In Search of Vinteuil: Music, Literature and a Self Regained (review)

Improbably, at the core of this book are the reflections of an individual who reads Proust in order to understand better the experience of listening to a rediscovered audio cassette, recorded in 1995, of his coursework for a British secondary-level school music examination. In Search of Vinteuil is part of the Critical Inventions series, whose aim, according to the Editor’s Preface, is to ‘push the conventions of literary criticism to breaking point’ (p. viii). One suspects, however, that the bulk of the book would sit rather better in a blog than between hard covers. The tone is conversational, chatty even, yet the work is burdened with unnecessary and clumsily handled end-notes. A substantial body of writings on Proust and music exists, yet little of it is acknowledged by Holden. Although he is more thorough with sources relating to sonata form and the history of the piano, one is somewhat surprised to find Wikipedia cited in an endnote (p. 129). Holden begins with a tired echo of Proust’s incipit — ‘For a long time I did not play the piano’ (p. 1) — and ends, predictably enough, with an echo of the closing phrase of À la recherche — ‘with each other again — in Time’ (p. 127). The book’s structure is musical in its nomenclature, consisting of a ‘Prelude’, where we learn of the fateful cassette recording and its rediscovery; two chapters, ‘Piece Number 1’ and ‘Piece Number 2’ (treating, respectively if circuitously, Vinteuil’s Sonata and Septet), separated by an ‘Interlude: On Deafness’; and a ‘Coda’ uninspiringly subtitled ‘Music Regained’. There is nothing here that Proust specialists or interested students of the novel cannot glean in more incisive and elegant form elsewhere — in the work of Georges Piroué, J. M. Cocking, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Peter Dayan, or Alex Ross, for example, to name just five, of whom only Cocking and Nattiez figure on Holden’s horizon. What do feature in his pages, however, are anecdotes of minor surgical interventions he has undergone; digressions on episodes of the 1970s television detective series Columbo; and a wealth of rather wearing sentences beginning ‘Allow me to [. . .]’. The landmark events of the author’s earlier years are detailed painstakingly (‘Having achieved the grades I needed (I got one A, one B and one C) I left to study English at Loughborough University’, p. 86), and the phrase ‘my girlfriend Laura’ crops up with a refrain-like regularity (pp. 43, 52, 86, 106, 117, 119, 126). The back-cover blurb asserts that ‘this highly original and compelling work represents a significant contribution to literary scholarship’; the evidence between the covers strongly suggests otherwise.