/lit/ - Literature

GOT DANG HE WAS DRIPPED THE FUCK OUT FR FR NO CAP

>>16136265
The mark of a skilled writer of literary fiction is (in part) his ability to make banal events interesting, and Proust is exceedingly good at it. I'm sure you'll enjoy the novel-within-a-novel about Swann. It could practically stand on its own as a brilliant little novel about obsession, love, and time and habit's effects on the latter.

Pic related is Robert de Montesquiou, a man so decadent he became the model for both Baron de Charlus of ISOLT and Des Esseintes of Huysman's À rebours.

>>16078913
These days? Read Baudelaire's stuff on Dandyism.

Basically every writer that isn't a neurotic working class person trying to psychically pull themselves into the aristocracy by acting as though money is worthless dresses well. (Well means good quality, not even necessarily new clothes.)

Your clothes should be as comfortable and familiar as your bedroom or study. They're a small extension of the boundaries between self and other, an imposition of your selfhood onto the surrounding world. They don't need to be unconventional, any more than you need to have unconventional body parts, but they must suit you.

>>15678262
>What do you love about him?
I love his prose, the long sentences that can go on and on, forcing you to 'let go' of your grip and just go along with it; he's a pain to read if you use the same technique you'd use to read Hemingway, where every sentence is a neat, easily digestible unit. I love the psychological analysis in his works, where one gets not only a superficial idea of what a character is like, but also their interior workings. And most of all, I love his ability to plant seeds within the story that he later returns to, having spent the last 200 pages nurturing them without the reader realising it. This is probably a bit too vague for your liking, but it's difficult for me to really express what I feel regarding Proust, it all becomes quite abstract to me beyond "prose".

>>15678271
I'd hesitate to call any of it 'boring'. Proust is a humorous writer with fantastic prose; even when he's describing what should be a boring dinner involving the narrator and his parents, it's still a joy to read. You really need to be patient with him, though; don't expect a tight plotline to follow, though there *is* plot, if only for the reader to truly realise it at the end.

What I recommend both of you anons to do is to read the first part; Swann's Way. The first half of it concerns his/the narrator's childhood summers in Combray, France, including the famous Madeline cake-scene. The second half is the stellar "novel within a novel" about Charles Swann and his growing obsession with the society cocotte Odette de Crécy, which mirrors the narrator's own obsessive love affair later in the full novel. It works well enough on its own, and for many people it's all they ever read of Proust. You'll know if you like him or not by the end.

Is there a more based character than the Baron de Charlus in all of French literature? Truly he makes bourgeois flamboyant homosexuals seem like an aesthetic

Also where are my Bloch-chads/Blochads at?

Best dandy ever.