‘Tiens! Une madeleine?’

Michael Wood

• A la recherche du temps perdu: Combray by Marcel Proust, edited by Stéphane Heuet
  Delcourt, 72 pp, €10.95, October 1998, ISBN 2 84055 218 3
• Proust among the Stars by Malcolm Bowie
  HarperCollins, 348 pp, £19.99, August 1998, ISBN 0 00 255622 7

There are all kinds of things to do with books apart from reading them, and one of the most pleasurable is to dream of reading them. Many of us keep scribbled or notional lists of such dreams, and happily speak of rereading works we haven’t read even once. In If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Calvino steers his reader and chief character through a bookstore, past heaps of dangerous objects identified as, among other things, Books You Haven’t Read, Books You’ve Been Planning to Read for Ages, Books You Want to Own so They’ll Be Handy just in Case, Books You Mean to Read but There Are Others You Must Read First, and Books You’ve Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It’s Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them. Even great readers can fall into this mode, and even books we have read can be dreamed. At one point in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Roland Barthes casually said: ‘The other day, I reread ‘The Magic Mountain.’ I’m sure Barthes had read The Magic Mountain, probably many times, but I’m equally sure he didn’t reread it ‘the other day’. That day he just remembered reading it, or perhaps skimmed a few pages. He joined the club of dreamers.