Celebrating the Centennial of Proust’s ‘Swann’s Way’

More to Remember Than Just the Madeleine

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

Published: November 7, 2013 - The New York Times

The New York Times -  Proust, circa 1896.

Bibliotheque nationale de France (BnF), Paris, France, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY - Marcel Proust's notes and doodles for "Swann's Way," published in 1913.

DAC — Lyliane Degraces-Khoshpanjeh/R. Briand - A re-creation of Proust's cork-lined bedroom, installed at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris.

Most people spend the week before a marathon resting up and carbo loading.

But in recent days, the radio host Ira Glass, the pastry chef Dominique Ansel and a crew of other long haulers have been worrying less about leg cramps than semicolons.

The marathon in question is a weeklong “nomadic reading” of Marcel Proust’s “Swann’s Way” that will celebrate the centennial of that first installment of “In Search of Lost Time” by bringing Proust’s endlessly subdividing sentences, microscopic self-consciousness and, yes, plenty of madeleines to seven Proust-appropriate locations across New York City.

In Mr. Glass’s case, that would be a bed in a room at the Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where, at 7 p.m. on Friday, he will recite the book’s opening — “For a long time, I went to bed early” — from under the covers before passing the baton, so to speak, to the next in a chain of nearly 120 readers recruited by the French Embassy’s cultural services division. 

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