of the upper classes or the Faubourg Saint-Germain. And he visited Proust's mother and father. And they were very underwhelmed. And the story goes that he arrived, took one look at their dreadful furniture and left. Either that chaise longue goes or I do. But it's true to say that Proust's writing about gay life in that era

and also the people who were championing Proust early on tended to be from that quarter, which was still, of course, incredibly brave in that era. It was, except homosexuality wasn't illegal in France from 1790 onwards. And yet was still scandalous. Not illegal, but still scandalous. Marcel, or I in the book, is straight. You know, that's how he's presented.

You can have arguments about whether Albertine and... Yeah, that's right. Are they actually... I mean, he's presented. You can have arguments about whether Albertine... Are they actually... Proust had a chauffeur called Albert with whom he was in love. No, Alfred. Alfred, that's true. Like Batman. Anyway, moving on. It's Alfred, I think.

It's Alfred who goes to get the final case of beer from the Ritz when Proust is dying. His last words. So here's a clip of one of the loves of Proust's life, the singer and composer Reynaldo Hahn, accompanying himself on the piano. Goutha le pleuze, cerze, je les adore Les pales, les saluts, l'entoureux, les vissuets, dans le satas, dans l'organisme, dans l'ordre... He must have been a looker, don't you? The Ed Sheeran of his day.

Nearly there, everyone. Day five, the fifth day of Prusmas, five old things. Alara Shersh is a book about memory. And one of the early works about Proust was written by Samuel Beckett when he was 25 or 26 years old. Here is the London Library's copy of Proust by Samuel Beckett. It took 10 years to sell out the first edition and they remained... 400.

400, yeah. Actually, it was from that book that my Herzog came, just in case you wondered if I'd written that myself. But more about Beckett than it is about Proust. Beckett's list of the triggers of involuntary memory in Proust. I'm just going to read a few of these. Some you will be familiar with because they're very famous and some are less familiar.

Yeah, just to say that Proust distinguished between two types of memory, didn't he? Voluntary memory, where we think about our past, and involuntary memory, where we are plunged into our past by a trigger of some kind. So these include the hedge of Hawthorne near Baalbek, the noise of a spoon against a plate, a musty smell in a public lavatory in the Champs-Élysées, and most famously, the madeleine steeped in an infusion of tea.

And I wanted to ask you, Lyssa. Yes. What is your equivalent of the madeleine in the tea? Is there a food or a smell that, if you were to experience it again, would cast you back to childhood? Tizer, I think, probably, which was forbidden in our house and therefore, for me, is the sweetest drink of all. I had it at my mate Beth's house and it was wicked.

Was it? Yeah. I tell you what, the young people who listen to that show will respond to that. I was thinking more of Christmas, but snowballs. My grandfather used to but snowballs my grandfather used to make snowballs which were that once a year he would have had one of those cabinets where there was only a bottle of harvey's bristol cream limes cordial and a this weird bottle of avocado and it came out and he made us snowballs i don't think there was much alcohol in

them but we thought that was amazing of Of course, the other smell of Christmas is the smell of Sprout, which is, of course, a Christmas anagram of Proust. So, just working the material there, Andy. Very, very good. Did you notice, everybody,

the artistry with which my co-host used the phrase of course. Of course it is, John. Moving on. Day four. Fourth day of Proustmas. Four appalling birds.

Proust heroines. The Proust heroines, Odette, Gilbert, Albertine and André. Now, there's a great book. Here it is. So good. Anne Carson called The Albertine Workout. I'm just going to read the beginning of this book because Proust is not terribly kind to his young heroines in A La Recherche. And this is broken up into a series of points, trying to see things from Albertine's perspective. I'll just read you the first few.

One. Albertine, the name, is not a common name for a girl in France, although Albert is widespread for a boy. Although Albert is widespread for a boy. Two. Albertine's name occurs 2,363 times in Proust's novel, more than any other character. Three. Albertine herself is present or mentioned on 807 pages of Proust's novel. Four, on a good 19% of these pages, she is asleep. I'm skipping ahead. Seven, volume five is called La Prisonniere in French and The Captive in English. It was declared by Roger Shattuck, a world expert on Proust,

in his award-winning 1974 study to be the one volume of the novel that a time-pressed reader may safely and entirely skip. You have been taught. Now, the point of that, it's my mind. I don't know what you think, Lisa. What do you think of the point of that book is? Oh, there are lots of good books about Proust. Well, there are lots of good books about Proust, but this one, it seems to me, is about saying

that the structure of criticism of Proust is male and that Roger Shattuck is not really suggesting that you skip a volume of Proust. He's saying, well, Albertine isn't very important, so you can skip that one. But as Anne Carson points out, she's one of the most important characters in the book. The thing about the Albertine workout

is it's just one of many good books about Proust. And we've mentioned a few. We've mentioned a few already. But, Lissa, you've done loads of reading around the topic. What's your favourite? My favourite book is Lost Time, Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp. Joseph Szapski was a Polish officer imprisoned in 1940. Something like 20,000 Polish officers were shot.

About 400 of them weren't, and they were in a prison camp together. And they kept sane by giving each other lectures. And he prepared five lectures about Proust with no materials, no books, entirely based on his memory. I mean, I don't have to, you know, explain any further how perfect that is for a series of lectures on Proust. And they're absolutely brilliant. They're a series of little gems, and they're fascinating. And they also sum up the book beautifully. I can't describe anything better. And now I'm going to do the worst, back to the worst book that I found, which has got a top Proust gag in it. Okay. So this is a

summary at the end of the first chapter. So there we have up to 3 million words, which may again be multiplied by an immense volume of corrections and rewriting, leaving a grand total of heaven knows what, but certainly enough to make most writers pale. Though none, in fact, so pale as he, because as we know, he was ill most of his life. Incisive. We like that. I'd like to mention a couple of books.

First of all, there is this graphic novel version of Proust, which is still being written in French. It's being translated into English now. It's published by Gallic Books. I enjoyed the first volume very much. Marcel Proust in Search of Lost Time in the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Stéphane Huet. And let me tell you, if you are preparing to sit on a stage

and talk about Proust for an hour and a half, there is no greater companion that you can have just to refresh your memory. And also, Lister and I both absolutely fell in love with this book, which we both read for a sort of lark and came away from thinking that is one of the most extraordinary bits of work I have seen for a long time. And that's the Proust screenplay by Harold Pinto. It's so good. It's so good. Has anyone here read it? What do you think?

Two of you, what did you think? Yeah. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. Thumbs up. Thumbs up. Yeah. You almost, if it had been made, you almost wouldn't have to read Proust.

Oh, no, I shouldn't say that, really. It was a screenplay that was written to be filmed by his favourite director, Joseph Losey, to follow up The Go-Between. It was written in the early 1970s. Pinter worked on it for a year. He described it as the best year of his working life. And then no one would come up with the money. It is fantastic

it was staged at the National Theatre in about the year 2000 so it has had a kind of after life and imagine condensing 3000 pages into 2 hours and doing so successfully

I really really recommend this to you whether you've read Proust or not. In fact, almost I recommend to you who haven't read Proust, not as a substitute, but to see how he is able to sell the story of à la recherche and the themes and not make you think, oh, this is literary. It's so brilliantly done. He's clever. We've already mentioned Alain de Botton how Proust can change your life very funny witty but also full of stuff really interesting biographical

stuff about Proust I also would recommend Clive James's Gate of Lilets verse commentary on Proust which is again full of full of insights into the novel that you wouldn't get except by somebody who really read it incredibly carefully and it's so it's it's also funny which is a rare thing three french hens those being the narrator's mother and grandmother and aunt we talked about the four appalling birds. On the other hand, it's the most matriarchal, pro-matriarchal text outside of the early episodes of Coronation Street. Yes, the women he falls in love with are not on the whole.

They don't warm the heart. Whereas he's much keener on doing interesting and characterful descriptions of older women. And he's fantastic on them. Particularly his Aunt Leonie who lay in bed and who used to watch everybody going past and could even work out if it was a dog that she hadn't seen before and then would have to closely question Francois as to whose dog it was. It's very good.

There's a lovely thing that Edmund White says, which is that people should read Proust because he is the most companionable of all the great authors. Although he's a mama's boy and a neurasthenic and into lots of kink, he will take your breath away. He may be profoundly pessimistic about love and friendship, but and he understands human ways better than anyone else. And I think the portrait, I think they particularly love the grandmother. In the second volume, he spends a lot of time on the coast in Normandy, in Baalbek, with his grandmother. He kind of learns from her in a way that you can actually watch the narrator being made into a better person by interacting. And he loves her, but he also listens. He listens to what she says.

So the second day of Prusmas, it would normally be two turtle dubs, but on this occasion, it's two title duds. Very good. Neither Remembrance of Things Past nor In Search of Lost Time quite captures the sense of the French title. So a discussion of translation and also the power of time regained. Now, if only we had an expert here, a translator of French fiction,

of authors such as Michelle Welbeck. Oh, my God, we do. Please welcome to the stage, Sean Whiteside. Chris didn't even like the French title. No. No, apparently he didn't like it at all. Was he keen on the English one, though? Oh, I don't think so.

No. See, I think when Moncrief translated it as Remembrance of Things Past, he was putting the impremature of Shakespeare on there, because it's from a Shakespearean sonnet. So he's saying, if we call it something a bit Shakespearean, it's going to sound literary. People aren't going to be frightened of it. The book's a bit weird, but we can bring him into the canon anyway. Same with Time Regained, a bit of Milton. But Moncrief, and then revised by Kilmartin, then revised again by Enright, that's the one that we've all grown up with in various ways. And it does tend in that way, in the way that translators in those days used to do, towards the literary, towards the florid. It's ripe, it's fruity, the jokes are good.

But along comes the new Penguin translation, and I think, you say it doesn't quite catch the title? Certainly the title of the second book, I didn't think it worked at all. Oh, no. Oh, right. In the Shadow. In the Shadow of Young Girls. In Flower. In Flower. OK, where do we start? I'd have to say, I think In is very good. In is great.

Next word, next word. Can we go to the next word? The, in the. Good, we're still going strong, it's still working. Okay, shadow. Do you sit in the shadow of a tree? You're doing maybe a cold, sinister, gothic, Victorian, scary tree. Maybe.

But these are sun-dappled Normandy trees. The shadow of a young girl is a different thing, surely, as well. Hey, you've all got six hours, right? Yeah. Sean, what would your type be?

Yes. For which, for a volume two? No, for the whole thing. The whole thing, In Search of Lost Time. Nothing else we can do with it. It's fine. Okay.

The problem of what to call this book is one that comes up again and again on the BBC Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs. A La Recherche is one of the books most frequently chosen as a desert island book. And we have here a montage of clips of guests who have chosen it with their reasons for choosing it and what they think it's called. And then you can take a book in addition to the Bible and Shakespeare.

Yes, well, I've been thinking a lot about that. I'm divided between A Christmas Garland by Max Bierbaum and Marcel Proust. I think I'd take the Proust on the whole, because it's a longer read. I'm afraid the Christmas Garland one could read in about half an hour. So my choice is Marcel Proust, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. I've got a beautiful edition, which my mother gave me when I was 15, and I actually never read it completely. It would have to be the greatest novel I've ever read, which is Proust's great work, because there's so much in it. It's so full of life. It's funny, it's tragic, it's

ironic, it's inexhaustible. À la recherche du temps perdu. That's the one. Well, I've just, in fact, next week, I'm starting a very unusual BBC programme about Proust. And because I'm going to be, in fact, playing Proust in this, I think I would take À la recherche de ton perdu in English I would choose Proust because I've never finished it because you can have a lot of time on that island

and I would choose it if it's possible in a dual translation French and English because you might as well learn French while you're there I would like like In Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. I read the first volume as a teenager and I loved it. And I thought, well, one day I'll read the rest of them. And of course, that's never happened. So I'd like to do it. And so much of it is about someone recollecting his life in tranquility. And it feels apropos to sort of use my solitude to sort of do that. So I'm going to go for Proust, A La Recherche de Tom Perdue, because it's like

a gazillion pages long. Ambitious. I'm never going to read it unless I'm trapped on a desert island and then I can be one of the few people who's got through it and I can come back feeling quite smug. I assume the whole lot in one volume, Remembrance of Things Past. Oh that's all right, yes.

Because it's inexhaustible reading. One can find all of life, the whole of life cycle in it and pick it up at any point and be totally fascinated. Will you have it in French or translation? No alas, in English. But the wonderful Scott Moncrief translation. You shall have it. And thank you for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you. Goodbye, everyone.

Goodbye. So, eyes down, if you got these answers, that was, in order of appearance sir Steven Spender Nicole Fari sir Philip Pullman Ralph Fiennes Zadie Smith Louis Theroux David Tennant and Claire Bloom so that leads us back appropriately to the Madeline dipped in a cup of tea. Yep.

And the thing about A La Recherche is it is a cyclical book. The idea that what goes around comes around. When you get to the end of the book, perhaps you realise you've been reading the book that the narrator of the book intends to write we could debate that for several hours to come we could but lissa you wanted to read didn't you and it seemed an appropriate thing to do to round us off the madeline moment because it is so beautiful and as soon as i'd recognised the taste of the

piece of Madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime blossom, which my aunt used to give me, immediately the old grey house upon the street where her room was rose up like a stage set. And with the house, the town from morning to night and in all weathers, the square I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And as in the game, wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper, which until then are without character or form, but the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape,

become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable. So in that moment, all the flowers in our garden and in Monsieur Swan's park and the water lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Cambrai and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, towns and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. ymddiriedolwyd y teulu a'r holl o Cwmbrê a'i ymgyrchion, yn cymryd ffordd a'i ddylunio, a ddod yn fyw, gan ystod y gwledyddion a'r gartrefi, o fy mhobr o ddŵr. Rwy'n hoffi ychwanegu cwestiwn o'r Styn Patron sy'n ymddiriedolwyd, Anita Bruckner, yr oeddwn i'n ei ddysgu'n ddiddorol pan oeddwn i'n ei ddarllen.

Mae'r llyfr yma o adroddiad Edmund White o Proust. Y ffordd ddiddorol a bryderus yw nad yw unrhyw un yn gwthio. Mae pawb yn cael eu gwylio ar gyfer, yn gweithio â chydweithwyr y mae'r ddiddorol wedi'u cyfarfod yn gyfranogol, all are glimpsed at a distance, married to partners whom the reader has met in a different context, tenderly supported in old age by those of formerly villainous reputation. Death in the novel, of the grandmother, of the mistress, is so terrible that such events are never to be forgotten. In that way, they continue to be part of the narrative,

forgotten. In that way, they continue to be part of the narrative, one more factor in which A La Recherche de Tom Perdue outdistances all more limited accounts, so that by the end of the novel, when time is regained, life and death have come to be almost indistinguishable. And if the perspective still appears to be indistinct, it is nevertheless understood to be cyclical, so that a conclusion of sorts can be drawn. And then she adds, those readers for whom this is puzzling or unsatisfactory are advised to turn back to the beginning and to read the novel again.

Now, Prusimus wouldn't be Prusimus without some carol singing. Yes. Okay, so I'm going to lead the singing. Can you all see that, sort of? Just follow somebody with good eyesight next to you. On the twelfth day of Christmas, Mr. Pruce gave to me... Twelve dreams of dreaming, seven of hires piping, ten lords a-leaping, nine ladies dancing,

eight maids a-milking, seven swords a-leaping, nine ladies dancing, eight maids a-milking it, seven swans a-stewing, six guys a-laying, five old things. Four appalling birds, three French hens, two title ducks, and a man laying in a cup of tea Wow! What a good place to end. Right, thank you to John and Andy for making me spend months reading books by or about Proust, to our guest experts Sarah Churchwell and Sean Whiteside, to our producer Nicky Birch for capturing the last 60 minutes of lost time, to the London Library for hosting us this evening, to the lovely audience here tonight

and to Unbound for sponsoring Backlisted. John, if Proust had attempted to crowdfund Alarachesh, how long would it have taken him to raise the money? I think he'd still be raising the money now. You can download all 107 episodes of Backlisted, plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website at backlisted.fm, where you will find a Spotify playlist of Proust-inspired music compiled with the help of our listeners, which you can also add to. And we're always pleased if you join us on Twitter, Facebook and Boundless.

Finally, a last announcement. A La Recherche de Tom Perdue is a novel about memory and this Proust episode will stay the longest in our memories not just because it's the end of the year and it's Christmas but because

it is the last show we'll ever do. No! Oh, alright, we'll be back in the spring. Why don't you use this break to catch up on your reading, you lazy people? Anyway, from all of us at Batlisted, and everyone here,

Merry Christmas! You can choose to listen to Batlisted with or without adverts if you prefer to listen to it without adverts you can join us on our Patreon patreon.com forward slash backlisted where you also get bonus content of two episodes of Locklisted the podcast where we

talk about the books and films and music that we've been listening to over the last couple of weeks