Marcel Proust

Germaine Greer wonders “Why do people gush over Proust?” in a commentary for The Guardian. “I’d rather visit a demented relative,” she says.

For one thing, she says, “it is damnable in its fake heterosexual voyeurism, and its disparaging and dishonest account of homosexuality.”

Then there’s the writing itself: “If Proust did not make such a snobbish to-do about diction, it might be easier to forgive him for his battering of the sentence to rubble and his apparent contempt for the paragraph. He relies on commas and semi-colons to do what should be done by full-stops, of which there are far too few, many of them in the wrong place. Sentences run to thousands of words and scores of subordinate clauses, until the reader has no recollection of the main clause or indeed whether there ever was one.”

Then there’s the fact that most translations of him are “mis-translations.”

There’s more, but in short, “If you haven’t read Proust, don’t worry. This lacuna in your cultural development you do not need to fill. On the other hand, if you have read all of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, you should be very worried about yourself. As Proust very well knew, reading his work for as long as it takes is temps perdu, time wasted, time that would be better spent visiting a demented relative, meditating, walking the dog or learning ancient Greek.”