Marcel Proust by Eric Ezendam
2016

Proust and the Sex Rats

A modest investigation into whether the French writer indulged in an unusual fetish.

By Adam Gopnik
June 13, 2021

Many people have asked me, since the publication of my long review of new books on Proust, about what seemed a perhaps too-casual reference to Proust’s paraphilia—a fancy but fashionable word for a sexual fetish—somehow involving the use, or rather abuse, of caged rats. I had danced past this quickly in the essay, not out of delicacy but out of an unwillingness to linger too long on a controversial point in the Proust biographical literature, and also because to go into it in depth would have required not merely a parenthesis but something more like a relentless footnote, or what used to be called, in the heyday of glossy magazines, a sidebar. Herewith though, in response, is that sidebar, with an attempt to make sense of the anecdote, true or false.

Romain Gary / The Made-Up Man

His moral vision, like his personal heroism, was authentic. Little else was.

Photograph by Jean Claude Pierdet / INA / Getty

Romain Gary

The Made-Up Man

The writer Romain Gary was an inveterate fabulist. But his work is sustained by an authentic moral vision.

By Adam Gopnik

January 1, 2018

Romain Gary was a great big liar. The French novelist, war hero, and diplomat made up stories the way other people make up beds: daily and conscientiously and without much premeditation. He lied all the time, and about many things. He lied about his background: born Roman Kacew in Lithuania, in 1914, right at the beginning of the European catastrophe, as a poor Jew among poor Jews. He lied about his mother, his father, his education, his literary history, his loves. His fine and patient and entirely admiring biographer, David Bellos, not only called his study of Gary “A Tall Story” but throughout uses words like “bullshit” and “eyewash” to characterize the tales his subject told.

But Gary was a big liar. This desperately poor Eastern European Jew reinvented himself as a French patriot and literary figure, titles he earned by fighting for France and by writing very good novels in French, one of which won the Goncourt Prize, France’s highest literary award. And then, when he was famous under one made-up name and persona, he invented another name and persona, and wrote well enough in this very different voice to win a second Goncourt Prize. (The rules say it can be awarded to someone only once, so he remains the sole writer with this distinction.) No lie Romain Gary told was bigger than that he was Romain Gary.

Michel Houellebecq / The Next Thing

Michel Houellebecq

The Next Thing

Michel Houellebecq’s Francophobic satire 

BY ADAM GOPNIK

JANUARY 26, 2015 

The French writer Michel Houellebecq has become a literary “case” to be reprimanded as much as an author to be read, and his new novel, “Soumission,” or “Submission,” shows why. The book, which will be published in English by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is shaped by a simple idea. In France in the very near future, the respectable republican parties fragment the vote in a multiparty election, and the two top vote-getters are Marine Le Pen, of the extreme right, and one Mohammed Ben Abbes, the fictive leader of a French Muslim Brotherhood. In the runoff, the French left backs the Muslim, preferring the devil it doesn’t know to the one it does. Ben Abbes’s government soon imposes a kind of relaxed Sharia law throughout France and—this is the book’s central joke and point—the French élite are cravenly eager to collaborate with the new regime, delighted not only to convert but to submit to a bracing and self-assured authoritarianism. Like the oversophisticated Hellenists in Cavafy’s poem, they have been secretly waiting for the barbarians all their lives.