“Reading Anne Carson is to experience a euphonious, mystical sort of perplexity.” on the jacket of her Albertine Workout, where she finds a novel way to communicate with, through and beyond Proust.This is not a review but an invitation. I picked this little booklet out for my father-in-law’s 90th birthday, knowing he enjoys such poets as Mark Strand and Anne Carson and spends a lot of time with Proust in the original French. I have never particularly enjoyed Proust, would be hard-pressed to tell you what exactly the wiki site on hermeneutics is about, but I found myself howling at the 21 pages of loose verse and 15 pages of appendices of varying length. I have no idea what this is. I can describe it just fine: 59 fragments about Albertine from Proust's RduTP, with 16 fragments a little less connected to her. If that sounds like not much, well, you're probably right. Of course, Proust readers will be excited. Quite right to be so. The take-away, if you will, is that Proust uses Albertine to show very clearly his pessimistic understanding of human love: that we only love that which we cannot fully possess, but we want to fully possess that which we love. So the narrator more or less holds her hostage, while knowing that he really wants her to resist his possession. So he becomes obsessed with the ways in which she can escape him: sleeping, lying, being gay, being dead. This is, in effect, the narrator torturing Albertine and also himself. Despite the best efforts of a minority of literary scholars, most people will know and care that Albertine is somehow related to Alfred Agostinelli, real-life Proust's chauffeur. In short, Proust's theory of love makes perfect sense for a fin-de-siecle gay man. I know all of this. So why is it that when Carson quotes a bit of Mallarme that Proust inscribed on a plane he intended to give to Alfred, that I nearly cried at its beauty, and the beauty of Carson's little booklet of literary criticism? I have no idea. Un cygne d'autrefois se souvient que c'est luiMagnifique mais qui sans espoir se delivrePour n'avoir pas chante la region ou vivreQuand du sterile hiver a resplendi l'ennui. [Forgive the lack of accents]. My only complaint is that Carson appears to approve of Barthes' "dreamy commitment to a third language in which we would all be exempt from meaning," 26. Yawn.
What do You think about The Albertine Workout (2014)?
I probably should have read Proust first. In any case, I really liked "appendix 21 on nuns."
—Nicole
Knockout combination: Proust and Anne Carson.
—MrEWeeks
