omg…PROUST REFERENCE in Nelio Biederman’s novel Lázar…the context is that a young boy (Pista) is far away from the girl he has a crush on, and he’s extremely despondent and therefore hates seeing other people happy. Including a Benedictine chaplain named Pontillus, who insists on enjoying things like nature and literature despite all the suffering in the world…

Pista could not stand Pontiller for three reasons.

First, it was because of him he had to sit in sheer boredom on the hard wooden benches of their chapel on Sundays and Wednesdays (for these were “dark times”).

Second, the chaplain was so terribly in love with life that Pista felt like taking his own. Even now that German troops had invaded neutral Belgium, he talked about how grateful he was to the Lord for the return of the spring, the resurrection of life, the carpets of snowdrops, daisies, and primroses, the rays of sun on the rear of the stable that helped the hawthorn unfurl its silky petals and stick out its bundles of gleaming stamens.

To Pista it seemed as if the Benedictine was less concerned with his faith and more with the beauty of nature, which, now that Matilda was at an unattainable distance, he himself could no longer take pleasure in. The glorious May days seemed phony, the blooming meadows gaudy, and the twittering of the birds a provocation…

Pontiller did not even regard the Bible as the greatest work of literature, but rather Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, something he admitted only in a whisper and with a hand in front of his mouth; merely the frequency with which he talked about it made this clear. Indeed he spoke so often about Marcel—he always used the writer’s first name—that one might think he were a close friend or even a lover. At any rate he considered Marcel to be a kindred spirit who would have understood him better than anyone else. And so it seemed as if his greatest regret was that he had never met the novelist personally, for he was certain that a conversation between the two of them would have been far more animated than the now well-known one between Marcel and Mr. Joyce, whom Pontiller considered an uncouth vagabond and with whom he was not on friendly terms, nor did he wish to be. By the time the two writers met in 1922 in Paris’s swanky Hotel Majestic after the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Renard, Pontiller had already settled within the thick walls of a Lower Bavarian monastery to embark on his ascetic life, which in many respects resembled Marcel’s in his Parisian soundproof cork-lined bedroom, though far removed from any high society.

Third, and finally, everyone else loved Pontiller. Although his father might make fun of him occasionally, saying things like, “I think our chaplain has forgotten that Jesus is the son of God, not his beloved Marcel,” Pista knew that he liked and admired him. The baron was fascinated by the cleric’s self-assurance, his trust in the world and God, and his ability to focus completely on the moment and on life.