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Edmund Levin asks: Can you reverse-engineer Marcel Proust’s madeleine? Starting with the description of the famed cake in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Levin tries to glean as much information as possible about how it was cooked.
Proust’s madeleine was quite dry. It demanded not just a quick dunk, but immersion to “soften” it (according to the new translation by Lydia Davis, said to be the most accurate). And, you’ll note, Marcel never bites the cookie. The memory surge is triggered by crumbs.
The Crumb Factor is the key to this culinary mystery. A close analysis of the text yields the following sequence: Marcel 1) breaks off and drops the morsel into the tea. 2) The madeleine piece then wholly or partially disintegrates during its immersion. 3) Marcel then fishes about with his spoon, yielding a spoonful of tea mixed with crumbs.
The question, then: What recipe would deliver this dry, extraordinary crumb-producer?
There are even black-and-white line drawings to accompany the argument. Is Levin a true literary sleuth? Or just someone with too much time on his hands?
Doreen Baingana, who was recently nominated for the Caine Prize for African writing, gets a brief profile in a Kampala paper (reprinted in AllAfrica.com). I quite enjoyed her collection of stories, Tropical Fish, and will try to write a review very soon.
Book Coolie writes about the success of Andrea Levy’s Small Island and what it means to him:
[T]hrough her work, acceptance and success, you can see the formation of a lineage, and that Andrea’s success is in some way a tribute to, a continuation of, those cussed and searching young Caribbean writers who came to Britain in the nineteen fifties, who struggled, and never achieved the kind of mainstream success that Andrea has. It is the sense of seeing a generation passing on, the continuation of a line, the consummation of a literature, from the immigrants to the British-born Caribbean writer, the sense of announced existence and dialogue between ancestor and descendant, the sense of life examined and legitimised.
Read the full post here.
Turns 60 this year, and she’s apparently decided to take up ballet.
Issue 19 of Boldtype is now available online, with reviews of the latest novels of Alicia Erian, Kazuo Ishiguro, H.T. Hamann, and Cintra Wilson, as well as an interview with Jonathan Lethem.
BT: Are there any other lost classics that you’d like to see reissued? Any authors in particular?
JL: Well, Malcolm Braly and few other exceptions aside, I think NYRB [New York Review of Books] is a little more focused on European and international stuff. For my money, there are a few great out of print American novelists of the last 50 years or so that could be very exciting discoveries for readers. Don Carpenter is a particular favorite of mine. His first novel, Hard Rain Falling, might be my candidate for the other best prison novel in American literature. I can think of a few others. McDonald Harris, as well. But really, NYRB has done an incredible thing and it’s so healthy. It’s a constant reminder of what riches there are just behind the canon, and just behind the list of what’s in print. I’ve been buying or snagging as many freebies as I can, but I haven’t even read a third of their shelf. I do feel, for the first time, that there are as many old books being pulled back into print as there should be. They’ve really willed that into being a part of the landscape.
By the way, earlier this week, Andrew Sean Greer recommended The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott from the New York Review of Books collection for Moorishgirl’s underappreciated books series.