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Returning to Balzac again

I gave it 200 pages before I quit. Too many characters who never cohere into a single story.

Very dry, understated humor, never hits you over the head or announces when a joke is incoming.

Mystery with many clues but no solution.

The end of Chapter Two answers Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and all the novels of psychological
realism. It's a polemic on behalf of late modernism.

It says there is a "true" story behind all other stories, a "what really happened," but that real story is impossible to know.

So no wonder Proust meant so much to Beckett. He got the unknowable from the Captive and the Fugitive.

Almost there. I think this may break my record for fastest reading of a volume of Proust.

After the long boredom of the Captive, Proust entirely redeems his novel with this little chapter.

Even when it’s bad it is sooo good.

We can detect a few signs of the author’s decline as he was writing this volume in haste a short time before his death.

Today I was introduced to that most exciting and hilarious of names, “Bussy d’Ambois.”