In short: literature condensed
Image: La Fontaine from Pixabay
Last month I read Alain De Botton’s summary of the work of Marcel Proust, titled How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997). This curious book got me thinking about the different ways longer works are summarised and how condensed forms of writing can paradoxically be the best way to expand our knowledge of a subject.
Often described as the greatest book of the 20th century, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time runs at over a million words. At 250 words a minute it would take over 70 hours to read, which does not account for the frustrating and ‘mind-meltingly slow’ pace of the narrative according to Patti Miller who spent 4 years listening to Proust read aloud.
De Botton’s work is more than a summary of the original because it arranges meditations on the life and work of Proust around themes such as friendship, paying attention, reading and being alive. Pulling together these ideas for a modern audience and condensing the brilliance of Proust into a short book makes the work accessible and appealing in a way that it isn’t otherwise.
When studying English literature at uni, I often found myself sheepishly on the sparknotes page for whichever classic book I was supposed to be reading. The site provides character breakdowns, glossaries of uncommon words in the text and sample questions to prompt new analysis of the work. Like De Botton’s book, this website offers an invitation to revisit the original, better equipped to handle its impenetrable language and imposing length.
Similarly, the Three Minute Thesis competition founded by the University of Queensland encourages graduate students to ‘effectively explain their research … in a language appropriate to a non-specialist audience’. While not a fair stand-in for the thesis itself, this exercise helps students to better understand their subject while also making their highly specialised work inviting to a broader audience.
A similar logic is applied at the state and federal government level with large documents like the findings from a Royal Commission. While the detailed content of the commission’s findings is available to access, the website will also include a summary report, a glossary of terms and a series of FAQs with the intention of making a large document shorter and more accessible.
As editors, we are often reducing word counts of the documents we work on. Some elements of this are simply mechanical, such as applying various grammatical rules to tighten sentences. But, like a summary, editing also involves comprehension so that the writing can express the central ideas of the piece with greater clarity. In short, a good summary will provide the right level of crucial information for a general audience, while also inviting the reader to go deeper if they wish.
To that end, I am now 180 pages into Proust’s novel and finally getting a first hand experience of how the sentences luxuriate and meander: not something any summary could have conveyed, particularly not David Bader’s from his book One hundred great novels in Haiku (2010):
Tea-soaked madeleine –
a childhood recalled. I had
brownies like that once.
