What excites me most about this book is the combination of two apparently incompatible aspects: first, the quality of poignancy, wit, comedy, and, like, realism, in the observations; second, the constant questioning of what observation and reality are. The book is a novel...more This review contains spoilers, but nothing gets spoiled that you wouldn't figure out from the jacket flap. If, indeed, you're the kind of person whose enjoyment gets spoiled at all by knowing plot elements in advance.

What excites me most about this book is the combination of two apparently incompatible aspects: first, the quality of poignancy, wit, comedy, and, like, realism, in the observations; second, the constant questioning of what observation and reality are. The book is a novel that satisfies all our expectations of memoir/autobiography, yet foils any attempt to ask the questions that most irritate novelists: is what happens in your book true? Did it happen to you this way? Did you make it up? Is it real?

The narrator of Swann's Way states outright that true reality is to be found only in memory. But the chapter/novella Swann in Love contained within this volume, which at first appears to have been summoned into literary and emotional reality by the bite of tilleul-soaked madeleine, is described by our narrator as the cribbing of another person's memories, narrated long after the events, and perhaps even secondhand--and bearing a suspicious resemblance to other events experienced by the narrator himself. Can we trust the narrator's description of Swann's unrequited longing for Odette, when that longing looks so similar to the narrator's own longing for his mother's bedtime kiss? Whose memory are we talking about anyway? Whose reality? Are we seeing a universality of feeling, the means by which the narrator (or the reader) can empathize with Swann's wildly different experience, the empathy that supposedly proves the honesty or truth of a scene? (It is honest because it feels real to me; it is honest because it's exactly like the time that I....) Or are we seeing an outlandishly stretched analogy that has been planted to highlight the artificiality of connection, of empathy? Is Proust tricking us into exposing just how limited our imaginations are in apprehending existences separate from ours? (If that which is honest is so only because it appears so to me, does that mean that nothing is honest which is outside my own experience and my own ability to analogize? Am I really that egocentric?)

Even were we to succeed in establishing the narrative perspectives as memory/reality on one hand, and fiction/analogy/empathy on the other, both the novella and the framing story show us that memory and the experience of reality are tenuous: our apprehension is limited and unreliable, and so much more so must be our memory of what we've apprehended. Swann learns that his most cherished memories of Odette, accepted by him as truth, were--had always been--only later became--not what he thought they were. When did they become lies--when they were happening, or when he found out--if they have indeed become lies at all? So, if the narrator recognizes this in Swann, is he not suggesting to us that we should read the life at Combray, the remembered childhood, and in particular the incident of the madeleine with a gram of, if not skepticism, then of pity, and regret, and, yes, empathy, because all of us are made fools by our memories? Because none of us has a better mastery of her own reality? Maybe our narrator isn't savvy enough to have figured this out, but Proust certainly knows, that while Swann abjects himself before Odette, a slippery elusive lying cheating ho, those of us trying to grasp the truth of literature, of other people, and even of our own lives, experience a similar thralldom.

So, is it possible at all to answer all of these questions with a Yes? Can one reconcile the experience of reality with the knowledge of its artificiality, the feeling of connection with the awareness of its limitation? Can we appreciate all Proust's literary hijinks at our expense, while admitting that yes, we were convinced by his descriptions of the pink hawthornes in bloom, of Francoise's munificence at the market, of the aunts' vulgarity (among the most delicious descriptions), of the terrible need to confess to love and desire even if one knows that the object of our affection will be repulsed by our confession? Can truth be found anywhere at all?