He read for six days: three days on, the weekend off, and three days reading again. Just take it one novel at a time.’Īnd so, sitting in front of the microphone on 2 August 2011, he started to read. Seven novels, starting with Swann’s Way and finishing with Time Regained. ‘But when I started to look at it not as one long novel, the longest novel of all, but seven separate novels, I began to think that I could do it after all. There is a vast cast of characters, who change as time passes, and the range and intensity of emotion also has to be managed. ‘It is so huge! It is also a difficult read technically, with extremely challenging sentences which go on for pages, and few paragraphs or chapters. ‘When I was first asked to read Proust unabridged, I was daunted by the thought,’ said Neville. To be truthful, this is not understood by many of the younger generation who train for film and television, and are seriously challenged by anything approaching a Proustian sentence. He comes from the old RADA-trained school of acting, where breath management and control were instilled in the first year of study (on graduation, Neville was awarded the diction prize by Sir John Gielgud) and he has never lost it. Without any fuss, he sat down at the microphone, opened the first page of Swann’s Way, and began. On 2 August 2011, he set off from his flat about 20 minutes walk across the park of Primrose Hill, threaded his way through the backstreets of Hampstead, and arrived at the studio. As he said over a coffee yesterday: ‘I knew that if I didn’t do it now – when would I do it?’ You would never believe it from the sound of his voice, but Neville Jason is 78, and still one of the finest audiobook readers regularly working. We both knew, I think, that, however it happened, Proust had become a huge part of his life: there were many listeners all over the world for whom Neville had become synonymous with Proust and had written to say so, and the unabridged recording simply had to be done. Then, last year, when I asked him again, and we discussed it further, he assented. He sat in his chair and he pondered.Įventually, he said he didn’t feel quite ready to go up that particular mountain again, quite yet. If truth be told, when I first asked him a few years ago whether he would do it, his eyes narrowed, his breath came a little short, and he sat in his chair and he pondered. We have found that some go on to the higher slopes, some do not.īut even for Neville, the prospect of unabridged Proust was, he recalled, a vision of snow-capped Mount Everest from base-camp. He has also completed a masterly 8 CD introductory abridgement to Remembrance of Things Past, for those who, initially, want to tread more lightly. Of course, Neville knew Proust well already, having recorded his 36 CD abridgement in the first decade of Naxos AudioBooks and having written a 3 CD biography of Proust. And if you think this may be more emotion than should be displayed in a publisher’s blog, you have not encountered Proust. I suspect both of us were experiencing a similar mixture of elation and shell shock, though maybe those qualities showed in different proportions for both of us. I thought we should present two photos: one formal, looking at the camera, and another one expressing the reality more closely: Neville looking as if he can’t quite believe it, and me looking down at the recordings released so far in appreciation, and the books from whence they came. And here are the photographs recording the moment, in the garden of Motivation Sound Studios in Hampstead, London, which hosts the Naxos AudioBooks studio within its complex. Neville finished reading it on 26 June 2012 – that is yesterday – as I write.
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