Commonwealth Club Of California Podcast

Humanities West completes its 2023–24 season by searching for the real Marcel Proust―featuring Adam Gopnik, who will give our first Vance E. Carney Memorial Lecture. Gopnik has been writing for The New Yorker for more than three decades and has often riffed poetic on Proust. From the September 17, 1990 issue: “. . . watching our building go co-op has been . . . a lot like the experience of reading Proust. You begin hopefully, you dream of new vistas of pleasure opening up before you, you think that your friends will think better of you for having done it . . . and then you get bogged down and the whole thing seems to go on forever.” From the June 14, 1999 issue: “As late as the nineteen-fifties, when most Americans already took it for granted that he was among the greatest of modern writers, a lot of people in France saw Proust as a slightly secondary figure―the way we might have seen a long-winded Scott Fitzgerald, or a Truman Capote who actually got his book written. In the past twenty-five years, though, a