Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison
by Arnold Weinstein
A Modernist Reader
A review by Gabriel Hankins
Weinstein is a passionate and lucid teacher, one of the most graceful expositors
of literature in the nation. In this literary appreciation-cum-memoir, he puts
his gifts to work for an unpopular cause: the continuing relevance of the great
books that "read us," as he claims -- that recover the reader's life through their
experimental investigations into time, relationship, gender, and history. His
avowedly humanist appeal is intended for the beginning or casual reader of Modernist
fiction, making a case for the narrative expedition into the interior recesses
of the soul, with (sometimes intimate) biographical anecdotes and heartfelt paeans.
Weinstein's book acts as an accessible invitation to the "common reader," digressing
fluidly and comfortably on Albertine, Molly Bloom, love, hate, consciousness,
madeleines, mothers, and wives (among others). For those who have already read
the staple works of Modernism that he discusses, his book will give much intellectual
pleasure and lend new insights. For those who have not attempted the Modernist
canon, this personalized exegesis may provide little incentive for the hard work
of reading; they would be better advised to listen to one of Weinstein's excellent
recorded lecture series on the same authors.
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