‘The Proustographer’ recreates the writer’s life and work in infographics, from his drugs to his vital and literary hobbies / Up to 2,500 characters parade through the 2,399 pages of his novel cycle, amounting to 1.2 million words
Brilliant as he was, Marcel Proust wrote thousands of pages in a soundproofed room. In addition to gossip of great literary height, his work contains an ocean of numbers and data that Nicolas Ragonneau and Nicolas Beoajuan played with to illuminate a book as entertaining as it is astonishing: “The Proustographer” (Alianza Editorial). It’s an infographic delirium in search of the lost figures of Proust and his literary and personal hobbies. Anyone who approaches him knows what drugs he took, how many letters he wrote, what the most commonly used verb form is in the 2,399 pages of “In Search of Lost Time,” how many characters he created, or what he treasures in his meager library.
You will see that the longest sentence the cupcake genius has ever written contains a whopping 931 words. The shortest, one: Ah! That with 1.2 million words and 2500 characters, horses appear 25 times in his writings, which makes the horse the most Proustian animal, before the butterfly, the dog and the cow. That he spent 6,000 francs on drugs in 1919 alone, that he challenged himself to a duel once in his life, or that he never took the subway. You’ll find out what her favorite restaurants in Paris were, the variations of her bank accounts, or how often she uses the word “duchess.”
It may seem useless knowledge, but his knowledge will be admired as much as his readers, through a hundred meticulous infographics that paint, in numbers, charts and signs, a revealing profile of the brilliant novelist who has sold nearly seven million copies of his great fictional cycle.
The authors have elaborated their painstaking work on the basis of all available data on the life and work of the fierce Proust. For example, they confirm that the pages of ‘In Search of Lost Time’ contain 99,106 commas, the most common punctuation mark used by Proust. He was much more moderate with the point, which he ‘only’ used 38,961 times.
The third most common punctuation mark in the seven volumes of his great novel is the script, which he uses 5,091 times. The most common verb form, which represents 28% of the total, is said to be equivalent to the Spanish simple past tense. Something logical in Proustian script, unfolding in a diffuse and static place of the past. The future tense, the least used verb form in his novel, takes up only 1%.
Proust had a curious technique for correcting texts: he added strips of paper pasted vertically and horizontally, which unfolded into a large column. He used them to enrich and retouch his originals. Proust’s longest manuscript measures one meter and two feet, a large ‘paperolle’ (as the technique is called), approaching the writer’s height, who was 1.68 meters in length. On one line, all the words ‘In Search of Lost Time’ would add up to 10.3 kilometers.
It takes a seasoned reader, an actor, 127 hours and 47 minutes to read the fiction that was for some time one of the longest of its time. But he is far surpassed by Honorée de Balzac, whose entire series “The Human Comedy” would take the same reader for 435 hours. For comparison, the authors add that the reading of the series ‘Game of Thrones’ takes 76 hours.
Proust medicated and anesthetized himself with 14 different substances. Asthma prevented him from living a normal life since his adolescence and forced him to attend a high school course, without the doctors being able to stop his attacks. He also suffered from insomnia, anxiety, abdominal pain and intestinal disorders.
To combat these ailments, he took sleeping pills based on opium and morphine. He also took Veronal, a drug he abused until he forgot “everything” he wrote in one of his volumes. He alternated it with Trional, Teotronal, Dial-Ciba and Didial. He was not averse to stimulants like adrenaline, caffeine or evatmine.
It occupied six flats in Paris, in the 8th and 16th arrondissements. He wore five types of mustache from puberty to his death, including those called walrus or charlot. An unrepentant grave moon, it is estimated that he wrote more than 100,000 letters, of which 30,000 are known.
‘Madame’ and ‘Monsieur’ top the list of most commonly used nouns, closely followed by ‘femme’ (woman) and ‘chose’ (thing). Racine is the author most cited by Proust, but his library was modest and he could hardly be called a bibliophile. It was as if he carried it in his head, endowed with a wonderful memory that allowed him long passages of tragedies and poems.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
