A voyage of literary discovery: Clara Reads Proust, by Stéphane Carlier, reviewed

Should Alain de Botton ever require fictional evidence of ‘How Proust Can Change Your Life’, he could do worse than to turn to Clara, the protagonist of Stéphane Carlier’s latest delightful novel. Clara is a hairdresser in a rather rundown provincial salon in France. She has a good relationship with her boss, Madame Habib, her colleagues, Nolwenn and Patrick, and her loyal clientele, and a more vexed one with JB, her boyfriend of three years, a muscular firefighter who resembles Flynn Ryder in the Disney cartoon. 

One day, a mysterious stranger comes to the salon. He barely speaks while Clara is cutting his hair and leaves her no tip, but she finds that he’s left something far more precious: a paperback copy of Swann’s Way.  Leafing through it, she spots an underlined sentence: ‘You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist’s nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs.’

Instinctually, she applies it to herself and, like another hairdresser, the heroine of Willy Russell’s Educating Rita, embarks on a voyage of literary and personal discovery. After initially struggling with Proust’s prolixity, she comes to realise that his rich sensibility more than compensates for his labyrinthine sentences.

 She becomes obsessed with the novel, prioritising it over her relationships with both JB and her parents. She starts to imagine how Proust would have portrayed her clients. She has her own moments of involuntary memory and even dreams of sleeping with the writer, thinking ‘how strange it is that aside from his literary talent, nobody talks about the fact that Proust was an exceptional lover’.

At a friend’s request, she reads passages from Swann in Love to the elderly Madame Renaud. Her success encourages her to give a series of public readings, through which she encounters a coterie of artists.