Clara Reads Proust by Stephane Carlier & Polly Mackintosh

Author:Stephane Carlier & Polly Mackintosh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallic Books

The beginning of The Guermantes Way, which is about the Proust family moving into an apartment within the Guermantes residence, is a shock that she had not anticipated. She never wants to leave the apartment again, especially Françoise’s kitchen; she fears that the story will take her somewhere else. As she reads these pages, something verging on magical happens, making her think for the very first time that books might be better than real life.

‘I didn’t fit in anywhere. Everyone fits in somewhere; I tried but it didn’t work – I felt like a cat who’d been asked to solve an equation with two unknowns. I started to hate myself, and I was exhausted too. Not being able to be yourself is exhausting. I wrote a letter explaining everything, I took a pack of sleeping pills washed down with Cointreau, lay on my bed and went to sleep. But I’d spoken to my mother in the morning, and she knew something was up. She got the firefighters to break down the door since she lived 600 kilometres away, and I woke up in hospital, very unhappy that I was still alive. An ex came to visit me. We weren’t together but we still saw each other. She was a second-hand bookseller in Yonne, near Colette’s house, and she’d been nagging me to read Proust for years. This time she’d brought a copy of Swann’s Way. I remember that on the cover there was a rather ugly watercolour of a young boy’s face, a cup of tea and some madeleines. One morning I opened it, on a beautiful autumn morning in the hospital gardens, and it dazzled me. Every part of it spoke to me, straight away. Its sensitivity, its sense of beauty. This guy who was forced to withdraw from life because of his frailty, who devoted entire pages to falling asleep or describing a hawthorn bush. He was as lost in the world as I was. I was no longer alone. I was saved.’

Claudie’s house is like her. Made of wood and single storey, it feels as though it wasn’t completed in one go but has been put together over time and slightly randomly, with objects in places you wouldn’t expect (she will later reveal that she made a good deal of them herself). Large rooms that are pleasant to walk around and to be in, with plenty of sofas, armchairs and cushions. And cats too, who, unlike others cats, allow you to stroke them, and even respond when spoken to. It smells of orange and cedar, and yellow net curtains hang from the windows: they could easily be in a canyon on the outskirts of Los Angeles in the early seventies.

Sitting between two large cushions covered in a paisley print fabric, legs tucked underneath her, is Claudie, radiant in a big diamond-print jumper that looks like a minidress on her. Clara has realised that for Claudie it isn’t about the way clothes make her look. Simply being a woman seems to be enough for her to be happy.

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