Happy Halloween! Happy midweek everyone! How has the year been going for you so far? I hope that the year has been kind to everyone. If not, I hope you will experience a reversal of fortune in the remaining weeks of the year. More importantly, I hope everyone is happy and healthy, in body, mind, and spirit.

With the midweek comes a fresh WWW Wednesday update, my first this year. WWW Wednesday is a bookish meme hosted originally by SAM@TAKING ON A WORLD OF WORDS. The mechanics for WWW Wednesday are quite simple, you just have to answer three questions:

  1. What are you currently reading?
  2. What have you finished reading?
  3. What will you read next?
www-wednesdays
What are you currently reading?

In a couple of days, we will be welcoming the last month of the year which means that the new year is inching ever closer. As such, I hope that the year has been kind to everyone. Reading-wise, November was a foray into works of European literature. While it is short-lived, this journey has brought me to some parts of Europe. The country I am in right now is somewhat of a familiar territory: France. George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual is the third book written by a French writer I read this month, the other two being works by Marcel Proust. A part of my 2023 TOp 23 Reading List, Life: A User’s Manual is also my first novel by Perec and was originally published in 1978 as La Vie mode d’emploi.

The novel charted the stories of the occupants of a Parisian apartment building at 11 Rue Simon Crubellier; this somehow reminded me of Muriel Burbery’s The Elegance of a Hedgehog. Perec walks the readers through each apartment unit, with its occupants described vividly through furnishings situated in the respective apartment. There is no singular plot, rather, what Perec provided was a lush tapestry of interwoven stories. We read about each apartment owner’s story. The meandering structure can be disorienting but Perec did provide a caveat at the start of the novel: it is a jigsaw puzzle. Puzzle is indeed a recurring theme. Percival Bartlebooth, one of the apartment owners, spent half his life painting pictures. He then had these pictures cut into jigsaw puzzles to allow him to spend the second half of his life reassembling these puzzles. It is an interesting idea. It may seem daunting but the writing is very accessible. This is the reason why I am nearly done with the book.

What have you finished reading?

Despite acquiring works of Marcel Proust nearly a decade ago, I held back on reading them after learning they were volumes comprising a labyrinthine literary work. Before I could start reading the books, I resolved to complete all seven books comprising Remembrance of Things Past/In Search of Lost Time, Proust’s magnum opus, and easily one of the most recognized titles in French, if not world literature. As I was able to obtain six of the seven books, I read the first volume in 2022. In 2023, I included the second and third volumes in my 2023 Beat the Backlist Challenge. The Guermantes Way, the third volume, was the only book I was able to complete in the past week.

The Guermantes Way continues the journey of the unnamed narrator, widely considered to be the author himself. The portion of his life documented in the book pertains to his fascination with the Guermantes, an aristocratic family who symbolized the historic Parisian district of Faubourg Saint-Germain; the Swanns, on the other hand, were attached to Champs-Élysées. At the start of the book, Marcel’s family moved to an apartment adjacent to his grandmother’s close friend, Mme. de Villeparisis. Readers of Within A Budding Grove would remember that the Marquise is a part of the Guermantes family. It was, however, a different member of the family that caught Marcel’s attention: Oriane, Duchesse de Guermantes. She is the toast of Parisian society. Marcel was enamored by her but she barely took notice of her doting neighbor. To get close to the Duchesse, Marcel visited his friend Robert de Saint-Loup in his barracks; Saint-Loup is a relative of the Duchesse. Things went awry when Marcel received news of his grandmother’s waning health. Marcel’s memory is seminal in moving the story forward. In a way, the book is an extension of the second volume, particularly his romantic and sexual awakening. An important element injected into the novel was the discourse on the Dreyfus Affair. The Guermantes Way is a continuation of an excellent book. I can’t wait to read the succeeding volumes.

What will you read next?