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( Indeed! And do you know anyone at Balbec? )
The ten-page passage about M. Legrandin, who is a terrible snob but cannot admit it even to himself and so weaves an elaborate mythology of his own independent and poetic nature whenever he is asked whether he knows someone, is the funniest thing I have read so far in 2016. It was lucky for me that there was no one in the store when I first read it, so I could just put my head down on the counter until I had partially recovered from the image of Legrandin writhing under the invisible arrows of his own unspeakable self-awareness "like a Saint Sebastian of snobbery."
"My father raised the subject again at our subsequent meetings, torturing him with questions, but it was labour in vain: like that scholarly swindler who devoted to the fabrication of forged palimpsests a wealth of skill and knowledge and industry the hundredth part of which would have sufficed to establish him in a more lucrative but honourable profession, M. Legrandin, had we insisted further, would in the end have constructed a whole system of landscape ethics and a celestial geography of Lower Normandy sooner than admit to us that his own sister was living within a mile or two of Balbec, sooner than find himself obliged to offer us a letter of introduction[. . .]"
( Indeed! And do you know anyone at Balbec? )
The ten-page passage about M. Legrandin, who is a terrible snob but cannot admit it even to himself and so weaves an elaborate mythology of his own independent and poetic nature whenever he is asked whether he knows someone, is the funniest thing I have read so far in 2016. It was lucky for me that there was no one in the store when I first read it, so I could just put my head down on the counter until I had partially recovered from the image of Legrandin writhing under the invisible arrows of his own unspeakable self-awareness "like a Saint Sebastian of snobbery."
"My father raised the subject again at our subsequent meetings, torturing him with questions, but it was labour in vain: like that scholarly swindler who devoted to the fabrication of forged palimpsests a wealth of skill and knowledge and industry the hundredth part of which would have sufficed to establish him in a more lucrative but honourable profession, M. Legrandin, had we insisted further, would in the end have constructed a whole system of landscape ethics and a celestial geography of Lower Normandy sooner than admit to us that his own sister was living within a mile or two of Balbec, sooner than find himself obliged to offer us a letter of introduction[. . .]"
