About Our Cover

It was at that elegant dinner party ending the Marcel Proust Gesellschaft's social rounds that I met Professor Funke, totally by serendipity. My friend Michael Sostarich thought we should choose seats for the dinner separately, so we might meet other members; out of respect to this group of associates, I waited until most of them had settled in their places of choice and then looked for the empty spots. It was one of those miracles that I, forever trying to cajole one of my artist friends into doing a cover for me, should find myself facing a fine artist who has devoted his career to the intertwining of Proust and art. We fell into a most pleasant conversation.

Professor Funke told me that ever since his first reading of Proust, he has worked in the manner which Proust called "involuntary memory" and all his work, be it painting or collage, draws passionately on our joint literary obsession. The piece on this cover is what Professor Funke describes as "a kind of palimpsest, in which fragments of pictures superimpose fragments of phrases", combining bits of the famous photograph of Proust and the original manuscript describing the death of Bergotte. In the one below, Proust's intense eyes, from that same photograph, gaze out from a drawing Proust had done himself of the Cathedal of Amiens.

P Segal