Uh oh, I really liked this… I guess that means I have to read the whole thing! :O ( )

There are just so many other books out there that are more rewarding, more worthy of my time. I mean, I knew this would be subtle, and complicated, and wordy. I didn't expect plot. I hoped, but didn't dare expect, characters I could learn to be interested in. But I was determined to read from the beginning until the madeleines. Which I did. I even got a bit beyond that, but I did not feel enlightened further. I did in fact already understand the point of the madeleine memory before trying to read the book. So, finally I got to p. 56 and have decided not to pick it up again.

That being said, I confess that I did mark several passages with bookdarts.

" in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them; I ran up to the top of the house to cry by myself in a little room beside the school room and beneath the roof ...."

" my father's behavior towards me still retained that arbitrary and unwarranted quality which was so characteristic of him and which arose from the fact that his actions were generally dictated by chance expediencies rather than based on any formal plan. And perhaps even what i called his severity, when he sent me off to bed, deserved that title less than my mother's or my grandmother's attitude, for his nature, which in some respects differed more than theirs from my own, had probably prevented him from realizing until then how wretched I was every evening, something which my mother and grandmother knew well; but they loved me enough to be unwilling to spare me that suffering, which they hoped to teach me to overcome, so as to reduce my nervous sensibility and to strengthen my will...."

" for the first time my unhappiness was regarded no longer as a punishable offense but as an involuntary ailment which had been officially recognized...."

Grandmother gives the boy "the four pastoral novels of [a:George Sand|1464|George Sand|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1341112433p2/1464.jpg]," and says: "'I could not bring myself to give the child anything that was not well written.' The truth was that she could never permit herself to buy anything from which no intellectual profit was to be derived, above all the profit which findings afford us by teaching us to seek our pleasures elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth." (This goes on to explain what possessions she does have, and why, and it's pretty funny, actually.)

All that worth posting in just the first bit! I should continue and get more, no? Um, no.

May 2024

edit to add: I decided to look at the GR quotes page for this book and the selected ones, the ones voted on by GR members, are either trite or misogynist. Not one from the first page is worth my click.

RE-READ 2017 ( )

Coincidentally, I finished this book just a week before the centennial of its publication, November 14.

Hard to say anything about this. It's certainly one of the best novels I've ever read, a very immersive experience, even if it takes you a lon grime to read. I read it nearly exclusively while commuting on the bus, which lead me to read it nearly twice, as I always started each session a few pages earlier than where I left off.

The opening section, the Overture and Combray, including the madeline scene is some of the most evocative writing I've ever read. Little's Marcel's story of waiting for a goodnight kiss from his mother is very affecting. Then his descriptions of the paths around Combray and what he sees there are so real they put you right there, and his characterizations of his family are moving. Swann in Love has some amazing writing about music and art, and tells the sad story of Swann's love for Odette, a woman who doesn't even appeal to him.

I wish I had read this book years ago, so I was now reading it for the second or third time. Now on to the next volume. ( )

For a long time I would go to bed early.

With those words, one of the greatest achievements of Western literature begins. Despite being a lit major, classicist and language-lover, I have somehow lived 28 years without ever committing myself to read Proust. In retrospect, I'm not sad about that, as I feel my heart, soul, and mind are more open to understanding the Frenchman's great 20th century tome with every passing year of my life.

In the opening volume, Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way, perhaps better translated as The Way By Swann's), the Scott Moncrieff-twice-updated-by-Kilmartin-and-Enright translation depicts the narrator's youth at Combray, his first crushes, and his elderly reminiscences of a world now gone by. Meanwhile, piecing together a tale that occurred before his youth, the narrator tells us of Charles Swann and his love for Odette de Crecy, in the fractured world of Paris society. It's a portrait filled with endearing and frustrating characters, precise observations about all kinds of humanity, always painful or poignant, hilarious or sly, erudite and insightful. I am eager to read the second volume, and excited for the journey I will take with Proust for the rest of my life.

Oh, marvellous independence of the human gaze, tied to the human face by a cord so loose, so long, so elastic that it can stray alone as far as it may choose!

Of course, it's no surprise that most people of my generation would never dream of reading these books, and many who start won't finish. Proust (or, perhaps, his narrator) is absorbed by description and detail. Pick any 20 pages and it's unlikely that much will happen - although I believe that's partly because this is the opening book in the series, and there is still much setup. Yet, for me, I've rarely been so delighted by a novel in all my life. Even when little plot moves (for instance, the sequence in which Swann grows increasingly jealous of Odette takes a good 100 pages), there is so much dense character development, growth of the novel's world, and immense understanding of human nature. After all, unlike what today's soap operas would tell us - or, indeed, what the 19th century romances before Proust would either - the story of love and human connection is not told in big revelations. It is told in those tiny moments, those repetitions, those instances. And they are so ably captured here. I've been reading an intelligent (if tragically brief) blog as I go, "182 Days of Proust", and have thus learned that many of the characters and places here will go on to develop later in the seven-volume sequence. This was something that, of course, Proust's contemporaries could not have known, which explains why some found the novel meandering. Everything has a place in this great study of memory; it's just a case of waiting for when.

"I love Odette with all my heart, but to construct aesthetic theories for her benefit, you'd really have to be quite an imbecile."

The country idylls at Combray present comedies of manners, in which the narrator gradually develops his psyche while a part of larger situations, some of which he cannot comprehend, even though he is often frustratingly aware that there is something he cannot comprehend. This contrasts with the middle-class character portraits of the Verdurin couple and their house parties, and the somewhat off-putting, satirised lives of the aristocracy. At this point, as a reader, I'm not yet sure how Proust felt about the class system, or where this great story is heading, but I'm quite excited for the experience. Admittedly, many of the references and social mores are now challenging for someone of my age to understand. As with any book focused on relations between people, there are parts that will always ring true, and parts that fade quickly as eras change. Yet, a little background reading and open-mindedness will cure you of that problem. Proust's lengthy sentences - and I mean lengthy, these babies can go on for a page when he feels like it - are also fascinating to us, and not always in a good way. For me, I adore the untangling of his wit. They are as luxurious as any older person's memories can be. The actor Neville Jason, who recently recorded 153 hours of the unabridged complete "In Search of Lost Time" for Naxos, said that these sentences are like music: one must find the way to phrase them, the way to link up each scattered segment. When one does, joy awaits.

I asked nothing more from life in such moments than that it should consist always of a series of joyous afternoons.

All of which is to say, starting "In Search of Lost Time" is a big commitment. Like any great work of art from a previous generation, it requires some willingness on the part of the reader to be patient, to absorb themselves in the world. Yet it will reward in spades, and is often not as hard as one might think. So many of the social jests still ring true, and certainly all of the giddiness and confusion of the young narrator - and the complexities of Odette and Swann's relationship - haunt me so. Perhaps I will find the later novels harder, as I have not yet lived through some of the experiences, but when it comes to young love and development of artistic and social temperament, it's delightful (or, occasionally, sorrowful) to feel one's own past experiences so represented in print. Particularly when the book's entire discussion is on what we have lost, and whether or not we can ever regain it.

What we suppose to be our love our our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral...

(A note on translations - the new Viking editions, each by a different translator, are apparently quite good in bringing a more modern taste to the works. For me, I'm very happy thus far with the current Modern Library/Vintage edition. The original English translation, by Charles Scott Moncrieff, has been regarded as a classic for more than 90 years. However, it had notable Victorian traces that obscured some of the greatness of Proust, and has now been updated twice, first by Terence Kilmartin in the 1980s, and more recently by DJ Enright. One day, I will certainly read the Vikings, however I am currently enjoying the connection to the past. Scott Moncrieff lived in Proust's era; to have his works complete with expert emendations seems fitting, particularly for someone like myself interested just as much in the academic conversation around the books which, for many years in the Western world, used Scott Moncrieff as the foundation stone.)

A.E. Housman said, "This is the land of lost content". Over the course of this first volume, the narrator - and, as I'm sure will be confirmed once I read my first Proust biography - the author himself desperately attempts to return to this land, taking us all with him, reminding us all of how much we have lost with each passing year. The question becomes whether we let ourselves drift back, desperately, to that land, or whether we attempt to fashion a life out of what remains. I trust Marcel Proust to take me further on this journey, aided by the skilful English translators, and I have no doubt that the "Search" will prove to be the masterpiece of the Western canon that as so many great minds before me have discovered.

The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years. ( )