GLR January-February 2023

the dialogue, advances the story economically and com pellingly. It also succeeds in creating wonderfully colorful and full-blooded characters. The somewhat clipped, occasionally disorienting style reaches its zenith when Fahad receives the news that his father has died: “Abus stopped, an alarm sounded, and a platform extended from beneath its doors like a tongue. It was absurd and at once everything was absurd: the tourists hud dling by the gates to the museum, a pair of pigeons pecking at a plastic bag, an elderly man pushing an empty pram diagonally across the road despite the oncoming traffic. How grey it was, how grey, as if there were no such thing as sun.” In the end, Other Names is about far more than shifting at titudes about homosexuality or a troubled father-son relation ship. It’s about what constitutes one’s identity. What does it mean to be Pakistani or British? To be a son? To be a gay man? In trying to make Fahad a carbon copy of himself, Rafik is con cerned that the old ways—in which he used his power to shape the country around him—will die, along with the memory of him. He continually boasts that everything in his village was jungle before he transformed it into profitable farmland. But, as the country moves on from that agricultural model, what ex actly does that achievement amount to? What does the history of one man or that of an entire country matter? This book ex plores both questions. ____________________________________________________ Dale Boyer’s newest volume of selected poems, Columbus in the New World , is now available.

at which the work’s artistic in novation ceases to compen sate for its repeated anti-queer morality, at least to the extent that it forfeits its status as an “important gay book”? A hundred years ago, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, himself a gay man and friend of gay writers like Wilfred Owen and Noel Coward, evidently thought so.

He devoted the last eight years of his relatively short life to pro duce the first English translation of the Recherche . This transla tion has been revised three times, most recently by Proust scholar and biographer William C. Carter, based on the corrected new French edition that Jean-Yves Tadié brought out in the 1980s. Pen guin brought out a completely new translation of Tadié’s edition using several translators starting in the 1990s. Oxford University Press published yet a third translation of just the middle third of the first volume, Swann in Love , by Brian Nelson , in 2018. So, one might ask, were there particular reasons for a fourth translation of this more-or-less stand-alone section of the work? I had assumed that, as with the Penguin and Oxford translations, there might be a translator’s preface detailing them. I was wrong. There are 47 brief endnotes clarifying some of the literary and historical references in the text, but that is all. Some introductory material might have helped readers not familiar with the late 19th-century Parisian world in which it takes place. I would as sume the translator, Lucy Raitz, used the new Tadié edition, but there’s no mention of it on the verso of the title page, just the 1913 Grasset first edition, which must be out of copyright and which was full of mistakes that Proust corrected for a later Gal limard edition (and which he kept reworking until his death). The blurb on the dust jacket says that Swann and Odette continue to meet “in the drawing rooms and theaters of Parisian high society.” But Odette never gains entrance into Parisian high society, the aristocracy, only the salon of the bourgeois Ver durins. The blurb also says that Swann in Love is “sublimely witty.” But since there are few high-society settings in this part of the novel, there isn’t much of what Proust elsewhere pre sented as wit, just the failed efforts at aping it by the Verdurins’ routinely ridiculed bourgeois habitués. This is primarily a tale of one heterosexual man’s obsessive love and even more obsessive jealousy for a woman he eventu ally dismisses as his social inferior: “To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I had my greatest love, for a woman to whom I wasn’t attracted, who wasn’t my type!” (Yes, Proust’s “wit” is often classist.) Why someone should opt for this translation of Swann in Love over the Penguin or Oxford or Carter’s reworking of the Scott-Moncrieff the volume does not say. But neither can I say why someone who has decided they want to make the ef fort to read Proust—and it takes effort—should start with this section, in the original or translation. There are other parts that, for me at least, still justify putting up with its classism and homophobia. ____________________________________________________ Richard M. Berrong is a retired professor of French literature who now makes documentary films about World War II in France.

Swann As a ProblemNovel

R ICHARD M. B ERRONG

SWANN IN LOVE by Marcel Proust Translated by Lucy Raitz Pushkin Press. 255 pages, $24.

M ARCEL PROUST’S 3,000-page narrative À la recherche du temps perdu ( In Search of Lost Time ) is often cited as one of the great modern novels, as well as one of the foundations of Modernism. That it was. It is also cited as one of the most important gay novels. Whether its artis tic importance still makes its seven tomes of often uncritical ho mophobia one of our community’s most important literary works, I’m not so sure. As I read Lucy Raitz’ new translation of part of it, I recalled Harvey Fierstein being quoted as saying in The Celluloid Closet (1995) that he was happy to see even neg ative portrayals of gay men in films, because he believed in “visibility at any cost.” I’m not sure how many LGBT people today would go along with this viewpoint. It’s one thing to cringe at a homophobic scene in a favorite old movie; it’s over in a minute or two. Swann in Love ends with pages of Swann’s revulsion at the thought that the woman he loves, Odette de Crécy, might have had sex with other women. Other parts of the novel are equally homophobic. Is there a point

January–February 2023

47