Grant Johnson > Recent Status Updates

I put off reading The Guermantes Way for years because I'd heard it was the worst of the seven volume of In Search of Lost Time. And maybe it is. But right now I am enthralled by this thing--20-page discourses on French military history be damned. There are things Proust does with language that are simply unmatched by any other writer, dead or alive. Reading him is a singular and transporting experience.

This book might be another confirmation that poets often suck at writing prose. As beautiful as this man was, and as gifted a poet, he couldn't seem to compose a paragraph for his life.

There are moment in here of near-scriptural intensity, but they are wedged between pages and pages of stilted, confusing, and annoyingly heavy-handed writing.