Neville Jason transmits Proust's complex sentence structure with seeming effortlessness. I read the first three volumes of this series ("In Search of Lost Time", also called "Remebrance of Things Past") and found it tough going. Rare for audio books, I can say categorically that I enjoy listening to this book better than reading it myself. Where does Sodom and Gomorrah rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
It is brilliant, but needs to be consumed in small graceful quantities, preferably with your pinky sticking out. I'm not sure it is possible to eat an entire wheel of Leerdammer by oneself, or to drink an entire hogshead of wine, or to read Proust's ISOLT all the way through. It is also a novel that needs to be eaten in discrete and slow chunks. But this is a novel that once started, must be finished. Still, having read/listened 2700+ pages /102 hours of Proust now, I can still feel confident in saying that the guy is brilliant, weird, distressing, mesmerizing, queer, petulant, boring, beautiful, raving, labyrinthine, decadent, lyrical, perverse, funky, banal, and that is just a sampling of my feelings about Proust on just one of his pages.
What are the risks of looking back obliquely on Proust's fourth volume of 'In Search of Lost Time' (ISOLT)? Will any indirect reference to Proust's army of inverts turn me into a pillar of salt? Will I disquiet my friends and my family with funky quotes from Proust's salon-centric novel? It is hard to grab this one volume and grade or inspect it separate from the previous three, and seems premature to attempt to capture the full body of ISOLT before finishing the next three.
Reviewing 'Sodom and Gomorrah' puts me in an awkward spot. Looking back obliquely on Proust's fourth volume