Harsh Early reviews of Marcel Proust and James Joyce

A recent discussion of UNZ.org in the Wilson Quarterly, noted that some of the early opinions of the greatest works of Marcel Proust and James Joyce were hardly overwhelmingly favorable. For example:

A browse through The Bookman, a New York-based journal published from 1895 to 1933, unearths some astringent literary pronouncements. Of the second installment of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, published in French in 1919, the reviewer declared that he was “a little surprised to find any but the professional student of letters reaching more than his first half-dozen pages.” In 1922, the novelist and critic Arnold Bennett said of James Joyce’s Ulysses, “As I finished it, I had the sensation of a general who has just put down an insurrection.”

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