Having just finished reading Lydia Davis's new translation of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way, I have old Marcel a bit on the brain, I think undestandably. The discovery of a literary masterpiece is always a bit of a life-changer, especially if you're a writer too and you're brought face to face with the fact that you'll never be able to do anything fractionally as good, even if you live 100 years. And my head's still swimming with this one: the steeples at Martinville, Swann the Vermeer expert, Swann's obsession with Odette, Marcel's later infatuation with Odette's daughter Gilberte, the great waves of the past crashing over the banal present, Paris in 1899, the violin sonata--fucking magic.

Next volume, Les Jeunes Filles en Fleur, I read in the original.Or bust.

BTW, one of the characters in my new novel is known as "The Yorkshire Proust" because everyone thinks he's long-winded. What they don't know is that he's actually rewriting Proust in Yorkshire dialect.