70 Books & arts The Economist February 6th 2021
tems and their redundancies: what can be
tweaked, and what had best be left alone.
Temporarily—and with a bitter irony—
covid-19 has slammed the brakes on this
burgeoning area of research. But Mr Steele
thinks its first dividends will emerge with-
in a couple of years, perhaps in the form of
senolytic drugs that clear the accumulat-
ing cellular detritus of a long life. He makes
the valid point that if, for every year of sci-
entific endeavour, a year could be added to
the average human lifespan, old age would
recede into the future at the same rate as
today’s population approached it. Thatwould itself be quite a milestone on the
road to negligible senescence.
This interim goal is easily within reach,
he claims. Many scientists agree—and are
among those who have chosen to take ex-
perimental anti-ageing drugs. For some of
these treatments they have calculated that
the risks are small, compared with the po-
tential benefits. The true sign that a scien-
tific revolution is in the offing is that the
scientists themselves have bought into it.
Whether that revolution is desirable is a
different question, which it may fall to a
new generation of artists to answer. Proust and the peopleThe time of their lives
S
itting in herpink living room in Tah-
iti, Natti Tumahai reads in French from
“In Search of Lost Time” as her family eats
lunch: “I cannot say, looking back, how
much of Albertine’s life was overlaid by
fluctuating, fleeting and often contradict-
ory desires...” The passage comes from vol-
ume five of Marcel Proust’s roman-fleuve,
and Ms Tumahai is the 1,262nd person to
appear before the camera.
From Bali to Paris, the readers in Véro-
nique Aubouy’s huge project, “Proust Lu”
(“Proust Read”), have been captured in
bedrooms, offices, supermarkets, factories
and beauty spots. Farmers, schoolchil-
dren, businessmen, even the French direc-
tor’s doctor have participated. “It’s a slice of
life,” Ms Aubouy says; “a reading about
time, in time.” The cast is as diverse as the
novel’s, brought together by their own web
of connections and coincidences.Proust’s seven-volume masterpiece
runs to more than 4,000 pages. Each par-
ticipant reads just two of them, so at the
current rate the project will not be com-
pleted until 2050—57 years after filming
began. It is already 150 hours long (much of
the footage is available to watch on You-
Tube). By contrast, Proust took a mere 14
years to write the book, finishing it in 1922,
shortly before his death. Tracing the narra-
tor’s life from childhood to old age, “it of-
fers a singularly accurate depiction in fic-
tion of how consciousness works,” says Pa-
trick McGuinness of the University of Ox-
ford. “His writing forces you to inhabit
time. It doesn’t do the normal thing of
compressing narrative into chunks—it
makes the narrative more like life.”
Ms Aubouy set out to make a screen
equivalent. Instead of condensing the text
into a conventional plot, thereby losing itsrich detail, she divided it into filmable
snapshots. Trusting in happenstance, she
finds and recruits interesting people.
Readers then recommend friends. She li-
kens the project to a locomotive, “each new
person adding a wagon”.
They have declaimed from bunk beds
and stairwells or standing in the sea. Some
are wreathed in cigarette smoke. A curate
with a pigeon on his shoulder is silhouet-
ted against the stained-glass window of his
abbey in Combray, where the novel begins.
A straw-strewn cowshed is coldly illumi-
nated by strip-lights: “Madame Swann,” a
young woman intones, “seeing the enor-
mous proportions that the Dreyfus affair
was assuming, and fearing that her hus-
band’s origins might be used against her,
had begged him to no longer speak of the
innocence of the convicted man...”
Differing accents and proficiencies
generate a dream-like rhythm that swings
between the theatrical and the prosaic—
just as the novel combines the mundane
and profound. Actors such as Kevin Kline,
Annie Girardot and Mathieu Amalric fea-
ture alongside inconnuswho have not read
aloud since school. “In 2001 one girl chose
to rap,” Ms Aubouy recalls. Now 65, Marie
Benoît contributed in 2007 from her Nor-
mandy smallholding, accompanied by two
donkeys. The experience “was very mov-
ing, because reading in this way, at home,
showed that anyone can enjoy Proust.”
Each scene is one continuous shot, pre-
ceded by a slide stating a name and loca-
tion. Then comes a brief silence, as if the
new reader has been listening to the previ-
ous one. Like the novel, the clips are por-
tals into lost worlds. Over the decades the
images become sharper; fashions, haircuts
and the timbre of speech evolve.
Even during the pandemic, “Proust Lu”
has marched on. Ms Aubouy let some par-
ticipants film their readings on their
phones. And the disease itself has echoes
in Proust’s life and writing. His father,
Adrien Proust, was an epidemiologist who
tracked a cholera outbreak in 1869 and pro-
posed a cordon sanitaireto slow its spread.
Marcel’s own squeamishness about germs
surfaces in volume four, when the narrator
relates his discomfort at sharing a lift with
a man who has whooping cough. Today, as
lockdown time has seemed to blur, when
days feel long and months short, Proust’s
mesmeric work has found its time—again.
Ms Aubouy says readers often believe
they have been handed an extract for a rea-
son: though ostensibly concerned with a
different era, Proust’s story seems to reflect
the precise moments they have reached in
their lives. “And yet in reality, it’s just the
moment we’ve arrived at in the book.” The
sensation arises, she thinks, because “the
persistence of memory, and the feeling of
having wasted time, are universal.” Per-
haps never more than now. A tag-team reading of a masterpiece mimics the mood of the originalNever-ending story