The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 15 January 2007
by Kristjana Gunnars
There are some books which absorb a reader, or which come to occupy the reader's life, taking up residence and casting a tone or atmosphere to everything the reader reads or does. The Lord of the Rings is such a book, for some readers. Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is another, for other readers (or the same readers, who knows?). Kristjana Gunnars is not the first reader to notice this. In this book, she is another who comes to write of the experience, and of a passage from her life colored by Proust's absorbing and addictive prose. During a summer's sojourn in Trier, Germany, the author is, ostensibly, researching the writer Mavis Gallant. In an alien place, and in a furtive romance with an unnamed lover, Gunnars takes up Proust to have a place where she remains grounded. Her afternoons in the rose garden, reading his intricate prose, turn her mind to language, writing, and how they play a part in or dominate our lives. This is a short book, part memoir, part literary essay, part novel (we guess). It is thoughtful and challenging. Gunnars cites many other authors in their thoughts on language and its role in governing our universe. Her writing is episodic, broken up into brief and often intense insights into literature, fortunately broken up in such a way that the reader can pause to chew on each idea before proceeding. It is by no means a comprehensive literary exploration of Proust. It is more in the way of fragments, literary ideas that have popped up and been set aside, organized here into a "madeleine moment", a memory conjured up from a glass of wine, reflecting upon that ever-mysterious, ever-irresistable lure of great language and greater literature.