I really need to read Proust

While inserting the Helen of Santa Zita scenes back into NFFN, I realized i needed a scene from Tm’s POV in between two scenes of from Helen’s POV (her calling Tim, and then them hanging out together at Holly Street)-something that show Tim’s thoughts about Helen and his point of view about their estrangement earlier during winter quarter.

I then had the wacky idea of having the scene start with Tim hearing the Winger song “Madalaine” which triggers an involuntary sequence of memories of the past year—referencing, of course, the famous moment in Proust’s La Recherce du Temps Perdu where a single bite of a Madelaine cookie causes a long episode of involuntary memory. This is something I only know about second-hand, though, I’ve never actually read the book. So it seems like I should. According to wikipedia:

At the risk of over-simplification, In Search of Lost Time can be viewed as a vast bildungsroman in which the neurasthenic narrator discovers that he is a writer after a lifetime spent distracted by society and love. It is also a meditation on time, memory and the superiority of art in recapturing past experiences. It is both a portrait of the artist and a discovery of the aesthetic by which the portrait is painted.

which makes it sound a bit like Notes For a Future Novel, actually. Only without the hair metal.

So I now ordered A La Recherce du Temps Perdus Vol. I from Amazon.com The most recent English translation by Lydia Davis, which apparently is highly recommended.