In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (In Search of Lost Time, #2) by Marcel Proust

May 04, 2013 Ian Graye rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: frogs, proust, read-2013, reviews, reviews-5-stars

A Note about the Translation

I wanted to support the translation of this volume by James Grieve, a lecturer at my alma mater, Australian National University, when I was there in the 70’s.

I’m pretty sure he taught two of my close friends. While I can’t recall meeting him, I did socialise with one of his colleagues, Robert Dessaix, who subsequently became a talented writer.

It was a very capable French Department. However, in the 90’s, it was decimated by budget cuts and Grieve was made "redundant"...more

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Sep 19, 2010 Elizabeth rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Mary Lou Retton

Shelves: 2010, french-francophone, reviewed

I have a long-held belief that life is too short to read long books by arrogant, self-absorbed men. I came to this conclusion at some point in college; it might have had something to do with Weber or possibly Marx or Gibbon (most likely Gibbon, but the other guys didn't help). This belief has given me a foundation in my reading that has served me pretty well for a long time. Now, let me tell you why I'm wrong.

Jean Cocteau, described hearing Proust's voice: Just as the voice of a ventriloquist co...more I have a long-held belief that life is too short to read long books by arrogant, self-absorbed men. I came to this conclusion at some point in college; it might have had something to do with Weber or possibly Marx or Gibbon (most likely Gibbon, but the other guys didn't help). This belief has given me a foundation in my reading that has served me pretty well for a long time. Now, let me tell you why I'm wrong.

Jean Cocteau, described hearing Proust's voice: Just as the voice of a ventriloquist comes out of his chest, so Proust's emerged from his soul. I felt that from these pages. The narrator seems to be telling the truths of his soul in between the daily events of the story. There's a tea party and a visit to the zoo and endless descriptions of silk dresses and because of these events and between these events, there is a feeling that he is writing about things I had never known I thought or felt but as he said them, I knew they were true. It was uncomfortable to identify so much with what he was saying, especially when I didn't like the narrator, someone I am having difficulty distinguishing from the author (as he intended, I'm sure). I did not like the narrator but I couldn't help being drawn to what he said. It was so real. Maybe I am not defining truth objectively but I mean it to be the thing in me that recognizes what the writer has said as true, for me, because I have done that or felt that or known it. I recognize it in me. It is all buried in this repellent little narrator though, who I want nothing to do with. An example:

Despite the repulsive calculation of the narrator to get close to these young women, and the callous use he makes (and hopes to make) of them, his observation of them is amazing, and, strangely, or possibly not so strangely, gender neutral. As I was reading his impressions of the little group, I thought about My Big Fat Greek Wedding. There's a scene of the little girl feeling ostracized in the lunch room because the pretty, thin, blond girls were making fun of her. That feeling of the outsider, seeing those "perfect" girls in their little gang is a universal feeling to most girls growing up. Proust's young women - I get the sense they're in their late teens, early twenties - are one of those gangs. Every woman knows what I mean by a gang of young women, we've all been on the outside of one, seeing them across campus or sitting together in a cafe or something. They've got a style and an attitude that's unique to them. They don't seem to regard the societal pressures the way others do (they may be loud or using language that would shock their parents or just laughing at a joke among the group). The dynamics of those groups are fascinating, and, I think, every woman who has ever secretly wanted to be a part of one, while at the same time disdaining them (too loud, uncouth, poor taste, fat - all those words we use for other women in the cruelest, most calculating way), would recognize what Proust's narrator describes in his feelings for them. The feelings, which, well, it's Proust right, really don't seem to be sexual, even though I think that might have been his intention. It's more fascination and longing, both being passionate emotions, and possibly the need to possess or be included (inclusion as a form of possession), rather than a sexual desire to rip someone's clothes off. He did talk about those desires too, but, they may have been the least believable part of the story. He seemed much more excited to see the train conductor and talk to him about his shiny buttons than the girl in the nightgown.

For a while, when he was initially describing the girls, I wondered if he was relating an experience of wanting to be with young men, and feel the inclusion in that type of group. I decided that it didn't matter to me. I am so unconcerned by his possible sexual interests here. The feeling of the outsider, the perspective of the person who is part of a society but also isolated or uncomfortable in it, is so much more compelling in this book. I am overwhelmed by what he has managed to capture of that in this volume. Because it isn't just the relationship with the girls. It's also the relationship of the narrator to the other characters and their societies and Proust looks at it in so many different ways.

The outsider status with the girls was the most obvious example, but there were many in the book. I did read a quick article on Proust because I was confused by the love, isolation, and anti-semitism that was mixed together. Understanding his background made it clear. I'm the child of one Jewish parent and one Christian, and there is a unique kind of displacement that comes with that. It is about loving the family, as your family, but not feeling perfectly comfortable when they have a shared culture, language, belief-system, of which you have no part. Some of what he seemed only to make sense in that context. He was unsettled, an outsider again, but on intimate terms with the group, but still feeling isolated within it. It was amazing to see someone write in such couched terms about it and yet it was so clear. His confusion, his feelings were honest; if the narrator or other characters were cruel, I think that was part of the author's own uncomfortable state.

I feel like I should be writing about love or art or memory. These are such big themes in the work. I just don't want to. There is lots of writing on that. And, I think, if that's all there was in this book, I wouldn't be as interested. What was most compelling to me is the author/narrator and his relationship with the people around him. It was not about them at all (as the author eventually tells us) but through the interaction with them we learn of the protagonist, as this is, of course, all about him. Proust is, after all, an arrogant, self-absorbed man. But I was wrong if I thought he would be able to tell me nothing of importance or that it was a waste of my time to see what he might offer me. It has been worth the time spent with this repulsive little man, who likes to lie in a darkened room for most of the day, calculates which woman is most likely to go to bed with him, and sells his grandmother's tea set to spend on whores. He's charming company. I look forward to spending more time with him.(less)

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May 13, 2013 Kalliope rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-french, france, literary-classics, proust-2013

À L'OMBRE de la REPRÉSENTATION

On my review of Du côté de chez Swann I had concentrated on the pre-eminence of the visual. The careful attention paid by Proust to light, to colour, to objects that add colour such as flowers, and to painting and the visual arts in general, led me to conceive of his art as painterly writing. All those elements continue in this second volume. I could easily select another rich sample of quotes that would illustrate this visual nature. Indeed, sight is explicitly des...more

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Aug 19, 2009 brian rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

the review is missing.
below are the comments which followed.

David – You’re wrong that this is better than Swann’s Way and you’re wrong in calling Proust an ‘anti-romantic’. Try again, jewtard!

Brian – read more carefully, gothskimmer. i wrote that ‘one could say’ that proust was anti-romantic. all i mean is that his extreme nuerosis and need to analyze everything (to death!) does, in a sense, reduce every creature to a 'thinking machine'. after hundreds of pages of his wildly in-depth analysis i...more

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Aug 16, 2009 karen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: my-summer-of-classix, littry-fiction, i-am-reading-proust

sorry, david. this book is better than swann's way. to the extent that i may have to go back and give swann's way three stars so that when i give this book four stars it doesn't make them equals, and, having four books to go, i want to leave room for a five-star anticipation. the first half of swann's way had me understanding what people did not like about proust. there was a lot of me hating on the narrator and gacking over his precious daintiness. this one, though, phoar. it is true it took me...more sorry, david. this book is better than swann's way. to the extent that i may have to go back and give swann's way three stars so that when i give this book four stars it doesn't make them equals, and, having four books to go, i want to leave room for a five-star anticipation. the first half of swann's way had me understanding what people did not like about proust. there was a lot of me hating on the narrator and gacking over his precious daintiness. this one, though, phoar. it is true it took me a long time to read it, and it was partly because the lulling nature of his prose would cause me to drift off into my own batch of memories and i would realize that three subway stops had gone by, or ten minutes of my break had passed, or i was asleep (that happened a few times, not because it was boring, but because his style is so much like a gentle boat on a lazy stream and it's all memory and dreamy and suddenly i am actually dreaming. that's pretty powerful) and then, i realized my copy was defective, and eight pages were blank! that's like two proust-sentences - gone! so i had to get a new copy and transfer all my bookmarks, marking passages i liked, such as "In reality, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralises, makes potential only, postpones, but which may at any moment become, what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted, excruciating." which is just gorgeous. and there is so much like that in this book - so much delightfully neurotic stewing and examining every delicate memory of first, and second, love. marcel is a thinkier prufrock waiting and waiting and thinking and hesitating and eventually pouncing, but like my cat when she's just playing with me to please me; you can tell her heart is elsewhere. but everyone, not just you, david, said this book was a valley in between the literary heights of swann's way and guermantes way, but i thought it was stunning. i am taking a proust-break for a moment,maybe two or three books worth, because i can see myself getting wholly immersed in the proustiverse and becoming too introspective and examining the minutia of life and love and disappointments and that's something you really want to space out and not digest all at once, for the sanity's sake. but then i suspect i will not be able to stop until the bitter end. with brian's (deleted) aborted wedding scene.(less)

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Mar 15, 2013 Aubrey rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: french, prose-prose-prose, translated, 5-star, reviewed, rage-against-the-sexuality

Beauty is truth, truth beauty.
-John Keats

Let us first treat this as a premise, a maxim if you will, this quote from a long dead poet with a penchant for ancient pottery. Then, let us strip whatever meaning that has accrued upon it. Whether it resulted from pure instinct or rote memorization, fling it all away, and leave just the words. Little as they are, they are more than enough.

So, beauty is truth, truth beauty. Now, what is beauty? What is truth?

We sacrifice to beauty in all its forms, the...more

Beauty is truth, truth beauty.
-John Keats

Let us first treat this as a premise, a maxim if you will, this quote from a long dead poet with a penchant for ancient pottery. Then, let us strip whatever meaning that has accrued upon it. Whether it resulted from pure instinct or rote memorization, fling it all away, and leave just the words. Little as they are, they are more than enough.

So, beauty is truth, truth beauty. Now, what is beauty? What is truth?

We sacrifice to beauty in all its forms, the physical splendor of the human anatomy alongside the colored transience of the heavens, the powerful magnificence of mathematical proofs side by side with the profound pleasure of inspirational prose. Proust is the essence of the last, his grand ability enabling him to gloriously burst from the pages in whatever language he finds himself in.

Like the fires caught and fixed by a great colourist from the impermanence of the atmosphere and the sun, so that they should enter and adorn a human dwelling, they invited me, those chrysanthemums, to put away all my sorrows and to taste with a greedy rapture during that tea-time hour the all-too-fleeting pleasures of November, whose intimate and mysterious splendour they set ablaze all around me.

There is no doubting the beauty embodied in this phrase, one defined by the seduction of multiple senses through fire, color, chrysanthemum, November, whatever taste would inspire 'a greedy rapture'. But beauty does not always require seduction. Beauty can also be simple, yet profound.

...genius, having the widest experience of the human intelligence, can best understand the ideas most directly in opposition to those which form the foundation of its own works.

The state of being profound requires immensity, depth, an amount of magnitude that it cannot be denied. The seduction of the senses through prose inspires recollection, calls for the reader to relive their own experiences in an effort to imagine the beauty being described as thoroughly as possible. In other words, both require truth, whether by accumulation of theoretical meaning or of real life.

But Proust knew that it is not so simple as that.

We need, between us and the fish which, if we saw it for the first time cooked and served on a table, would not appear worth the endless shifts and wiles required to catch it, the intervention, during our afternoons with the rod, of the rippling eddy to whose surface come flashing, without our quite knowing what we intend to do with them, the bright gleam of flesh, the hint of a form, in the fluidity of a transparent and mobile azure.

There is much more to life than beauty and truth. There is the supreme effort between seeing one and realizing the other, from observing the flash of scales in the water to consuming because one knows one can. And within that effort, there are whole hosts of misunderstandings and miscommunications and mistakes, propagated by the fact that existences are individual, reality is subjective, and time is always racing away.

We betroth ourselves by proxy, and then feel obliged to marry the intermediary.

With the girls, on the other hand, if the pleasure which I enjoyed was selfish, at least it was not based on the lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone and prevents us from admitting that, when we chat, it is no longer we who speak, that we are fashioning ourselves then in the likeness of other people and not of a self that differs from them.”

We fall in love with a beauty and take it for truth, or one we think is a truth, or one we believe we are in love with. There is no doubt that we held at one point, no matter how singular, that beauty and truth were one and the same. The question is, do we tell more truths about our love by loving it, or about ourselves? And when the communication between individuals and the shifting of reality and the passage of time have worked their magic, can we say that neither the beauty nor its underlying truth have changed?

It's difficult, annoying, and oftentimes heartbreaking to acknowledge this inconsistency of a world that provides an infinite amount of infinitesimal moments of beautiful truth, but rarely leaves the two to peacefully coexist for any length of time. It would be all too easy to slip into a state of constant intoxication, where

inebriation brings about for an hour or two a state of subjective idealism, pure phenomenalism; everything is reduced to appearances and exists only as a function of our sublime self.

Or to withdraw from the pandering lies that fill so much of reality, despite having so much to give it.
Everything he possessed, ideas, works, and the rest which he counted for far less, he would have given gladly to anyone who understood him. But, for lack of congenial company, he lived in an unsociable isolation which fashionable people call pose and ill-breeding, the authorities a recalcitrant spirit, his neighbours madness, his family selfishness and pride.
Or even to come to terms with the futility of it all and fully embrace resignation in its myriad flavors.

And it is, after all, as good a way as any of solving the problem of existence to get near enough to the things and people that have appeared to use beautiful and mysterious from a distance to be able to satisfy ourselves that they have neither mystery nor beauty...it enables us to regret nothing, by assuring us that we have attained to the best, and that the best was nothing out of the ordinary—with which to resign ourselves to death.

Or, despite all that, despite all those moments of beauty refusing the hand of truth and vice versa, to realize that there is always a chance for the two to come into alignment somewhere down the path. It may last for a fraction of a second, but it also may subsist for a lifetime. That is the miracle of memory so expounded by Proust in his Swann's Way, one whose passages can be found blooming within this budding grove, a miracle of a single instant conjuring up a endless passages of wonder and insight as memories spring from previous experiences and intersperse themselves among the new reality, both undergoing endless shifts and yet every so often joining together in sublime perfection.

...I tried to find beauty there were I had never imagined before that it could exist, in the most ordinary things, in the profundities of “still life.”

Wonder and insight. Beauty, and Truth.(less)

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Apr 26, 2013 ·Karen· rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013-year-of-reading-proust, mttbr-2013

WHY?

Or: The Brain on Proust

There’s a group of 7 ladies I’ve known for quite some time. We meet regularly for afternoon tea, going round turn and turn about, although Barbara has now been excused from hosting in deference to her great seniority and some health issues that come along with the seniority. We have nothing in common except that we are all English native speakers, living here in Germany, and all of us married at one time or another to German husbands. So it’s only the language that con...more

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Apr 05, 2013 Nick Craske rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013_book_feast, i_haves_it

This second volume within Proust's panorama of self and senses shifts from the inner salons to the outer sea side alcoves and sun drenched hotel lobbies. There is an energy and vitality to this second book which is projected through even more vivid character portraits and through Proust's evocative expression of his infatuations and obsessions.

There's a greater sense of space, of terrain and the broader environment. For me this seemed to allow the often claustrophobia inducing long-winding-inne...more

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Mar 16, 2013 Emma rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: i-like-you-a-normal-amount, translated, proust-2013, vive-le-france

I went to a conference in England recently, a dull and painful conference for work. My flight left Jersey at 7am and I had a lengthy train journey to follow. Quite accidentally, I got totally hammered on cosmopolitans the night before. During the long and humbling expedition, me and my hangover managed to do three things: drink tea, eat ready salted Walkers crisps and read Proust.

Ah, Proust's luscious musical prose was like a soothing balm to my throbbing head. The narrator, gentle and captivat...more

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Mar 12, 2009 Manny rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: french, life-is-proust

There's a lot of stuff in Volume 2 of A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, and people see different things in it. To me, though, the unifying theme is a continuation of Proust's analysis of how romantic relationships work, which he started in Un Amour de Swann. There, he examined one particular kind of relationship. Swann spends a fair amount of time with Odette, who is very nice to him and keeps saying how she wishes she could see him more often. Without realizing it, he comes to rely on her always t...more There's a lot of stuff in Volume 2 of A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, and people see different things in it. To me, though, the unifying theme is a continuation of Proust's analysis of how romantic relationships work, which he started in Un Amour de Swann. There, he examined one particular kind of relationship. Swann spends a fair amount of time with Odette, who is very nice to him and keeps saying how she wishes she could see him more often. Without realizing it, he comes to rely on her always to be there for him. One night, she isn't, and he suddenly discovers he's hooked. The balance of power changes completely: he needs her all the time, she's hardly ever available, and his life is taken over by psychotic jealousy. If you've never had this kind of thing happen to you, count yourself lucky.

In the second volume, Proust looks at two more kinds of patterns, where the relationship isn't as clearly defined as it is with Swann and Odette. He shows how hard it can sometimes be to understand that a relationship has started or ended. With the narrator and Gilberte, he's involved with her in an early-teen way, and then, somehow, things go wrong. He's mad at her, and thinks he won't see her for a bit. Then it continues a bit longer, and he still hasn't seen her. After a while, it's clear that the relationship is over, but it's not obvious whether he ever made a real decision to end it. He examines all his shifting thoughts and emotions in the minutest detail, and you still don't know. At least, I didn't.

With Albertine, in the last third of the book, we get the case that I find most interesting. He's at Balbec (apparently it's based on the real-life resort town of Cabourg; I first learned that from a Brigade Mondaine novel). He sees this rather rowdy gang of teenage girls who go around together, laughing and indulging in various kinds of horseplay. He's a sickly kid, and their boisterous animal spirits appeal to him. There's one in particular that he keeps on bumping into by accident. Her name is Albertine, and after a while he decides he's fallen in love with her.

Being Proust, he has to carefully go though all the times they've met, and look at how his feelings evolved in response to those chance meetings. When he reconstructs everything, an interesting fact emerges: he thought he was meeting the same girl every time, but in fact he may not have. It's possible that he met different girls on the different occasions, and the feelings just crystallized out as deciding that he was in love with Albertine. He doesn't know, and they don't know! If the book had been written 15 years later, I would have wondered if this was an allusion to the new quantum theory: you have, as it were, a wave-function of girls, which collapses into the single Albertine observation. But I'm pretty sure that that was still in the future, so Proust made it all up himself. Impressive. Conceivably, the causality went the other way: perhaps some quantum physicist was inspired by Proust's novel!

The thought I find so interesting here is that, as Proust shows, you can fall in love quickly, but then there is a philosophical problem: who are you falling in love with? At one point in my life, I was kind of interested in the semantics of denotation and reference, but linguistic philosophers like Kripke, Quine or Montague never seem to look at examples as complex as the ones that Proust makes up. I would love to know if someone has done an analysis of his books from this kind of angle. From the practical point of view, though, I think there is a useful lesson to be learned. If you fall in love quickly, the person you're in love with may not really exist. That's worth remembering.

(less)

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May 03, 2009 Jessica rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: anyone intent on kissing dupont's ass/making an effort to appear more highbrow

I'm certainly no great master of the French language, which must be why I'm completely mystified by how A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs translates to Within a Budding Grove.

Good thing I have the ever-trustworthy (....???) C. K. Scott Moncrieff to translate this all for me!

--------

AAAAAAGGGHHHHHH!!!

I GIVE UP! I mean, not permanently, but for now, yeah, I do. I give UP! I give UP!!! I give up on this Proust! I give up despite this recent line: "I ask you, what in the world can he see in her?...more

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Mar 29, 2013 Madeleine rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: head-in-the-clouds-nose-in-a-book, our-libeary, there-s-no-i-in-group-read, maybe-it-s-time-to-live, mmxiii

Oh, adolescence. Is there any period of time more frustrating, conflicting and downright disappointing than that too-long span of gawky limbs and endless opportunities for embarrassment? When one's body is alien territory, when one is faced with an onslaught of wholly unfamiliar impulses, when the head and the heart and all of the hormones are battling for control over a vessel that just wants things to make the kind of black-and-white sense they did in the blissfully naive days that are just ou...more Oh, adolescence. Is there any period of time more frustrating, conflicting and downright disappointing than that too-long span of gawky limbs and endless opportunities for embarrassment? When one's body is alien territory, when one is faced with an onslaught of wholly unfamiliar impulses, when the head and the heart and all of the hormones are battling for control over a vessel that just wants things to make the kind of black-and-white sense they did in the blissfully naive days that are just out of arm's reach but already rapidly fading memories, constantly pushed farther and farther away by the systematic remapping of a formerly recognizable world.

Both Proust's narrator -- still imbued with vestiges of an innocence that can only take root in a childhood shaped by terminal sensitivity -- and his vulnerable heart stumble cautiously and cluelessly beyond youth's idyllic safety zone into the uncharted realm of life after puberty: He is, indeed, alone in the umbra cast by blossoming young girls who have gained his affections but will not share the warmth of their vernal lights with him. One of Proust's most obvious successes with this volume is the familiar poignancy he gives to the fumbling initial efforts of gaining another young heart's favor because, really, did any of us understand the objects of our blindly obsessive desires at that age? Reading this book was like going through all those terrible milestones all over again, only with each misstep beautifully rendered and every confused failure examined with an enviably erudite melancholy that still captures the fatalistic immediacy of all those awful lessons' first cuts.

From the beginning, his understanding that the world he had not long ago regarded with a child's certainty was now turned on its head was apparent, as the feverishly anticipated chance to see his favorite actress results in the kind of shattering disappointment specially reserved for those times when an impossibly idealized dream becomes a vapid reality. This is only the first in a series of crushing blows, though: The narrator's dreams of literary greatness are effectively dismantled by his father's colleague; a beloved writer has little in common with the literary persona he has come to adore; his first taste of love sours with his beloved's cooling interest and cruel neglect; the church at Balbec simply does not live up to his expectations.

But the necessary dethroning of old favorites and the tarnishing of long-upheld ideals make way for the man the narrator is to become, just as childhood's magic sooner or later drains from all those things that once so enthralled our younger selves. It is imperative that the narrator grow tired of such things so he can make new discoveries: His happiness is no longer derived solely from the sensory delights of a delicious feast, the beauty of nature, his mother's love, the wonder of the arts -- though the echoes of these things do reach the core of his soul to move him with their familiar stirrings of joy when they prove to be at their most resplendent moments. With age comes discrimination: As one can no longer live in a constant state of marvel distracting him from the myriad things to be discovered both within and without him, he also must learn what is truly worth his awed regard.

Like all teenagers, the narrator gradually distances himself from his family, focusing on the friendships and infatuations that define life on the brink of adulthood. And, like every teenager I ever knew, some of those friendships are based on convenience rather than a mutual affinity for each other's company. The deepening bond between the narrator and Robert serves as a beautiful foil for the narrator's desperate attempts to tally the redeeming qualities within Bloch, a back-home chum whose coarse manner and general inability to recognize his own countless flaws make his presence difficult to bear even at a reader's safe distance. The two dueling personalities embody the narrator's own wavering balance between youthful indiscretion and the discrimination of experience, highlighting the decay of the former as it becomes unreasonable to cling to such childishness to any longer. Just as not every girl the narrator fancies will return his interest, he no longer has to subscribe to the youthful notion that he ought to be friends with everyone.

Proust's writing is the real star of the show here, with a sumptuous language that just drips poetry from each page. His insights prove time and again that human nature is constant across the ages, even though people themselves are in constant states of adapting to both interior and exterior forces. What I found the most remarkable, though, was the way he takes the tired tradition of similes to positively novel heights by playing two almost diametrically opposing elements against each other to fully express the emotional resonance of a seemingly insignificant moment: A household cook's reverence for her cuisine is likened to Michelangelo's dedication to his art; the fading hope of restoring a broken relationship is akin to the panicked desperation of a wounded man who has drunk his last vial of morphine; "[j]ust as the priests with the broadest knowledge of the heart are those who can best forgive the sins they themselves never commit, so the genius with the broadest acquaintance with the mind can best understand ideas most foreign to those that fill his own works." They take what could be bloated ravings exaggerated to the point of nonsense and translate them into a personal relevance that paints a more accurately vivid representation of a personality than bland narration ever could.

This is people-watching at its finest, a tour of humanity with an unusually tender soul leading the way through his own emergence into adulthood and his discovery of the world around him.(less)

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Jan 05, 2013 Sparrow rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: motherless-daughters, reviewed, under-read-gems

If a reading experience could turn you into a butterfly, that would be the magic in this book. And would any of us be surprised by Proust having that kind of conjuring power, the wizardry to misremember us into flying, floating little bugs? No. There is surely magic in these pages, in its remembering and misremembering, in shaping and re-shaping: magic to move beauty marks all around faces, to remember dresses into petals and monocles to wings. In the end, Proust remembers us all into flowers an...more If a reading experience could turn you into a butterfly, that would be the magic in this book. And would any of us be surprised by Proust having that kind of conjuring power, the wizardry to misremember us into flying, floating little bugs? No. There is surely magic in these pages, in its remembering and misremembering, in shaping and re-shaping: magic to move beauty marks all around faces, to remember dresses into petals and monocles to wings. In the end, Proust remembers us all into flowers and butterflies lounging in the shade near water, wrapped up and mummified by the golden sun of his memory.

These memories are my own, too, of friendships with boys and girls. They are the magic of wondering about and judging people before knowing them, finding out you are were wrong, and then, maybe, learning you were actually right. They are memories of the vulnerability of imagining another person’s life and then becoming a part of that imagined world. This book is the birds and the bees, only here, it is the butterflies and the flowers. It is more delicate, and it is about the show of courtship among all people (friends, family, lovers, etc.), not the mechanics of sex.

My friend who reminds me so much of Proust keeps including in his emails to me lately the qualifier, “I am telling you that to make myself ridiculous so you will laugh. Are you laughing?” We were talking about that, and he said, “That’s why Rosamond and I still talk. I make fun of myself, and she laughs. It is a pretty simple relationship. I can say just about anything to Rosamond to make her laugh. And I think I make cheap insults of myself that might kinda hurt, but I’d rather see someone laugh, cause then maybe I can be happy later.” I think that is a nice sentiment, which is brave in a certain way, and also rather specific. And with Proust, I do laugh. I laugh at his purposeful avoidance of Gilberte that he so deliberately expresses by hanging out at Gilberte’s house with her mom. I laugh at his falling in love with the big girl on the train, his love affair with Saint Loup, his social anxiety over procedures at the Grand Hotel. I laugh at his passage about throwing himself in front of a bullet out of the selfish wish to prove he would throw himself in front of a bullet. He is very funny.

When I am laughing at those things, it is partly because of their simple ridiculousness, but also because it is a ridiculousness I see in myself. Ludicrous daydreams and misunderstanding social cues. And even though there is a lot that is gendered in here, at the same time, I think at its base, it is more about difference, and not so rigidly gendered. Part II is a boy wondering about a group of girls, but it could just as easily be me wondering about boys. The details might be different, but the wondering is similar, I think. When Marcel imagines who Saint-Loup will be to him, he knows the answer; but, when he encounters the girls, it is all confusion and misunderstandings. And the divide of gender, whether created by nature or nurture, is so ridiculous like that. Does she want to kiss me or laugh at me? Does he want to hold my hand or beat me up? We must consult our research guides and use magnifying glasses to seek the answer. And most of us, like Marcel, are very ridiculous in the process.

I don’t think this book is so much about, “wimmin folks ain’t like men folks.” I think it is, rather, about how awkward we are in bridging those differences. I want to say, “how awkward we are in adolescence,” but I am still awkward in that, and no longer adolescent, so it still applies at least to me. With Marcel, though, it is so pretty how much he loves all of these people, how generous he is to them, while still making fun of his own self-interest.

And the stories about why, above all else, you must not be gay are such kicks in the gut and so knifingly told.

Like I say, I think there is a certain bravery mixed with the odd self-interest in Proust making himself ridiculous and vulnerable in the way he does in these books. Maybe I am wrong about this, but it seems like there is a tendency in the Proust readership to think that somehow reflects well, or reflects at all, on the reader. I kind of don’t get that. It seems to me like when someone makes himself ridiculous or vulnerable for our entertainment, a reader can react with a myriad of feelings, among which are, of course, sympathy; alienation; eye-rolling; distancing laughter; or self-importance, as though Proust’s vulnerability, artistry, and ridiculousness says something about our merits. As if our identification with him says something about us, rather than everything about him. We all react according to our own experiences, but I have been very surprised at how dissimilar my feeling about these books is to how I anticipated feeling.

Maybe part of this book’s magic is in being a different shady, watery place with different flowers and butterflies for every reader.(less)

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Apr 18, 2013 Proustitute rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, french-literature, five-stars, favorites, proust, proust-2013, 2013

(There are no "spoilers," I promise.)

Madame Swann at Home

a new Swann; a new Cottard — "fashions change, being themselves begotten of the desire for change" — the Marquis de Norpois — Berma in Phèdre — "the cruel anxiety of the seeker after truth" — "But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand" — the literary life; the value of shares — Françoise; Michelangelo — King Theodosius — Mme. Swann's...more (There are no "spoilers," I promise.)

Madame Swann at Home

a new Swann; a new Cottard — "fashions change, being themselves begotten of the desire for change" — the Marquis de Norpois — Berma in Phèdre — "the cruel anxiety of the seeker after truth" — "But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand" — the literary life; the value of shares — Françoise; Michelangelo — King Theodosius — Mme. Swann's salon — "archduchess or prostitute" — Bergotte's aesthetic influence — "In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can rest assured. So it is with Time in one's life." — Françoise's aspic — new year; new friendship with Gilberte — "Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it" — the beloved's face — water-closets; fevers — "And we realised that this imbecile was a great physician" — "I asked myself whether there was not an existence altogether different from the one I knew, in direct contradiction to it, but itself the real one" — chez Swann — gâteaux; livres — appropriated mannerisms and expressions — Mme. Swann's "day" — Albertine: "She's certain to be dreadfully 'fast' when she's older, but meanwhile she's an odd fish" — "like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed immutable, and composes a new pattern" — confusing royalties — the Cottards and the Bontemps — love; fear — "in the company of orchids, roses and violets" — "that anxiety ... which destroys in us, in the presence of the person we love, the sensation of loving" — Vinteuil's "little phrase" — "And we shall love it longer than the rest because we have taken longer to get to love it" — art and posterity — Mme. Blatin and the Singhalese — objects; meanings; souls — the Zoological Gardens — Princess Mathilde — "as though [English] had been a secret language known to our two selves alone" — Odette's Anglomania — Bergotte's name (and nose); the Narrator's name — carnations in buttonholes — Bergottism — genius; mirrors; power — on Berma's Phèdre — "A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the man who contradicts it" — "a prophetic warning" of "the danger of that kind of love" — Gilberte as a composite Mélusine — "a single intelligence of which everyone is a co-tenant" —"Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect" — brothels and Jews and "Rachel when from the Lord" — "our memory does not as a rule present things to us in their chronological sequence" — "There can be no peace of mind in love, since what one has obtained is never anything but a new starting-point for further desires" — unknown languages; sealed fortresses — contradictory severance letters — the third Gilberte — Mme Swann's flowers — five-o'clock tea — "Dear Mme Verdurin is not always very kind about other people's flowers" — electricity; telephones — "When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves" — renunciation — "regret, like desire, seeks not to analyse but to gratify itself" — when what is "smart" becomes what is "trashy" — the charm of a Botticelli — the colors of Mme Swann's at-home dresses — 10,000 francs — two strollers in the Avenue des Champs-Élysées — "the healing effect of isolation" — interpreting dreams — "The person whom we love is to be recognised only by the intensity of the pain that we suffer" — letters; lies; the past tense — Mme Swann's parasol

Place-Names: The Place

"It is our noticing them that puts things in a room, our growing used to them that takes them away again and clears a space for us" — three knocks on the adjoining wall — habit; new bedrooms; lofty ceilings — "it is the light that displaces and situates the undulations of the sea" — the guests at the Grand Hotel — Mme de Villeparisis, "the most powerful of fairies" — Françoise's friends —"those peculiar places, railway stations... those marvellous places, railway stations" — "those who love and those who enjoy are not always the same" — "the enraptured traveller Ruskin speaks of" — reading Mme de Sévigné on the train — a milk-girl, beauty, and happiness — Balbec Church and the Virgin of the Porch — the Grand Hotel — "the horror of my own nonentity" — the Princesse de Luxembourg and a loaf of rye bread — "a carriage which reeked of harlot a mile away" — carriage rides; young girls in flower —"our desire for people ... is the only kind that leads to anxiety" — three trees — Chateaubriand on moonlight's melancholy — "a creature of habit" — Saint-Loup — "adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything" — a Jewish colony — Bloch contre Ruskin; the "lighft-boy" — human kindness; defects — "we ought at least, from prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that other people's views are never in accordance with our own" — Baron de Charlus's gaze; a memory of Tansonville — the Guermantes: "in that family they change their names as often as their shirts" — Charlus's "obsession with virility"; an awkward tea — "A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist" — the Baron; a book of Bergotte's; the narrator's bedroom — "in the state of mind in which we 'observe' we are a long way below the level to which we rise when we create" — dinner at the Blochs — Saint-Loup's mistress — "the wall which remained silent" — "I was going through one of those phases of youth ... in which at all times and in all places ... we desire, we seek, we see Beauty" — "the little band" of jeunes filles — "a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes and plump, matte cheeks" — "To strip our pleasures of imagination is to reduce them to their own dimensions, that is to say to nothing" — "a mirage of desire" — "aristocracy is a relative thing" — the name Simonet — seascapes; sunsets; Whistler's Harmony in Grey and Pink — Dreyfus; a change of season; Rivebelle — "Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning" — too much port; music; seductiveness — "two separate bouquets that had exchanged a few of their flowers" — love; inebriation — "we say that we often see animals in our dreams, but we forget that almost always we are ourselves animals therein" — sleep; waking; "the shipwreck of my nervous storms" — Elstir, the famous painter — "The most exclusive love for a person is always a love for something else" — Elstir's studio; art fostering immortality — the blurred boundaries between sky and sea, land and sea — "If a little day-dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time" — the name Albertine — ambiguous gender; Elstir's portrait of Miss Sacripant — "The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius" — states of consciousness; the evolutions of those whom we love — multiple Albertines — "We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves" — railway stations; invitations; letters; "the profundities of 'still life'" — "Pleasure ... is like photography" — meeting Albertine — a beauty mark: fluid then fixed — Octave; the Mlles d'Ambresac; Andrée; Gisèle; Rosemonde — "it was their flowering-time" — successive loves and their similarities — women's fashion — the Creuniers cliffs; picnicking — "Loving helps us to discern, to discriminate" — girls' voices — "The individual is steeped in something more general than himself" — je t'aime — Gisèle's letter from Sophocles to Racine — "every fresh glimpse is a sort of rectification, which brings us back to what we in fact saw" — a game of ferret; hands; hawthorn — "the selfish angle which is that of love" — "the photo-telephone of the future: the visual image ... clearly outlined in the sound" — bedrooms; an urge to kiss; the ringing of bells — Albertine in society: "killing several birds with one stone" — "Oh, you men!" — interchangeability — "when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not surveyors" — multiple selves; darkened rooms; departure(less)

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May 03, 2013 ReemK10 (Paper Pills) rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Desire, Longing and the Power of Pollination

After an initial period of withdrawal where I was desperately longing for the metrical sentences of a Lydia Davis translation, I was eventually able to adapt and enjoy this volume.

Volume number 2, "Within a Budding Grove", of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" is a longing for something more real than anything the narrator could ever imagine. There is desire for Odette, Gilberte, and of Albertine Simonet (with only one n). Let us also not forget that c...more Desire, Longing and the Power of Pollination

After an initial period of withdrawal where I was desperately longing for the metrical sentences of a Lydia Davis translation, I was eventually able to adapt and enjoy this volume.

Volume number 2, "Within a Budding Grove", of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" is a longing for something more real than anything the narrator could ever imagine. There is desire for Odette, Gilberte, and of Albertine Simonet (with only one n). Let us also not forget that constant, intense desire to be in the company of the young girls at Balbec.The narrator delights in an aura of pleasure in making new acquaintances, of curious examinations, of communicating with the captivating, and of making favorable impressions even though sometimes he fails to do so.

Yet, once the object of longing is acquired, there would be much suffering as it only becomes "a starting point for further desires". Such is the nature of things and our love for its poison.

The reader, the trained observer often has difficulty in comprehending certain things like Odette being grateful to Charles Swann for marrying her that she plays the role of Madame Swann to perfection despite being unable to arrange the chrysanthemums to Madame Verdurin's liking. Also difficult to understand is a desire to be outside of Time and yet become more conscious of it and its cruelty by either putting a stop to it or by clinging to a long list of works of posterity.

Seeking a change in surroundings while trying to gain time, the narrator heads off for the charms of the seaside town of Balbec, going there in expectation of a renewed desire to awaken the dormant effects of Habit, and to live in the intoxicating presence of beauty while thirsting for this beauty. "We desire, we seek, we see Beauty."

The reader revels in the portraiture of the senses that is painted in pink, lots of pink, in pink hawthorns, the pink in Swann's scarf that was a replica of that of the Virgin in the "Magnificat" and especially the sulphurous pink cheeks of Albertine in that pefect harmony of pink and gold.

There is a sense that in reading Proust, the more knowledge you bring to your reading, the more you get out of it. Knowing the culture of things like the letters of Madame de Sévigné, the performance of Phèdre, perferring "Chateaubriand better in Atela than Rance", and Pisanello's pencil or Gallo's glass only enhances the ISOLT experience and doesn't leave you feeling clueless in your reading. I liken it to taking a whiff of a favorite perfume, detecting a floral note and recognizing it for what it is which is a very different experience than having to research on Google for a list of possible ingredients.

This reinforces my belief that reading "In Search of Lost Time" requires a second reading in one's lifetime, to capture that sense of deja vu , of a repetition of time and the critical attempt to embalm time.(less)

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Sep 20, 2008 Greg rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Giving only four stars to this book seems like a sacrilege. There was something about Within a Budding Grove, that didn't quite live up to the beauty of Swanns Way. While the first book followed quite closely the adventures of M. Swann and his love affair with Odette, this book stays almost entirely in the perceptions of the narrator. The wonderful social aspects of the first novel are diluted in this novel, and the cast of characters is reduced, giving this a more claustrophobic feeling. Not th...more

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Oct 17, 2012 Lee rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Now just past his adolescent years, our nameless little narrator friend spends time at the Balbec beach and basks in the ambit of some fine young lasses after chatting with a kindly ambassador and a famous (albeit brutishly dressed and mannered!) writer he admires. The bits with Bergotte, the great writer, were fun -- I love great writers as imagined by great writers (the only other one I can think of is Arnheim in Musil's The Man Without Qualities, Vol. 1). I'm having trouble recapturing all th...more Now just past his adolescent years, our nameless little narrator friend spends time at the Balbec beach and basks in the ambit of some fine young lasses after chatting with a kindly ambassador and a famous (albeit brutishly dressed and mannered!) writer he admires. The bits with Bergotte, the great writer, were fun -- I love great writers as imagined by great writers (the only other one I can think of is Arnheim in Musil's The Man Without Qualities, Vol. 1). I'm having trouble recapturing all that's covered in this one, particularly early on, since I somehow started it about six weeks ago. Good to see Swann and Odette years later, comparatively settled down, to feel like I'd experienced their most passionate episodes and now know them well, can see the world through their eyes and appreciate changes in character. Little narrator dude alludes to time spent in a brothel, just chatting of course, and in general seems a lot less wispily enthralled by pink hawthorns. Once he travels to the beach, he recognizes young yearning ladies but has a low estimation of his ill self and sort of holds his tail between his legs and talks not of sharing in their yearning but appreciating young ladies for how interesting they might be, something which at first seemed indicative of the author/narrator's sexuality but also nicely setup a change of tune (from bashful whistle to let's get it on) after hundreds of pages. Narrator hangs with some male folks his age, particularly Saint-Loup, who really stands out at first, erect as a silver bishop on the swirly shifting societal chess board, a kind kindred aristocratic kid for Marcel to marvel at and befriend. For the most part, over 730 pages, all that really happens (ie, in terms of a concentrated burst of action) is he tries to mack on a hot little lady who's asked him to come sit by her bedside after pressing on his hand, giving him meaningful looks, and speaking "the language of affection" with him, and so when he leans in to kiss her . . . I won't give it away since it's a relatively pleasurable payoff on page 701. This long second installment seems a little more solid as narrator comes into his own, essentially sides with writing over an ambassadorial career, and then develops his eye for beauty in art, nature, and pale little dark-haired ladies wired to please, all near the sea with its sets of waves as liquidy and luminously lapidary as the prose, as always. A cathedral is associated with rocky cliffs along the sea while talking to a cool painter guy who sees everything's intricacy and serves as role model and ambassador to the girls. Something continually of interest is the lack of Christian religious significance/influence and the suggestion that a sort of mystical artistic perception (all elements of life are embued with beauty!) transform the world into a cathedral. The end's very much about the first stirrings of adolescent eros, whose innocence is underscored by the hysterical tilt-a-whirl romance between Swann and Odette in the "Swann in Love" section of Swann's Way. This one ends with the recognition of his reserve of passion within, sort of how the first one ended with recognition of his reserve of divine love/artistic perception. It's not so much a "five star" book in itself -- some stretches really dragged and others soared -- but the overall project (its themes, characters, settings, execution, insight, and particularly its language of course) is without a doubt at least seven stars. Monumental without being monstrous at all. (less)

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Apr 04, 2013 Nathan "N.R." Gaddis rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013-sepukku

An Open Letter to Marcel Proust:

Sir, thank you for having written what must be known only as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century; a work of genius.

Unfortunately, this letter cannot be a letter of exaltation, but a rather a letter of apology. You deserve all the adulation which you have received these past 100 years since the first volume of your novel was published. And the Proust group on goodreads is testimony to the faith which you have properly placed in your readers’ abiliti...more An Open Letter to Marcel Proust:

Sir, thank you for having written what must be known only as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century; a work of genius.

Unfortunately, this letter cannot be a letter of exaltation, but a rather a letter of apology. You deserve all the adulation which you have received these past 100 years since the first volume of your novel was published. And the Proust group on goodreads is testimony to the faith which you have properly placed in your readers’ abilities to not settle for a simple book; you had the faith to believe in what you were to write and to believe in your book finding readers who could luxuriate in what can only be called a masterful work.

But for me, I can only apologize. Our minds would seem to work upon different currents. My literary experience has me ensconced in what was written after you wrote, in those works of fiction written by authors who must have learned an enormous amount of what you taught that fiction could be, what it could do. It is a matter of finding myself more at home in a postmodern aesthetic than a modern aesthetic.

If I dare oversimplify the contention over modernism, I have to place myself more in the camp with James Joyce than with yourself. But that is merely a matter of my preference for one genius over another, just as one may prefer Plato over Aristotle or Kant over Hegel or Heidegger over Wittgenstein. Whichever side one finds oneself, one can only believe that one is witnessing the heights to which thought can aspire. I am entirely incapable of disparaging your novel or your prose or your aesthetic, but only find myself traveling down other roads of thought and experience.

In the back of my mind I think it may be only a matter of language. I have a small suspicion that your thought, your writing, is at home only in the French language, and despite the efforts of three generations of the Englishing of your novel, the English language itself may not be a comfortable abode for your experience. Lacking masculine and feminine nouns and pronouns, perhaps your dependent clauses can only land as a clunk in English, so poorly adapted for this kind of subordination of one thought to another. I don’t know my French well enough to be certain of any such hypothesis, but it only leaves me wondering.

I have heard complaints posited against your narrator Marcel, that he is self-absorbed. I find such a judgement about Marcel to be entirely out of order. Much more than obsessing about himself, your narrator is highly attuned to the impressions which other human beings make upon him and the impressions he makes upon other human beings, and this entire complex of our affect and of our effect upon others results in a profound attunement to the moral shape of what it’s like to be a human being. Marcel does not believe that he exists sufficient unto himself, but experiences himself at all times enmeshed with the experiences and recognitions of other people, people upon whom he depends for his very being. Marcel finds his being at all times in and with others. Perhaps the fiction we need today is a fiction which would translate Marcel’s attunement to others into a twenty-first century character; that there is some gap between Marcel’s world and our own, that the gap is too large for us to translate Marcel’s world and his response to it into our own contemporary world of experience. But perhaps rather it is precisely this gap which is what fascinates so much in reading your novel; that it requires an imaginative and engaged reading by which one would find oneself as a reader dislocated into a strange world, and gaining from that distance a new insight into how we can shape ourselves as moral beings within our own world. And indeed, the further I read into your novel the more convinced I am that the very same difference in aesthetic preferences between us is at the very same time what links those postmodern novels I love so much with your very modernist novel, one of the three pinnacles of modernist noveling. Perhaps the aesthetic difference between the modernist and the postmodernist novel is nothing about this or that characteristic, but is reflective merely of the different shape we find ourselves in living under different conditions and different pressures, different traumas. Were you writing and reading today, would you find yourself attracted to a fiction like that of Joseph McElroy's? I do feel you would. And if I could recommend one book to you from my postmodernist library, it would indeed be his Women and Men; therein I suspect you would find a kindred thinker, a questioning about how to bring ourselves to a respect of the gap between us as individuals, as ones and simultaneously as twos.

I do not know at this time whether I will maintain my intended schedule to read your entire novel in 2013. I may luxuriate a bit and extend my reading into next year. But I am convinced that, despite our differences, I will not add to those statistics found here on goodreads whereby your first volume has received over 12,000 ratings while this second volume already has a mere one fifth of that number. I will not allow myself to be counted among those who have abandoned your work.

I thank you for your time in reading this, and I do look forward to returning to your novel in the not too distant future.

Sincerely,
Nathan “N.R.” Gaddis(less)

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Mar 26, 2009 Bram rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009, proustophilia

"For a pleasure divested of imagination is a pleasure reduced to itself, to nothing." (p. 377)

À la recherche du temps perdu is a fluid cross-country drive through sunrise skies of ever-blossoming oranges, pinks, and violets, sidekicked with a road mix designed by a more perspicacious iTunes Genius® sidebar. After I finish the whole shebang, to staunch the inevitable sense of loss that will come, I may just continue to read this pacific novel on loop, in fits and in starts, in silence and in savo...more

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Mar 11, 2010 Geoff rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

What Proust was, and what In Search of Lost Time, when given the proper air and light, the proper attention, can instruct others to be, is an astute pupil of life. He was perhaps the most exacting and astute observer in modern literature, and his dedicated readers are, in essence, forced also to become as aware, as exacting, in their own perceptions, not only as they wade the ebb and flow of his tide of words, but beyond that, when the book is closed and put away. For as the sound of the ocean a...more

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Aug 13, 2012 Joao Vaz rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Proust não desaponta!

Aqui encapsula-se mais um capítulo da vida de Marcel, o inocente e hipocondríaco rapaz de Combray, que sucumbe aos prazeres sensuais da carne agora que é adolescente.

É-nos dado um conjunto ecléctico de descrições cuja precisão e minúcia são as características chave do Mestre, desde o bric-a-brac das relações sociais à materialização de cheiros, sabores e sobretudo sensações.

Não há juízo que possa fazer à sua escrita que se equiparasse à elevada literatura que Proust produz.

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Sep 12, 2011 ☽ Moon ☯ 佛月球 Будда Луны rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

δ∝•☜ THE CHRYSALIS OF TRANSFORMATION ☞•∝δ

Drowned in the elaborative dissection of every shred of memory is the evident floridity of Marcel Proust's narrative, interspersing his thoughts in the nonlinearity of events in the past as it creates order from the chaotic element of Time, solidifying the vaporous elements of memories from the black void of space unto the poetic expression of words, as it hides between each line the indicative elements of transformation derived from the inevitable brushes...more

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Mar 19, 2010 Lavinia rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010, fiction

In this second volume of "A la recherche..." Proust continues to focus on/analyse love- more or less from a teenage perspective, focusing on the narrator's love for Gilberte, Swann's daughter. Actually, every two pages or so there is at least one paragraph that can be regarded as an aphorism on love. I basically pictured myself many years ago reading Les Miserables, when I used to write down similar passages about love & co. in a little notebook destined to keep all my favourite book quotati...more

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Mar 01, 2013 Roger Burk rated it 3 of 5 stars

Second of seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past AKA In Search of Lost Time. After the first volume I wanted to find out what happened next, so I read this one. No more. The quality of the writing rewards sustained close attention, but I can't sustain it for the required aeons. I wish Proust had written 3,000 poems instead of this one hypertrophied novel. It's just yak, yak, yak--the descriptions and scenes go on four times longer than they need to. Yes, it's beautiful writing, but enough a...more

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Dec 02, 2009 Rob rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

After completing this, Volume 2 of Proust's immortal masterpiece, I am debating whether to turn to Volume 3 or Sinitta's autobiography next.

I have been fortunate in that my reading of "Within a Budding Grove" has coincided with long periods of travel involving plane and train journeys and waits at airports and Indian hotel rooms. The book is superb of course - and I'd agree with various other posters on GoodReads who pronounce it worth battling through the first, demanding section of "Swann's Wa...more

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Feb 14, 2009 Robin rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: classics

Man, that took a long time. Sure, I had other stuff going on in my life (like, moving from my house of 18 years and going back to work full-time after a two-year childrearing leave and reading a different book every month with my rockin' book club), but SHEESH. And, for those keeping score, it was my second go at it (tried years ago). But I did it, and I'm in for the long haul. Only four more volumes to go.

I've been trying to figure out why it moved so much more slowly for me than Swann's Way....more Man, that took a long time. Sure, I had other stuff going on in my life (like, moving from my house of 18 years and going back to work full-time after a two-year childrearing leave and reading a different book every month with my rockin' book club), but SHEESH. And, for those keeping score, it was my second go at it (tried years ago). But I did it, and I'm in for the long haul. Only four more volumes to go.

I've been trying to figure out why it moved so much more slowly for me than Swann's Way. I think it may be that Proust is trying to tap into his readers' memories ALL THE TIME, so if you're susceptible to that, your mind tends to wander into reminiscence constantly. Has anyone else had this experience? (Oh yeah, right, who else besides Caroline has actually finished Volume II?) Or maybe it’s just that I’m feeling particularly melancholy these days, what with the life changes and all.

For me it was the second part, the summer/early fall at the beach, that kept going on and on. And then when our hero FINALLY makes the acquaintance of the elusive girls, even that dragged. But I kept going, because, as Proustians know, he does make me think, and at every page. And even if that slows me down, it keeps me going. Examples: his description of the seductive power of pop music, returning to the “mathematic of the morrow” after having gone to sleep drunk and blissfully unaware, how as we get older we lose our ability to be thrilled/terrified. How finding out that there is no mystery or beauty brings tranquility to our lives because we can resign ourselves to death with no regrets. (I don’t buy this one. Obviously he was a depressive. Or maybe old before his time? It makes me think about a 1996 interview I read in the New Yorker about the Obamas. Barack said that Michelle is both completely familiar to him and also a complete mystery to him, and that was part of what helped sustain their relationship. There‘s one guy who‘s not ready to die -- thank goodness!! See what I mean about how Proust makes your mind make all of these connections ALL THE TIME?)

At the moment when our hero might finally get his only kiss of the entire volume, this moment of adolescent hormones and drive and purely carnal desire where he‘s 100% sensation and flinging himself at this girl, he has to stop and look back at the moment and reimagine a philosopher telling the teenager that he‘s going to die someday and that he‘s not indestructible. So Proust. The narrator never gets a break. And that’s why, even though he annoys me, I love ‘im.(less)

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Dec 18, 2007 Matthew Love added it · review of another edition

The most exquisite hand-wringing one is bound to encounter.

A good, slow, dense read for the winter. This man is capable of clacking open oblique moments like nuts and feeding you the meat. Mysterious meat you did not really recognize before it was proffered. (Okay, now forget the whole mystery meat thing.)

Certainly, patience is required. But once you've made your way through the first volume (indeed the first challenging 100 pages), you know what is coming -- it simply takes a particular commit...more

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Mar 22, 2009 James rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This was more work to get through than Swann's Way but it was worth it. Not so much because of the overall work but for what I found repeatedly inside the book.

The story took lots of perseverance to get through but just when I was about to give up and cast the book aside, I'd read something like this:

That is why the better part of our memories exists outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever we happen upon...more

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Nov 16, 2012 Christy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Before I'd even gotten more than half way into this volume, it inspired me to write, in gratitude for the pleasure it had already given me, this blog post: On the unsuspected joys of Proust
http://christyrodgers.wordpress.com/2...

And this is from the context, I should say, of someone who, while loving the other modernists she'd read, was not really looking forward to Proust, thinking he'd be stuffy, overly romantic, and reactionary. Well, was I wrong. I'm hooked. There are hills and valleys in th...more

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Apr 17, 2013 Mala rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013-the-year-of-reading-proust

Review of Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust.
Shelf: Modern fiction,2013- The year of reading Proust.

A character,the Marquis de Norpois quotes a fine Arab proverb, The dogs may bark; the caravan goes on. And so the ISOLT saga continues– Marcel has a meandering tale to tell and he will take his fine time telling that–fall in line or else,vamoose!

A lot happens in the second book– new characters,new themes are introduced. Old characters & old themes are expanded upon. Marcel gets to share...more

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2013: The Year of...: Through Sunday, 28 Apr.: Within a Budding Grove	61	95	May 14, 2013 07:48am
2013: The Year of...: Through Sunday, 21 Apr.: Within a Budding Grove	110	89	May 12, 2013 06:06pm
2013: The Year of...: Through Sunday, 14 Apr.: Within a Budding Grove	103	99	May 07, 2013 09:12am
2013: The Year of...: Through Sunday, 24 Mar.: Within a Budding Grove	170	128	Apr 24, 2013 12:49pm
2013: The Year of...: Through Sunday, 31 Mar.: Within a Budding Grove	127	125	Apr 23, 2013 08:35pm
2013: The Year of...: Through Sunday, 7 Apr.: Within a Budding Grove	128	104	Apr 17, 2013 10:54am
2013: The Year of...: Through Sunday, 10 Mar.: Within a Budding Grove	136	127	Mar 31, 2013 11:16am

title link	preview: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
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In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (À la recherche du temps perdu #2)

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