Letters to his Neighbour – Old Paper & Cats, Reviews by S. Hargrave

Reading Slump at a Bad Time of Year

I read a lot in a year. I read a lot on any given day. Reading is part of the backbone of my schedule, the work I do with my lovely spouse, and a huge part of keeping me calm and mentally healthy. However, reading slumps can and do happen. Usually, it signals a large shift in my mood that needs to be addressed. This November I’ve gone through a particularly bad patch where I barely read at all. It makes me sad. It makes me feel less of myself. It’s difficult not to get frustrated and angry and neglect the things I know I need to do to help my mood.

A tortie cat in a red-and-green tartan bow, sits primly beside a book with Marcel Proust's picture on the cover.

It comes at a particularly bad time because the autumn and early winter are when there is a massive influx of reprinted rare literary gems and special volumes appearing in my local independent bookstore. Everyone is getting their to-read stack ready and talking about getting cosy with a book. But for me in times like these, books can seem like little packets of disappointment and sorrow.

I’ve been trying to be generous and understanding with myself and read what I feel like when I feel like and not focus on how much or how little I manage to get through. It also helps that my spouse has been insistent on keeping up our book-based discussions and routines and is insistent that I am still a reader. I still love books and literature and I will enjoy them again, even if I am not right now.

The inside of a slim book shows a letter signed 'Marcel Proust' and addressed to 'Madame'. Beside it is a picture of a letter handwritten in French.

Some Context

Though New Directions Publishing’s collection of Marcel Proust’s letters to his upstairs neighbour came out in 2017, I decided to review it as a holiday selection because I found it in the influx interesting books my local independent bookstore got in for the holiday season. If you haven’t noticed, collections of correspondence are extremely popular as gifts for the literarily inclined and every year brings a new collection. Two years ago, Simon and Schuster came out with Remembrance, a collection of Ray Bradbury’s correspondence. This year Knopf released the correspondence of Oliver Sacks entitled simply Letters.

A tortie cat wearing a dapper bow on its collar looks down at a book about Marcel Proust.

In Letters to His Neighbour, the reader is only provided with 26 fairly short letters, but it is the context that makes these missives special. Proust was a man who was very sensitive to noise, and Paris was (and is) a very cacophonous metropolis. He went so far as to line the walls of his apartment in cork to save some of his concentration. And then his upstairs neighbour married a divorcée, Mme Williams, who brought with her a young, rather loud son. These letters are his attempt to both be nice and to deal with the age-old problem of hearing the upstairs neighbours doing whatever it is they do to make those strange sounds they universally make.

Marcel Proust's Letters to his Neighbour has a cover with a picture of Proust on it and the title and author written on scattered postage stamps.

The Letters

Even in these letters, you can see just how good of a writer that Proust is. They are unfailingly polite and more often than not came with gifts of flowers or even a pheasant or two. He delightfully skirts around the point — that he would please, please, please like some quiet. Just a little bit of quiet? In the mornings? Please?

He never accuses Mme Williams or her son of being loud, but instead weaves a tapestry of pain and illness that one cannot help but sympathize with — along with maybe one or two flattering compliments about just how lovely they are and just how awful most neighbours can be. Reading these letters is an amusing experience, especially because you’re looking back at them from the 21st century and can see that, while a lot of things change, some things — and some problems — will always remain the same.

Marcel Proust's Letters to his Neighbour lies beside the paws of a tortie cat.

What Can Be Learned

This volume includes a lot of delightful content along with the letters including photographs and facsimile letters in Proust’s own hand. It’s a nice, little book that is purely fun in the reading and in the analysis. Most importantly, it gives the reader a chance to see Proust outside of the leviathan presence of In Search of Lost Time. Here, we see him as a creative with the same problem most of us have — finding space, time, and concentration to work on our crafts. Also? The delicate politics and politeness that comes with dealing with people who live in close quarters with us.

Actually, reading this reminded me a lot of our old apartment and dealing with our own set of noisy neighbours. When that happens, it feels like you are outside of time, connecting with someone who has been gone for so long and put on a pedestal but, for the span of a few letters, is sitting across from you. Commiserating over a cup of tea…and potentially a madeleine.

A copy of Letters to his Neighbour sits beside a cat and a little red birdhouse ornament with holly tied to the base.

Black Friday

As I write this, I am trying to decompress from all of the chaos that is Black Friday. We don’t line up in the wee hours of the morning for deals, but, in our household, it’s taken on a kind of shopping holiday ritual that we both enjoy but limit to a strict budget and a couple of hours in the mall. And, of course, we did watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade yesterday — though it’s a bit of strange experience for a Canadian that had Thanksgiving dinner more than a month ago.

This year, the challenge was the blizzard we experienced and trying to put up the Christmas lights in the middle of it. But my lovely spouse was so excited for her new set of Tru-Tones, it had to be done!