IN SEARCH OF LOST PROUST

I’ll just come straight out and admit it: I am reading À la recherche du temps perdu in honour of the French Presidency of the EU (I began it in another French Presidency, but that’s another story). Several colleagues whose French is better than mine say they find it “heavy-going”. Since I can’t quite bear to say “Au contraire!” I tend to reply “Then I must be a very superficial reader.” I suspect this is true, but I get such pleasure from it nonetheless.

If you read Proust for meaning, or for the story, it must be very hard work. But if you tend to surf prose, inhabit textures, find your mind wandering on tangents, then fear not: you will find yourself satisfyingly building and juxtaposing layers of different individuals’ perceptions of the same communications about the same events. This is what interpreters do, and is part of much great literature, if not at the heart of it.

If your mind works like this, then it is refreshing and even relaxing to encounter Proust, and other adepts of errabundia such as Javier Marías… ’Hard work’ for you means retaining information crucial to a plot, and not getting distracted by aesthetic details or tiny misunderstandings which a more business-like author would contemptuously dismiss in order to get on with The Story.

The structure seems so natural that you are not even aware you are reading. You know when the narrator is going to stop to dwell on something, not let something lie, turn it around, look at it from a new angle, through another’s eyes, or from our own perspective but in the past.

There was a moment during yesterday’s run in the woods, as I approached the part-frozen lake, when my thoughts became unbounded, rushing out of the schoolroom at 4pm, intoxicated with freedom, but slowly coalescing into organised groups and activities. Skipping over here, football cards there. The running order for a performance, the strategy for advancing a complex project, it all took shape before my eyes. Was I actually running? I was aware of the rhythm, but not of my feet. Surely this was called flying (or Dad dancing)?

Pages pass (or even entire paragraphs), we flap our wings, leave the ground, examine the terrain, savour the clouds. We even begin to see patterns in those clouds. But the ground is there when we need it, and a new paragraph is somewhere on the horizon. We see cloud-like patterns in our own lives. They are shifting, of course, but so are we– remember before it all happened? More importantly, before we had that conversation? When we misinterpreted that remark.

I appear to have slipped into saying “we”. I think I mean: the narrator.

“Pretentious, moi?”

Today’s episode is brought to you by Crawley pop group The Cure:

“I’m alive

I’m dead

I’m the stranger”

I am growing up in a monolingual, monocultural home. The French are geographically closer to southern England than the rest of Britain is (and there has been crazy talk of building a tunnel to them for almost a century), but they are only occasionally visible through the fog over the Channel, tiny ants transporting huge mountains of garlic to and fro. They have certainly left their mark on our restaurants, though. A proper meal out involves a tablecloth, a lurid starter, and a wine which you are supposed to mispronounce, but discuss like an expert with the waiter (“I’ll have the Entre deux legs”).

But, and I have a big but- your surname is actually French, Matthew! It has a silent “t”- so you’d better learn how to pronounce it properly. And if anyone says “Perrett”, you can set them right by saying “Actually, it’s French”, and no-one will ever mock you or bully you for that.

Since you ask, a Monsieur Pierre Perret left northern France for southern England at some point in the nineteenth century for unspecified reasons in rather a hurry. A few years ago, my father and I went to investigate our family roots in the small town of his birth, and despite Perret being a very common surname in France, not only could we find no evidence of the family, but the locals claimed not to understand the name and looked at us slightly askance. I don’t think we should draw any conclusions from that.

After all, nationality is a fluid concept. The Saxe-Coburgs only changed their name to Windsor during the First World War when a German bomb literally had their name on it. I grew up eating samosas and curry, because my father was stationed in… Slough. I have French friends who consider the French national dish to be couscous, or “cou-cou”, as Mum called it. Mum, having married a man with a sexy silent “t” in the 1950s and become Mrs. Perr-ay, didn’t learn any French, but took to removing consonants. (It was only in recent years I discovered there was no such dish as “croquet potatoes”, named after the sport.)

I’d always been the tall speccy kid with the foreign name and the bad hand. But now cultural identity was hitting me too, and like many early teens, I felt a cuckoo in the nest for other, probably invented, reasons. So, of course, in my premature adolescent angst, I was listening to The Cure and reading Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels. Novels written from the sympathetic viewpoint of the murderer- a man who was constantly on the lookout, constantly concealing and deceiving, and yet somehow seeking a way to be true to himself, a way that set him apart from the others because no-one could quite accept his truth when confronted with it.

The Cure and Highsmith both had direct connections with twentieth-century French literature (a subject I was increasingly fascinated by) and more specifically, with Albert Camus, pied-noir philosopher, born in Algeria to colonial French parents. The Cure came from a similar Home Counties background to my own, but their first single, Killing An Arab, in 1979 (quoted above), was based on Albert Camus’s “L’Etranger”. (The literary reference in the song’s title was so misunderstood by racists that the band later chose to perform it live either as “Kissing An Arab” or “Killing Another”). Highsmith was a life-long Francophile. She described Camus’ novel as “a tour de force… a piece of brilliant impressionism. It captures the twentieth century’s annihilation of the individual”.

In my experience the typical attitude in Britain towards the Perr-ay family is very similar to the average British attitude towards the French. Good people to know if you like decent food and wine, but annoying and slightly full of themselves after about 10 minutes’ conversation. You’ve been reading this entry for less than 10 minutes so far, but it feels like a lifetime already, right? Bienvenue en France.

For these reasons, which one could perhaps say combine existentialism with nominative determinism, I have always felt like a French cuckoo in an English nest. And if you think that sounds a tad pretentious, all I can say is: “Pretentious, MOI?”