Open twenty-four seven, it is a small miracle of capitalism, unaffected by the diurnal cycles of waking and sleeping, as is the marble foyer that appears to shine just as bright in the night as in the day. Meanwhile, the bodega, the endpoint of the narrator's habitual excursions, is seemingly immune from time. Proust's narrator repeatedly goes to bed Moshfegh's repeatedly wakes up. As in the Proust, the layering of timeframes–a singular action takes place as part of a daily routine that is repeated over an unspecified duration of days, weeks, or months–disorients us.
The opening conjunction whenever possesses the same built-in iterativity as Proust's adverb longtemps, immediately placing us in the cyclical time of daily practices Moshfegh underscores the habitual nature of the action with the contraction I'd and the qualifier night or day.
It doesn't bend the rules of grammar, but it induces the same kind of temporal wobble. Moshfegh's sentence owes a considerable debt to Proust. 4 You might even say that the iterative becomes, for Proust, the very substance of the novel. 3 According to Genette, in fact, Proust does not merely employ the iterative he displays an “intoxication” with it.
Gerard Genette calls this a problem of “frequency,” since it linguistically blends a singulative narrative event (something that happens once) with an iterative one (something that happens repeatedly).
#My year of rest and relaxation satire how to
Enright emends the translation to “I would go to bed” Lydia Davis and Google Translate opt for “I went to bed.” What the translators famously wrestle with is how to render Proust's ungrammatical combination of the completed action of the passé composé (“went to bed”) with a modifier (“long time”) that implies a repeated, habitual, or everyday action. Scott Moncrieff's translation of Proust, whose French reads, “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.” D. More accurately, the second sentence begins C. The first of these sentences begins Ottessa Moshfegh's 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation the second, Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
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