There is some attentiveness to form here, and to the polite conventions of twentieth-century letter writing, but there is fluidity, too — some element of lived experience that cannot be shaped into the narrative arc of a novel or bound by the stylistic rules of poetry ...letters are inflected by fine observations and moments of deep empathy. They are suffused with the intimate textures of daily life — flowers and fragrance — and allow us an insight into the larger social context of the time, with reports of the wounded returning from war ...elegant, charming, tender; occasionally hastily scribbled with heavy underlinings, as seen in the facsimiles; sometimes accompanied by tasteful gifts of books, roses and carnations, even pheasants ...adds greatly to our understanding of Proust’s life and work.
As long as there are apartments, there will be walls to paper with cork; neighbor will be set against neighbor. But Proust — who visited Mrs. Williams upstairs at least once — was always charming and gracious, his humor seasoned with just a dash of passive aggression ... Letters to His Neighbor, which contains notes written between 1908 and 1918, is a trifle overpriced — twenty-three dollars for two dozen of the briefest missives! A certain kind of person will purchase it for her bathroom. But it is, in at least one instance, enlightening ... Life goes on, even in wartime, but that the 'little tiny raps' of the valet de chambre did not prevent Proust from writing is extraordinary.
...in this sad/funny book of letters from Marcel Proust to his neighbor, should resonate with any city dweller who has ever been subjected to noise from without and despair from within ... He [Proust] remains meticulous and articulate in all things, though he does ignore punctuation ...foreword by Proust scholar Jean-Yves Tadié and the afterword by celebrated French translator Lydia Davis serve as codes to these letters, through which we catch a glimpse of the writer’s idiosyncratic domestic life...note contains all of the pathos of feeling at the mercy of one’s neighbors, its specificity, its agitation, its deliberate formality ... The pretext of these letters may be noise, but the context is war, and the subtext is loss. Proust is seeking solace in the domestic and carrying on.
Unpublished until now, only Proust’s side of the correspondence survives; but these 23 letters, written between 1908 and 1916, form a haunting portrait of a friendship both evanescent and intense between two people who lived within earshot of one another, separated only by a few inches of plaster and floorboard, but who scarcely ever met ... Arranged in speculative chronological order by the editors, the letters are occasionally businesslike... In the epistolary spaces unoccupied by pained remonstrations about the din, a complicity developed –– a piquant combination of physical remoteness and emotional intensity.
Proust’s letters to the Williamses, recently discovered in a Paris archive, span the decade from 1908 to 1918. These 26 items make a delightful addendum to the four-volume Selected Letters. What makes this small volume worth having, however, is the bookmaking, including the textured endpapers and facsimiles of letters in which the lines of loose and airy handwriting sometimes droop and run off the page … [Lydia Davis] offers insights from her experience translating Swann’s Way and a remembered glimpse of what remained of Proust’s bedroom some years ago.
Letters to His Neighbor is an entertaining collection of notes the author sent to a woman who lived in his building in Paris. Discovered in a French archive in 2013, the letters, from 1908-16, depict a person just begging for a few minutes of peace ... Accompanying essays by Lydia Davis, whose translation preserves Proust’s sparse punctuation, and Jean-Yves Tadie, Proust’s biographer, provide the requisite background ... Proust also wrote vividly about the war, and about his worries for his brother, Dr. Robert Proust ...was never more detailed than when discussing his noise-related concerns.
So a newly discovered cache of letters, as slender as Proust’s great creation is fat, gives occasion not to resubmit Proust’s talent to the artistic calipers for yet another measurement, but to discuss the writer’s need for quiet ... Yet mysteriously they collectively form a work every bit as rich as an epistolary prose poem, or a novella, or the singular form of brief story of which translator Lydia Davis... The writer’s suffering and solitude make a far more resounding clamor on the page ...deceptively slight collection of letters, recently unearthed in a Paris archive, evokes similarly lavish wonders ... Lydia Davis’s elegant translation, too, begets complex considerations.
Renowned Proust translator Lydia Davis reproduces the author’s idiosyncratic usage and orthography faithfully, mimicking the improvised quality of these dashed-off letters with a slashing verve ... The real magic of her afterword comes in its coda, which tells the story of the grandson of a Norman florist reading extracts from these letters online and subsequently disclosing Proust’s flower-buying habits and etiquette with the Williamses and others, noting the thirty-two times that he visited the shop between 1908 and 1912. Unearthing these intricately revealing records is the true Proustian pursuit, redeeming Davis’s mini-gospel of its few apocryphal lapses and elevating this volume’s host of testamentary material to nearly the level of the letters themselves. A tiny reliquary, this book’s illuminated codex now serves as a minor pilgrimage for all true Proustian communicants.
Letters to His Neighbor, brilliantly translated by Lydia Davis, is a collection of beseeching letters that Proust wrote to his noisy upstairs neighbor, a dentist. The letters are inadvertently hilarious in their hyper-genteel poise; we see Proust at his most desperate, charming to the extreme, an effect no doubt amplified by Davis’s elegant prose ...these letters endear us to him and his struggle for peace.
Even literary greats, it turns out, are not immune to the vagaries of apartment living, as proved by this slim but enchanting volume of recently recovered letters ... Though born of frustration, the correspondence also brought rewards, as Proust found himself in empathetic accord with this artistically inclined woman...letters start in approximately 1909 and continue until 1916. Though the overall picture is fractured by the fact that we do not have Marie's side of the story, Proust's letters brim with wit, grace, and reflection.
One might wonder why a man as sensitive to noise as Proust chose to live in a Paris building where someone might set up a dental practice two floors above him ... Despite the noise, Proust and the Williamses developed a close friendship, as is documented in these letters written between 1908 and 1916 ... Marie’s responses, thought to be lost, would have made the book more engaging, but Proust’s letters are as poetic as one might expect. They also show his self-deprecating wit ... A trove of charming correspondence from literature’s most famous 'noise phobic.'
