You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. Today I'm talking to Michael

Wood, an emeritus professor of Princeton and contributing

editor at the LRB. He's the author of many books on Yates, Nabokov, Stondahl, Hitchcock and Emson, among other subjects.

He has also contributed more pieces than anyone else to the London Review of Books, nearly 400 of them at the last count.

His most recent book and his most recent piece are both on

Marcel Proust. The piece is a review of two translations of the first volume of Alaricest

Tutant Perdou, Swan's Way, translated by James Greve and the Swanway, or the Swanway. We can talk

about pronunciation maybe a bit later, translated by Brian Nelson. Hello, Michael.

Thank you very much for talking to me today. Good morning, Tom. Proust novel, you write at the

start of your piece, is founded on a gesture so famous that it's hard to retain the idea of its

risk. It's also so famous that you take the risk of not saying what it is, though in your last

paragraph you do refer to

the Madeline episode in which the narrator is, as you put it, too preoccupied with the evocation

of his complicated feelings to get far in understanding them. The episode is also so famous that it's

sometimes misremembered by readers or by people referring to it, who may mention the Madeline,

but neglect to mention the T.

So maybe to begin, you could tell us what happens with the Madeline and the T, and why is it a risky gesture?

Okay.

The thing of many readers, even good readers actually ignore, is what I was basing the piece on in a way, is that this event might not have happened.

Actually, not quite that, since any event might not have happened.

But the Proust goes out of his way to underline the ways it might not have happened.

And we tend to, all of us tend to over read that because the story, the traditional story is,

...