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Dec 16, 2009

Cheri rated it:

If there is anything that Proust taught me, it's patience. I'm a fast reader, but his books require a slow, contemplative reading. I enjoy tight, spare prose, yet he meanders and spends a page describing the quality of light at one specific moment. I'm not sentimental, and he wallows in nostalgia. The best advice I got when starting the series was to give myself over to the experience, turn off the left hemisphere of my brain and just try to imagine the cool French air, the buttery taste of More...

2 comments like (13 people liked it)

Mar 03, 2010

David marked it as to-read

OK. Fine. I said my February reading project was going to be "Infinite Jest" and RoTP. So I'll give this another shot. Provided you all promise to give "Ulysses" another chance.

Feb 15th: here goes nuthin'!

**************************************************************************

With apologies to Alain de Botton and others, I regret to say that I am probably doomed to eternal philistinism where Proust is concerned.

My views can r More...

11 comments like (6 people liked it)

Dec 08, 2008

Michelle rated it:

Proust is unquestionably brilliant, although not for the lightminded reader by any means. I had no idea what I was getting into when I decided I needed to read this novel. It is made up of six enormously dense volumes. I've only made it through the first two, and honestly, I'm taking a break for a while. Each sentence is so well crafted and so full it takes minutes just to digest what it is you've finished reading. The minutest details of a split-second thought can have you reading for fift More...

2 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jul 26, 2007

Liel rated it:

If you have not yet read Proust, please put aside whatever else you might be reading. Better yet, get rid of it. There is hardly a point. Literature, life, art, love, yearning, the mind, brothels, dinners, celebrities, fashion, aesthetics, cookies, insomnia, the beach, France, mothers, the theater, obsession, flowers, and memory, to name just a few, are perfectly captured here. Writing before Proust is little but a long prologue; after him, side notes. Also, if you're curious about Proust, pleas More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

May 12, 2008

Dave rated it:

I am carrying these around everywhere and reading it at every chance. Nabokov said that Tolstoy was best at reproducing real time, and Proust seems to have this. You just follow the characters, feeling like you are living them. The ending to Within a Budding Grove was so beautiful. I loved the part when Marcel leans over to kiss Albertine. Proust really put me there with him. I wonder how authors do that. Reading this has been exhausting. Other books I can read for hours at a time, but t More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

May 15, 2008

Thomas rated it:

I tried. I really did. But I finally had to hide this, unfinished, between the mattress and the boxspring.

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 31, 2011

El rated it:

It seems totally appropriate to finish this re-read of the first volume (which sounds completely pretentious, right? Like who reads Proust more than once?) of Proust on the last day of the year. Here we are finishing up the last of the Artist Formerly Known as 2011 and I finished Proust (well, the first volume anyway). It feels good, really. The end of the year is all about reflection and internal reevaluation and Oprah and shit, and Proust is about those things too. (Maybe not Oprah, but t More...

3 comments like (4 people liked it)

May 17, 2007

Eric rated it:

Well, two down. Remarkable, of course, with insights into everything from the art of the novel to love to time itself and the minutiae of life in the country- or sea-side. Not only is this a source for a great Tom Russell song ("The dogs bark but the caravan moves on"). But this: "...for existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand, when some trivial incident becomes a springboard for romance. Then a whole promontory of the More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Arwen rated it:

This might just be my favorite book of all time. It's probably because I envy Proust's profession as professional nostalgist (although not his bedridden tendencies), but also because the writing is exquisite. There is a paragraph about asparagus in "Combray" that still dances behind my eyelids sometimes, and one about allegory that has changed the way I think about the relationship between art and life. Heavy stuff, but done in the lightest possible way, with the longest and most meand More...

7 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 14, 2012

Hamed rated it:

"در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته"، شاید متفاوت ترین کنابی است که هر کسی ممکن است در سراسر عمرش بخواند.برخورد اولیه خوانندگان کتاب نیز از یکی از این دو حالت خارج نخواهد بود: یا پس از تحمل کردن رنج بسیار و حداکثر 100 صفحه از جلد اول کتاب، آن را به قفسه کتاب هایی که هرگز نخواهند خواند منتقل می کنند، یا چنان شیفته و حیرت زده می شوند که به قول مترجم بزرگ کتاب، مرحوم مهدی سحابی، این کتاب آنها را از آن خود خواهد کرد.

حقیقت این که بنده شخصا هیچگاه بنا نداشتم که این کتاب را بخوانم، چرا که More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 08, 2012

Bruce rated it:

(part one of three)

Marcel Proust’s monumental novel, A la recherche du temps perdu, traditionally translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past, from a line in one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and probably better translated in more recent editions as In Search of Lost Time, consists of seven books. Having last read it a quarter of a century ago, I decided that I wanted to read it at least once more in this lifetime. In my previous reading I read ten pages each night before falli More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 21, 2011

David rated it:

A man seeking to connect with the meaning of his life discovers a new theory on the reality of time. It seems that time is not traditionally linear but rather, in truth, humans are subject to triggers, as simple as a madeleine and a cup of tea, which can send one unwittingly hurtling into the past. Depending upon the associations one may have with such triggers, the journey may be pleasant or painful. But in order to understand where we have traveled, one must revisit the past and surge existent More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 25, 2009

Matthew rated it:

June 2002
I tried starting Proust's "Swann's Way"... it is really amazingly written but very slow going... it doesn't help that the first few pages describe waking up from a dream state and not really remembering where one is...

April 2003
I started reading Proust. It's really wonderful. Deborah gave me a tip which was very effective: she advised reading "Swann in Love", the second book, before reading Combray. It worked... after attempting to begin Comb More...

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Dec 17, 2009

Jordan rated it:

I first read Proust during a frustrating, dull church retreat one January in the Colorado mountains. It rained outside, incessantly, as I neared the passage about "a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow," and then Proust's sudden nostalgia kicked in and I was likewise transported for the rest of the waning weekend. I read the rest of Proust on and off throughout that school year

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 20, 2008

Teri rated it:

I always have excellent posture when I read Proust. Even my body is at full attention; this is no casual read. Nevertheless, it is well worth the effort. Proust attains an excruciating precision in mapping both external and internal landscapes. Like Artaud, Proust articulates neurosis/obsession/madness with such detail that the reader feels privy to the narrator's psyche.

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Feb 03, 2009

J rated it:

I've finally decided that I am going to finish this mammoth this year, despite all the previous attempts in my life. I think it helps that I've reached a point in my life that I'm satisfied with an uneventful narrative, which happens for quite some stretches in these novels. Onward and upward.

Updated:

Well, I've finished the first novel of the two in this volume and it was nowhere near the struggle I had been dreading. I think age and maturity (haha) have made it definitel More...

1 comment like

Jan 10, 2009

Elizabeth rated it:

This is why I thought I loved Proust. The first 2 books are magnificent. After that, it got to be a chore. But I still have fond memories of young Marcel and the hawthorns. And that tease, Gilberte.

The Swann and Odette episodes were also absorbing, though painful at times.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 23, 2009

Emmie rated it:

I loathe Proust and would never recommend his work to anyone. If only there were a way to give negative stars. I will tell you right now everything you need to know from this book. He eats a madeleine (shell shaped biscuit of sorts) dipped in tea and this sends him hurtling down memory lane. This scene probably gets referred to more than any other Proust moment so you can snobbishly refer to it and everyone will think you read the whole darn tome (since probably nobody else ever finished it More...

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Mar 16, 2009

oriana marked it as to-read

As I was scanning my shelves tonight to decide what to read next, my eye kept snagging on all my longest books – Don Quixote, Hopscotch, Ada, or Ardor, and this. I guess I'm craving something a bit, ah, weighty?

So but I've never even attempted Proust. Can any of my smart bookfriends tell me if this translation is a good one? On the cover it says "The definitive French Pléiade edition translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin." Do C.K. and Terence know what's More...

5 comments like

Dec 23, 2011

James rated it:

Another reread. What can I say about Proust? I'm sure there's no insight to the novel or feelings about how it touches me that hasn't been expressed before in dozens of ways. Earlier in the year I came across something by Peter Gay in a book called Modernism: The Lure of Heresy: From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond that I thought insightful:

"There is a short, memorable passage titled "The Intermittences of the Heart" in A la recherche that occurs in Sodome et Gom More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 18, 2010

Adam rated it:

Proust is a scientist of human feeling.

To modern readers, that might sound like he is a reductionist who dehumanizes with every stroke of the pen, but for Proust's time, science meant careful and self-less observation.

In this treatise, entitled literally "research of lost time," Proust examines the human experience, his own and what he intuits of others in the most careful and roundabout prose ever scribed.

If you want a driver's manual to the very More...

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Oct 14, 2008

Nick rated it:

I launched into À la recherche du temps perdu the summer between high school and starting GT, struggled to finish this volume (containing the first two of seven parts), and didn't much care for it at all. Then again, those were still highly formative times, where I was trying to drag in as much different material as possible; 4000+ pages of French playboy modernism did not at that time qualify as efficient intake. These three imposing texts have traveled with me since then as a mordant whole, la More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Oct 17, 2008

Michael rated it:

Ugh. I am sick to death of M. Proust and even more so of M. Swann. Proust's modernism is tiresome at best, warping time in on itself to produce some sort of instant nostalgia that doesn't work, that draws out a short walk through the woods into a hundred page exposition of insecurities and fanciful little packets of 4 dimensional narrative. This is cheating, or, if you want to be an apologist, bad poetry.

That being said, I'm sure Remembrance of Things Past is a great piece of lite More...

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Nov 09, 2010

Peggy rated it:

I read this years ago in French--well, just the middle section--Swann in Love. Now I'm almost done with the entire novel and am somewhat embarrassed (because reading Proust in the 21st century is considered pretentious or stupid or just weird) to say I am truly loving this book. My only complaint is that it is hard to find suitable breaks in which to put it down between readings.
Certainly Proust didn't intend for this monumental work (six more novels to go to complete all of Remembrance of More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 02, 2008

Aloysius rated it:

Mark Twain once made that comment about classics being books that everyone talks about but no one reads, and it might be no truer than with Proust monumental Remembrance of Things Past. I spent '07 trying to get through Volume 1 and I'll spend '08 on Volume 2. I love Proust at his best, and there's certainly a great deal here for Lit Majors or Professors to talk about, mull over, write papers on, etc. but the problem is that I'm neither these days, and my enjoyment is limited to passages that ma More...

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Jun 22, 2009

Robert rated it:

This has been "finish humongous reading projects" month. If I could even remember how long I've been reading this book, I'd be embarrassed to admit to it. So imagine my joy at having reached this milestone! Imagine my further joy if this weren't merely the first volume of three in the edition of this book that I happen to own. But I'm going with the joie for the moment. Joie de livre, if you will. Here are my main thoughts about Remembrance of Things Past, now that I'm fully one third More...

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Aug 23, 2011

Steve rated it:

Reading this book was exquisite torture. I spent most of the time wanting to slap some sense into the main character (is it Marcel? We don't know yet), but the occasional breaks in the literary clouds reveal intensely poignant and evocative prose tumescent with brilliant insight. I feel a desire to give it more stars, but as Proust shows us, things always look better with the rose colored glasses of hindsight. In this light, I feel and itch to read book three. Damn you Proust.

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Jan 14, 2012

Brendan rated it:

i bought this three volume set on the cheap years ago in a used book store, figuring that one day i might want to read proust. it sat unread for years on my bookshelf until passing mentions of proust in various books i was reading led me to grab the first volume; i figured i'd read swann's way and be done with it. months later i find myself chipping away at the second volume once a week or so.

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Oct 20, 2011

Tucker rated it:

Very long. Not a "quick" read. At times doesn't really seem to be about anything. But I thoroughly enjoyed it anyway (or, at least, the first two volumes of the novel-- I'll be taking a little break for some lighter reading now!). It's the kind of book that you find yourself becoming oddly absorbed in-- not because of the plot (because there isn't one), but because the quality of the prose is so gorgeous and the reflection so engaging. I think I might be able to enjoy it more on a seco More...

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Mar 02, 2010

Dennis rated it:

The writing is beautiful, but I sometimes wonder if there is any real substance to it. At 50-something, I like the beauty of the prose, but there is nothing here that surprises or shocks, nothing that says, here is something you did not already know about life and love. But maybe that is the point, that, when all is said and done, not much is said or done.

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