The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.  – Elias Canetti 1 I am not one for reading projects. I have never planned to read a play of Shakespeare every day until I have read them all or set out to read every novel by a particular author in order of their publication. There are people who every year read all six novels on the Booker Prize shortlist to make a judgement to compare to the jury's or ask "Where to start?" with an author when they (the author) has recently died or been awarded the Nobel Prize (which amounts to the same thing).2  I wonder what they hope to achieve. Despite this, I did plan to read Harvard UP's four-volume Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin in order. And not just in book order but each essay in each book in order. I believed this would enable to me to get a handle on Walter Benjamin's thought better than knowing well the odd essay like The Image of Proust or The Storyteller, both found in a battered copy of Illuminations I've had since the late 1980s, and as a result become a more informed and learned person, able to reach for an idea or example with the nonchalance of one who knows. It started with great promise with consecutive essays on Trauerspiel moving me with unexpected force 3, only then to reach the 69-page essay On the Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism. Not only was it like walking across the Atacama Desert, it was like eating it as well. Of course, I could skip the essay and carry on but, no, it had to be every essay and in order. This is also why I resent books with long introductions by a third party. While they may be full of useful information, with their spin and spoilers they diminish the enthusiasm one had to read the main text, yet skipping them feels like one cannot claim to have read the book.4 Unread books promise, cajole, weep and sneer. Beside the four volumes on the bookshelf is the translation of Benjamin's Arcades Project. Twenty-five years on it remains untouched. (Note the peekaboo on the dust jacket, a design inspired by Albert Angelo by BS Johnson perhaps.) And then on a coffee table there are the toppling piles of partly read books promising a glorious future of enlightenment: Joseph Leo Koerner's Reformation of the Image, Hans Urs Von Balthasar's Mysterium Paschale and Georges Poulet's Metamorphosis of the Circle are just three.5  Instead I have been picking up books I have read and reading them for the second, third or even fourth time. Is this comfort reading? How do we understand this phrase? Akin to comfort blanket, it suggests a retreat into warmth and familiarity. The number of adults reading or, rather, rereading the Harry Potter novels suggests as much, and more: reading as passivity; reading as sleep. If fantasy novels arouse wonder in a child, they numb an adult. I recognise this need even if I could never read that kind of book. There is a longing only to submerge oneself in a river of prose, to find a rhythm as one sentence follows another on the way perhaps to that fabled infinity, even if that is now diminished into the complete absorption of a complete work. I have long been aware of the dangers of dilettantism, the tendency to be satisfied with a passing understanding of what one is dealing with, manifest in the haphazard nature of blogging. Recently, I saw an advert for IndieScholars and, keen to find a way to read and write more productively, I downloaded its free practical guide. When I saw the advice to get rid of my TV, I found the answer...and got rid of the guide instead. It is for the unexpected and perhaps for the revelatory that I read and risk dilettantism as their possibility. I take comfort in desultory reading. The process of reading has something infinite about it. Notes  1. From The Secret Heart of the Clock.  2. This urge is worth noting: it suggests respect for authority and the impulse to question that authority without questioning the conditions generating the need for authority. If they did, their reviews may become more interesting.  3. As a result I began to read Origin of the German Trauerspiel but stalled at the seductively entitled Epistemo-Critical Foreword.  4. That said, Hannah Arendt's 58-page introduction to Illuminations contains a quotation I have always valued: 'Truth, so Benjamin said shortly before he became fully aware of the irreparable break in tradition and the loss of authority, is not "an unveiling which destroys the secret, but the revelation which does it justice."'  If one wants to know where the quotation comes from, the publishers in their infinite wisdom have provided a reference to a page number in the German Gesammelte Schriften. Were they not aware that Illuminations is a translation for people who cannot read German! Anyway, by coincidence it's from the Epistemo-Critical Foreword.  5. Blanchot says Poulet's book prompted him to ask himself why "along with this book, the very history of criticism and culture closed".

This is the first paragraph of a review cut from the TLS in 1989. I was in my fourth year of reading novels and looking everywhere for ideas for what to read next, often keeping reviews that excited my interest. What set Gabriel Josipovici's reviews apart was the inclusion of the novel under review within the wider landscape of the form. Until then I had been reading the novels from the second camp unaware they could be any different. I enjoyed them for sure, but then I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being and from the very beginning felt something different, a rush of recognition, like vertigo. This wasn't due to the prologue discussing Nietzsche's idea of eternal return and Parmenides' division of the world into pairs of opposites, though that played a significant part, but to the single paragraph opening the novel 'proper'. I have been thinking about Tomas for many years. But only in the light of these reflections did I see him clearly. I saw him standing at the window of his flat and looking across the courtyard at the opposite walls, not knowing what to do. This, I realised, is what I wanted to read; this was what I wanted to feel when I read. Everything else was a distraction. But why? Of course, apart from the overt philosophical frame, Kundera's novel is a prime example of mainstream literary fiction in the 1980s and because of its mix of sex and Cold War politics it received a good deal of media attention, much of it sniggering at its hyperbolic title – these pretentious foreigners, what? – and this is why I had heard of Milan Kundera and not of Nathalie Sarraute, and yet this brief admission of distance changed everything. It has stayed with me for 40 years.  Perhaps only three sentences is all it takes to convert a reader from one camp to the other because before long I had lost interest in Updike, Roth, Amis et al. For all the pleasures their novels afforded, not one produced something like vertigo.2 From then on I looked for more of the same. I assumed the key difference was that the novel was from continental Europe and discussed big political and philosophical issues, so I read novels like Josef Škvorecký's The Engineer of Human Souls....and was bored, utterly.3 Kundera's other novels were also disappointing. I was confused. Later, I discovered the same had to be different. The realisation came in the form of the only novel cited in Josipovici's review apart from Tu ne t'aimes pas 4 now reissued by NYRB Classics in the US and And Other Stories in the UK.  Is Beauty Good is nothing like The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Those sniggering at Kundera's title would likely question whether it is a novel at all. For a start there are 31 chapters across three sections contained within 136 pages (111 in the Serpent's Tail edition), and then there's the absence of a question mark in the title. What's that all about? One of the Booker Prize judges said it almost made that year's shortlist but the jury felt it was too radical for their audience. One reviewer of the reissue does well to make the novel more palatable to this imaginary readership: Lara Pawson says the diverse chapters are held together by "Belben's obsessions with the loss of the natural world, with human folly and, as the title makes plain, with challenging the idea of beauty". Along the way, much is said about dying, deafness, desolation, depression, dogs, deckchairs and ducks, about horses, fish, frogs, swans, bees, "brackn", brain cells, bad teeth, beetroot and bodily excretions, about elephants, litter, gardens, graters, colanders, streams, dreams and doubts.   In another, Joseph Schreiber describes it as "polyphonic, multifaceted" and a "dynamic and immersive reading experience", which it is. He places the novel in the context of Belben's earlier novels, also recently reissued. When I wrote about the book under my 39 Books constraint, I described the original cover painting rather than summarise the contents because the experience of reading a book is like that of looking at a painting, only in reverse. One is aware of the detail before the whole. This has consequences for its reception. Soon after the first reading, I lent Is Beauty Good to a friend. They were hesitant to respond but said they enjoyed this or that chapter. I realised that I had not read the book as a collection of short stories from which one can pick and choose favourites. But how had I read it? The book's first words are "And so" plunging the reader within an ongoing expression or conversation as if each chapter is part of a fugitive whole.5 This is why Henry Broome says "quotations don’t convey the experience of reading the book". And this is why I want only to recall the experience of reading the book for the first time rather than performing an aesthetic analysis 35 years on. In her introduction to the new edition, Esther Kinsky recognises this demand in the appearance of untranslated German words, seeing "an element of Fremde between the lines". In general use today the word means "somewhere between strange and foreign and alien". However, Kinsky says it shares its root with the English 'from' and originally meant "coming from another place". Picking out themes or connections between chapters is the usual direction of criticism and reviewing; attending to the sense of another place is not. How can one do that? Where or what is this other place? In a brief talk on his specialist subject, Noam Chomsky resists the commonly held belief that language is fundamentally a tool of communication. "You can communicate by your hairstyle, you know, style of walk, everything. And yes, language can be used to communicate, but it doesn't seem to be part of its design." You find in case after case, right at the core of language design where there are conflicts between what would be efficient for communication and what is efficient for the specific biological design of language ... the communicative efficiency is sacrificed. It it just isn't a consideration.  Readers of Is Beauty Good will recognise this sacrifice – call it poetry – and Chomsky's conclusion that, rather than a tool of communication, language is "a mode of creating and interpreting thought". If "much is said" along the way, it is not so much precious recuperations of folk wisdom than manifold articulations of the space between thought and the world as it is, the world perhaps as experienced by animals and objects. This is explicit when Felix is struck by the possible absence of opposites and awareness that the means of experiencing the world is the very thing that maintains our distance from it.  That word again: distance. If three sentences in Kundera's novel provoked something like vertigo, Is Beauty Good did so over 111 pages. Josipovici's says the "mode of narration" of Tu ne t'aimes pas "is contingent upon the truths of affirmed by the narrative" and this applies to Is Beauty Good. For all of the intimacy with the individual voices, another place impends. In 'Air Ride', members of a brass band are in a cable car rising to play music in the mountains. The tuba player chatters about his instrument "being hugged, shining, making sunlight dart" but whose message he reckons is blocked by all those who "rabbit on about this and that, whether beauty is good or not". He says "I adore playing, yet I am not important, we should be listening to our instruments and not ourselves." Is Beauty Good allows us to listen beyond all chatter to the instruments of thought and language. This poses a challenge to our idea of the novel as a unified work ("It won't suit everyone"). The genre that arose in response to the incremental disenchantment of the world, promising a a sense of totality, the opportunity to recover clarity and meaning, is undone. This could be another means to distinguish the two camps, even if it is there in only three sentences. The challenge begins in Is Beauty Good even before the first line with the absence of a question mark in the title. We see it anyway – a ghost question. If the question mark at the end of Sarraute's novel is "a sign of anything but irresolution" its disappearance into the wall at the beginning of Is Beauty Good is a sign of infinity, the unspeakable origin of thought. We hear it anyway. Notes  1. The full review. 2. I can hear objections to the latter by pointing to the metafiction elements in Roth's later novels and a character called Martin Amis appearing in Money. Why did these not have the same impact? Compared to Kundera, each lacks subtlety and genuine existential pressure.  3. Later, I read Škvorecký expressing admiration for Margaret Thatcher.  4. Translated as You Don't Love Yourself by Barbara Wright. The final lines of the novel not translated in the review are: How good it would be for everyone... how everyone would benefit if we too could feel it, that self-love... If we could... We would like nothing better... We would like nothing better? Nothing better? Really?  5. The first words excluding title and chapter headings, that is.

Once I imagined a novel in which everything seen throughout the day by a single person is reported in detail. I was a teenager in my first job and began by using company paper to describe the scrub on the slopes beside a motorway as seen from a car. I never got any further. No doubt the idea was prompted by a chance encounter late one night with Remembrance of Things Past and a lasting intrigue with its elaborate and apparently excessive descriptions combined with an apparent lack of a story. I think of it now after reading Anna Arno's biography of Paul Celan in an English translation by Soren Gauger, half-wishing that I hadn't. Not that I have any criticism of it as a biography. At over 400 pages it may well be as comprehensive as the form allows, and, if you need a comprehensive review, the LA Review of Books has one. My wish is due not to the tendency of literary biographies to conflate life and work – an inevitability and precisely why we pick up such books – but because its limits are not limited enough and its excesses not excessive enough. What would a literally comprehensive biography look like? Following my idea for a novel, I have imagined a biography of a writer that describes everything in and around their life outside of writing: what they did each day, the rooms in which they lived, the clothes they wore, the food and drink they consumed, how they slept; absolutely up close, absolutely unremarkable. I've read biographies of Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille in which nothing of such detail is mentioned, focusing almost entirely on their public life and writings. If biographies were more like what I imagined, we might then sense the person and thereby the space between the writer and the work (Blanchot called it "the essential solitude"). Naturally, this would be impossible for a biographer, and near impossible for the subject. Somebody did try it, however. For 24 years, Robert Shields wrote a diary describing what he did in every minute of every day. The hair-raising sample pages from the diary reveal how life and work cancel each other out, becoming complementary voids.  Of course, Anna Arno's biography of Celan doesn't go this far. She sets the scene with a novelistic portrait of his hometown of Chernivtsi and how Celan spent his youth there, followed by the war, the murder of his parents, and then his exile, first in Vienna and finally in Paris. We read about his passionate Judaism, his struggles to make a living, his friendships, his marriage, the loss of a son at birth, his devotion to his second son Eric, his obsessive need for his wife's fidelity while he conducted numerous affairs, his awkward meeting with Heidegger despite his demand that others steer clear of ex-Nazis, the terrible effects of the "Goll Affair" and subsequent psychosis, hospitalisation and suicide, with the poetry, translations, prose and correspondence providing a nested commentary by Celan himself. In fact, there's no doubt this is a serious and valuable study of the poet's life and work, and yet, at the same time, the blend proper to literary biography inevitably tends towards caricature, often prompting the reader to judge its subject's hypocrisy. The constraint on detail thereby narrows the necessary space and the in-line quotations of poetry are read as a code confirming the narrative portrait. Apart from silence then, is there an alternative?  Many years ago I read an anecdote from a friend of Kafka's, probably Gustav Janouch, who said how, on calling at his home on yet another day when Kafka was late for their meeting, he saw Kafka bounding down the stairs, his knees kicking high as he descended. For all the wealth of Stach's biography, this felt like the closest to what it was like to be in the presence of the man himself, which, though trivial and saying nothing about his work – unless one can perhaps make an argument for its untimely quality – provides more in a single image than any 400-page narrative (similar to "The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past", the first line of Kafka's diaries). Jean Daive's Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan, translated by Rosemarie Waldrop and published by a small press 1 rather than a major one like Belknap, offers similar images from Celan's life.  A recollection: near Avenue Emile-Zola, Paul Celan looks for a grocery store. He buys a lightbulb that he puts in a huge netbag. Carrying the netted lightbulb he moves on in a lordly way. And the net hangs heavy.  And:  Recollection: Paul coming back from London. "I have seen God, I have heard God: a ray of light under the door of my hotel room." And later Paul recalls Kafka's formulation, "Sometimes God, sometimes nothing."  Each of these, it seems to me, with their mix of banality, elegance, poignancy and oddity, is enough. If the poems quoted in the biography open onto meaning via the life, these anecdotes, as with Celan's poetry, present as the open itself. My imagined novel did not progress because the image of the scrub, between sky and tarmac, was also enough. It remains, sometimes everything, sometimes nothing. The surprise of being? A primal scene, again? Note  1: Burning Deck originally, but no longer available in the photographed edition.

The papacy, people say, counts in centuries, and perhaps never even thinks of counting, because its goal is eternity.1   It has been a pleasure every few months to buy the latest volume in the new translation of À la recherche du temps perdu. I've now read the third, by Peter Bush. The Oxford World's Classics paperbacks are affordable, easy to hold open and, while the typeface is small, it's not too small. Overall, this is the ideal edition for those planning to read Proust in English for the first time and for those wanting to read a translation more faithful to the original than Scott-Moncrieff's, bountiful as it is. The contents for each volume suggests another reason to recommend, coming as it does with extensive background information. Excluding Proust's titles, the table of contents looks like this: General Editors' Preface Translator's Note Introduction Note on the Text  Select Bibliography A Chronology of Marcel Proust Explanatory Notes.  Compare this to the Penguin Classics paperback from the 1980s in which I first read Proust: while The Guermantes Way is 100 pages longer because of the larger typeface, it also includes Cities of the Plain, making it a bulky 1,100 pages.2 Also, the table of contents lists (again, in addition to Proust's) only Notes, Addenda and Synopsis, with the notes filling three pages. The new edition has sixty-seven. The reader is directed to each note by an asterisk placed after a word. In a flurry of black snowflakes, there are often several to a page. If some provide detail of Proust's life to align the fiction to his biography, most explain the narrator's allusions, cultural references and the contemporary and historical events mentioned. This includes a veritable Who's Who of the fin de siècle French aristocracy, which is of course almost entirely unfamiliar to modern English readers.  In two previous posts on the first volumes new translation, I express dismay at the unfamiliarity of the details, which I assumed exposed the shallowness of my first reading.3 In the new translation, Marcel's visit to the barracks at Doncières, his grandmother's decline and death, Albertine's brief visit to his home, his attendance at the salons of Mme de Villeparisis and the Duchesse de Guermantes, and the surprising turn taken in his call on the Baron de Charlus at the very end, are each very clear and memorable, yet almost entirely new to me. And then there is the seismic presence of the Dreyfus Affair splitting high society into two camps, which I do remember. But what did I know of it back then? Perhaps only visions of Steve McQueen in Papillon. Nearly forty years later then, it was a different experience, a kind of disappointment, in that it was mostly intellectual, if not lacking the usual pleasures of reading, including laughs. In discussing de Charlus' excessive grieving over his late wife, the Princesse de Parme notes that "we sometimes do for the dead what wouldn't have done for the living", with which Mme de Guermantes concurs: "For one thing...we go to their funerals, which we never do for the living!"  What this meant was that the breadth of space opened in my mind by Proust's long, luscious sentences as rendered, perhaps misleadingly, by Scott-Moncrieff, with, as Julia Kristeva puts it, their "odors, sounds, colors, shapes, tasty delicacies, and tactile pleasures", as well as arcane references proliferating across clause and sub-clause, in which one's thinking turns from a slog into a waltz, was not repeated.4 Had my young self been seduced then by the mere flourishes of an arch stylist? If I am appalled at myself for not being more attentive, for seeing the novel not only as a transcendent presence but as a guide to a life to come and the value of art, it is a recognition reflected in Marcel's own journey. I see that now. From a distance, he falls in love with the Duchesse de Guermantes solely on account of her family name only to be disillusioned upon getting to know her and the world she inhabits. We become enchanted with a certain work like In Search of Lost Time and wish to pursue it beyond the covers, perhaps by reading biographies and literary studies, by reading philosophers who influenced its ideas and the novelists inspired by its example or, if that isn't enough, by visiting the writer's house if they're dead or going to hear them talk at a literary festival if they're the living dead.  What The Guermantes Way makes plain is that much of this research is unsatisfying, a dissatisfaction blurred like the sun through oceanic depths of information, and is also why many common readers will struggle with this part of the novel: there are hundreds of pages full of the twitterings of dinner parties, part of what Gilles Deleuze called the narrator's "apprenticeship to signs".5 According to him, there are four signs: worldly signs, the signs of love, sensuous signs, and the signs of art. The Guermantes Way offers a prolonged exposure to the first. Worldly signs constitute the language of an in-crowd. Maintaining one's place within it depends on making the right signs. Nothing funny is said at the Verdurins', and Mme Verdurin does not laugh; but Cottard makes a sign that he is saying something funny, Mme Verdurin makes a sign that she is laughing, and her sign is so perfectly emitted that M. Verdurin, not to be outdone, seeks in his turn for an appropriate mimicry. Deleuze is referring to another salon here but the signs apply across high society. While these signs are empty, their emptiness nevertheless "confers upon them a ritual perfection" in which everything is clear and known.  The signs of love, by contrast, confers a ritual of anxiety. The loved one "expresses a possible world unknown to us", one that we wish to enter and study with the intensity of a codebreaker. Nothing about the loved one is clear and knowledge is sought with trepidation. We seek facts as a painkiller only for it to turn into a knife under the ribcage, as we remain excluded, even, and especially, when the loved one gives us signs of preference. Thus, "the means we count on to preserve us from jealousy are the very means that develop that jealousy". We see this in serial form across the novel, from Swann's love for Odette, St Loup's for Rachel, and Marcel's for Gilberte and Albertine. The sensuous signs are those that have made In Search of Lost Time famous: the petite madeleine, the loose paving stone, etc. presenting an ecstatic truth without intellectual agency. Beckett guesses there are 12 or 13. Involuntary memory is explosive, 'an immediate, total and delicious deflagration.' It restores, not mere the past object, but the Lazarus that it charmed or tortured, not merely Lazarus and the object, but more because less, more because it abstracts the useful, the opportune, the accidental, because in its flame it has consumed Habit and all its works, and in its brightness revealed what mock reality of experience never can and never will reveal–the real.6 As with the signs of love, they demand interpretation and the signs of art constitute the 'Search' of Proust's title. The goal is to recover time wasted at dinner parties and time lost in love. Deleuze notes that the first three types of signs depend on material conditions while art is immaterial. In this way it is not subordinated to the experience of an individual and as such enables us to recognise its place in the plurality of experience.  If Deleuze's analysis helps us to understand why it is especially challenging to maintain attention throughout The Guermantes Way, it may also help us to appreciate the difference between novels in general and the essential novel. That is, by applying Deleuze's signs to the culture of reading and writing about novels. We can see the critical apparatus given in the Oxford World's Classics edition as the worldly signs of reading novels. They enable us to place the reading experience in the context of literary history, the macro history of the author's time and the micro history of the author's life. They offer knowledge we can use to accommodate our response to the work and express it in public. We can see the overall series as a worldly sign: the edition presents world's classics and everything that phrase implies, acting like the bright pastel colours of supermarket fiction or the gothic filigree of YA Fantasy. Genre fiction makes a sign of pleasure and the reader makes a sign of enjoyment. Both are empty. This is why booklovers claim with an addict's panicked fervour that they devour books. We can also see the worldly signs in the framing of novels in The Guardian newspaper's book coverage. What then are the signs of love? The stack above of Proust studies and Proust's writings in addition to the novel itself indicate my attempts to interpret the signs given by a reading of Albertine Asleep I heard in 1978 and the beloved beaten-up secondhand copy of volume one of Remembrance of Thing Past bought in 1987 for £3:10 (the minutae of infatuation). The means to travel closer to the work may be the very means of increasing distance. A magnificent distance nonetheless.  The sensuous signs of reading are the most difficult to describe. It should consitute the focus of critical response. Gabriel Josipovici spoke of what Proust's novel does that other forms cannot. I have never wanted to write poetry. So there must be things fiction can do that poetry can't.....This has something to do with time, with how human beings respond to time, with what time does to us, the losses it brings, and the sense of possibilities unrealized, but also the Proustian sense of sudden loops in time and the way our lives are sealed off to us but suddenly, in time, open up momentarily.  This is close to my own experience of the essential novel. On a summer's day browsing bookshelves, anxious and passing time before a meeting, I picked up Peter Handke's Across and, reading the first line, I felt the dense air evaporate. Time disappeared, replaced in miraculous moment by time's essence. It's happened since in different ways and in different novels by different authors. One cannot seek them. They cannot be guaranteed. What Proust's example shows us is that we must create our own work, equivalent to In Search of Lost Time however feeble our resources in comparison to his. Weakness in this case should be considered the greatest strength.    Notes 1: from The Guermantes Way.  2. The title is Scott-Moncrieff's bowdlerised version of Sodom and Gomorrah, Proust's original title is restored in the Oxford World's Classics edition translated by Helen Constantine, published in June 2026. 3.  The Swann Way and In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom respectively.   4. In Time & Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, translated by Ross Guberman.  5. In Proust & Signs, translated by Richard Howard.  6. In Proust by Samuel Beckett.