On Reading [Paperback]

Marcel Proust was a great admirer of the English cultural critic and writer John Ruskin and spent several years translating Ruskin. The essay, On Reading, was published three times, once, as here as the preface to Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, once in an anthology of pieces "Pastiches et Melangés" and finally in 1919 as a free standing work, "Days of Reading" (published by Penguin Books here).

The essay's interest is in its biographical nature, with lengthy descriptions of the impact of books on a child. As you read it you are reminded of Combray, the setting for the earlier parts of Remembrance of Things Past, for On Reading foreshadows the semi-autobiographical stories of Swann's Way, such as the tormented accounts of sleepless nights when a mother's kiss was withheld and sounds of the family could be heard downstairs.

Of course, not all children will be as taken up with reading as Proust was when he says, "There are perhaps no days of our childhood that we lived as fully as the days we left behind without living at all: the days we spent with a favourite book".

To illustrate the power of reading, Proust uses four scenes from a day in his childhood, in the dining room, bedroom, park and bedroom again. The young Marcel would sneak into the dining room after breakfast, a room which no-one else used until lunchtime and would spend the morning reading until his parents came in, "to say all too soon the fatal words, `Come on, shut your book, its time for lunch' "

After lunch Marcel took up reading again at once, "especially if the day was a bit hot, everyone went upstairs to retire to their room, which allowed me to return to mine right away, up the little staircase of close-set stairs, but alas, "I had not been reading very long when I had to go out to the park, about half a mile from the village. But after the game I was forced to play, I would cut short my tasting of the treats that had been carried out in baskets and handed out to the children" - in order to find a hiding place by the river where he could read again.

It is perhaps not surprising that Marcel's parents worried about the hours he spent reading on his alone! (but then they did not know what a world-famous literary figure he would become in later life).

The essay is full of thoughts on the nature of reading and Damion Searls, the translator and editor of this volume believes that "On Reading" is "full-fledged Proust at his best and work that repays unending attention and love" and I am sure that he is right that "it marks the first time Proust sees his personal past as a vanished world, and has developed the techniques to bring it back to life.

Moving on to other works in the book, we learn about Proust's method of reading, which was to make hundreds of footnotes on the book before him, often, as the editor says, "deeply erudite and enormously diligent". The volume includes many of these footnotes which Proust gave on Ruskin's lectures and the provide revealing insights into the depths of Proust's contemplation on his reading matter.

I have enjoyed reading this book. It is a book to dip into and to come back to at a later time. Its a fairly slim volume but I'd say its the sort of book to carry around with you for a few days and includes plenty of material to reflect on at odd moments.

This is a mixture of recollections about Proust's own experiences of reading and writing as well as a collection of essays translated from Ruskin's work, an influential writer from the eighteenth century. The message of the book is to show the importance of reading and how books are precious - like food for the mind. He also states how they teach us about great ideas and how we all have the opportunity to learn from great minds.

I enjoyed his recollections about his innocent childhood and the joy reading gave him. However, I did find the essays quite heavy-going, they are quite lengthy so I found myself just dipping in and out of this. I did find the ideas interesting but prefer the more light-hearted modern books on reading which refer to modern works as well.