Catherine Cusset, the facetious novelist of “La Haine de la family”, dissects the different (good) reasons to read and reread “in search of lost time”. In what she says about Proust and her sentence, on her vision of love, the author confides in what built her.
As she tells in the preamble, Catherine Cusset has read three times “in search of lost time” in full: “At fifteen years old, like the great novel of love; at twenty, like the great novel of society; at fifty, like the great novel of writing”.
It is therefore under these three prisms that she resumes her reading today, explaining in a book that is both funny, very informative and often moving which gives Marcel Proust a unique place in French literature.
Proust is a great comic in the vein of Molière and Woody Allen: his reading is a rise, a joy, an antidepressant.
The result is exciting. Catherine Cusset, who has long taught French literature in New York, knows how to make her modernity to Proust, highlighting her ultra-component concerns. It also shows how a novelist of the intimate is, capable of probe like no other author our love torments and our uncertainties.
Understanding human codes
The writer also recounts the life of Proust, analyzes how we can gradually see him evolve in what he says on the Parisian microcosm that surrounds him, especially about the aristocracy, adored at the start of his work and which he then stands out. Thus the novelist reflects on the way in which a writer can insert, or not, in the codes and the shackles imposed by society.
“I am interested in describing the way of acting of the human being, because it is often absurd, confides Catherine Cusset in the podcast Qwertz of April 15. But moreover I express a fear, that of what I call my insensitivity. I am blundering and sometimes my blunders can hurt the other. And I am extremely afraid of hurting the other.”
And it is also an extremely interesting aspect of this book, which tells thirty-five years of writing by Catherine Cusset. This is not the first time that the author has worked from an autobiographical material. She explores key moments in her life, analyzes what she inherited from her family, tells her beginnings as a novelist and returns to the genesis of what is perhaps one of her most beautiful books: “The other we loved” (2016). He was the poignant portrait of a close friend, shiny and funny, crazy by Proust. An eternal unsuitable who one day committed suicide, almost at the age when the author of “in search of lost time” began to write.
Sylvie Tanette/aq
Catherine Cusset, “My life with Marcel Proust”, Gallimard, March 2025.
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