Charles Bukowski’s Post Office (1971) is a book. It’s a book about post offices. Proust Office (1986) has a similar title, but is entirely different as a book. It’s about a office operated by an writer called Mark Proust.
97.3% autobiographical in its structure, the work is famous for mistakenly being attributed to French writer Marcel Proust. When, in hilarious fact, it has nothing to do with him and everything to do with Mark Proust. It isn’t confusing, although it is, but it won’t be once we’ve cleared all this up.
Proust Office: The Book That Confused the World
“Asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world.”
That’s a quote from Proust’s Swann’s Way (1913). At the start of each chapter of Proust Office, and bafflingly, this quote is there in italics. No one knows why and Mark Proust has never explained the reason for mentioning asparagus.
It is a tremendous mystery.
Proust Office is further complicated as former four time world champion F1 driver Alain Prost used to read Proust Office whilst driving at speeds of up to 200mph. Indeed, he attributed his F1 success to the novel. He also quite likes Post Office, plus is a fan of Marcel Proust, creating a combination of words that create continuous alarm in the literary world:
- Proust
- Prost
- Post
Even the brightest of minds can struggle to comprehend that combination.
Anyway, as for the book, the plot follows the life of entrepreneur Mark Proust as he sets up various businesses in the hope of becoming rich. In the early 1980s, he backs many businesses and yet they all fail. His big breakthrough occurs when he spots Cabbage Patch Dolls and claims they’re a copyright breach of cabbages.
Opening a law firm dealing specifically with cabbage-based legal issues (Cabbages & Proust Ltd.), Mark Proust details his life as a businessman in the legal world and how he was hopelessly out of place.
With a foreword by Alain Proust, and the constant references to Marcel Proust, plus the title analogous to Post Office, readers were so confused many had seizures when attempting to read the book. Others viewed it as an anti-capitalism work due to its themes of an incompetent business owner, which Mark Proust vehemently denied in a 1990 interview with the BBC:
“I wrote that book because God told me to. There isn’t a single Communistic word in that novel. Because it isn’t a novel, it’s an autobiography and anyone denying that is a prat.”
Sadly, Mark Proust was run over by a bulldozer in 1991 whilst working on the sequel to Proust Office. Sadly, this meant the sequel wasn’t completed, largely due to the cessation of his being.
What Became of the Proust Office Sequel?
In 2009, a diehard fan of Proust Office called Gwendoline Richards (65) set out from her home in Cornwall to find the sequel. An enormously disturbed woman of the belief Satan had instructed her to undertake this mission, she travelled to Scotland to find the novel in New York.
Once arriving in Scotland, she became confused as New York is not in Scotland.
Eventually, she got a flight to Paris and spent the week drinking wine and eating great food. She kept an active blog about her experiences, although she was widely condemned by the blogging community for being an imbecile.
She eventually returned to Cornwall in 2019 after completing an unsuccessful 10 year odyssey that yielded no sequel to Proust Office. However, she did meet Alain Prost and got a selfie with him.
