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ნაპოვნი დრო

(À la recherche du temps perdu #7)

Marcel Proust,

დალი იაშვილი (Translator)

4.49 · Rating details · 5,414 ratings · 550 reviews

მარსელ პრუსტის შედევრმა „დაკარგული დროის ძიებაში“, რომელიც 3000-ზე მეტ გვერდს მოიცავს და 7 ტომადაა დაყოფილი, შეცვალა არა მხოლოდ ფრანგული, არამედ მსოფლიო ლიტერატურა.

პრუსტი ძირეულად ცვლის რომანის სტრუქტურისა და სიუჟეტის ტრადიციული ქარგას: მოგვითხრობს სპონტანურ მოგონებათა, ასოციაციათა, ქვეცნობიერ მინიშნებათა კვალდაკვალ; მოვლენათა გადმოცემისას არ იცავს დროულ თანმიმდევრობას. მ მარსელ პრუსტის შედევრმა „დაკარგული დროის ძიებაში“, რომელიც 3000-ზე მეტ გვერდს მოიცავს და 7 ტომადაა დაყოფილი, შეცვალა არა მხოლოდ ფრანგული, არამედ მსოფლიო ლიტერატურა.

პრუსტი ძირეულად ცვლის რომანის სტრუქტურისა და სიუჟეტის ტრადიციული ქარგას: მოგვითხრობს სპონტანურ მოგონებათა, ასოციაციათა, ქვეცნობიერ მინიშნებათა კვალდაკვალ; მოვლენათა გადმოცემისას არ იცავს დროულ თანმიმდევრობას. მკითხველი პრუსტისეულ უდროო დროში ვარდება: წარსულის ფრაგმენტსა და დღევანდელ შეგრძნებას გამოჰყავს დროის ბრუნვიდან. დრო დამარცხებულია ამ რომანში, დრო ხელახლაა ნაპოვნი.

მთხრობელს (პრუსტსაც), რომელსაც წერა სურს, ყურადღება გაფანტული აქვს ამქვეყნიური ამაოებით, ზეპურ საზოგადოებაში ტრიალით, ფუქსავატობით და ამ მდგომარეობაში მყოფი გადაქანცულია უამრავი ძიებით. თვალნათლივ ხედავს, რომ არანაირი ლიტერატურული ნიჭი არ გააჩნია, რომ ვერაფერს დაწერს, რადგან ის თვისებანი, რაც მწერალს უნდა ჰქონდეს, მხოლოდ დროდადრო აქვს. გადაწყვეტს, ხელი აიღოს მწერლად გახდომის განზრახვაზე. თუმცა გერმანტების წვეულებაზე მისული ეზოში ფეხს წამოჰკრავს ცუდად დაგებულ ფილაქანს და წამსვე სენ-მარკის ეკლესიის ეზო ახსენდება ვენეციაში, სადაც სწორედ ამგვარად წაბორძიკდა. ლაქიას ჩაი მოაქვს და კოვზი გაწკარუნდება ლამბაქზე, რაც შუა მინდორში გაჩერებული მატარებლის შეკეთების ხმაურს აგონებს, როდესაც საყვარელ ბებიასთან ერთად მგზავრობდა. ბიბლიოთეკაში ფორთოხლის წვენს მოართმევენ და ხელსახოცი სწორედ ისევეა გახამებული, როგორც ბალბეკში პირველად ჩასვლისას დახვდა. ეს სამი ნიშანი იდუმალი კავშირია წარსულსა და აწმყოს შორის. და ის უმნიშვნელოვანეს გადაწყვეტილებას იღებს – ჩაიკეტება, წერას დაიწყებს და კვლავ იპოვის დაკარგულ დროს. სასწორის ერთ მხარეს წერა იდება, მეორეზე – სხვა ყველაფერი. წერით უმაქნისი, უბედური, ამაო სიცოცხლე ქმედით, ბედნიერ სიცოცხლედ იქცევა. ...more

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Published 2019 by არტანუჯი (first published 1927)

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Start your review of ნაპოვნი დრო (In Search of Lost Time, #7)

Aug 31, 2012 Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, 1001-book, literature, 20th-century

(685 From 1001 Books) - À la recherche du temps perdu VII: Le Temps retrouvé = Time Regained (In Search of Lost Time, #7), Marcel Proust

Volume Seven: Time Regained. The final volume of In Search of Lost Time chronicles the years of World War I, when, as M. de Charlus reflects on a moonlit walk, Paris threatens to become another Pompeii.

Years later, after the war's end, Proust's narrator returns to Paris, where Mme. Verdurin has become the Princess de Guermantes. He reflects on time, reality, je (685 From 1001 Books) - À la recherche du temps perdu VII: Le Temps retrouvé = Time Regained (In Search of Lost Time, #7), Marcel Proust

Volume Seven: Time Regained. The final volume of In Search of Lost Time chronicles the years of World War I, when, as M. de Charlus reflects on a moonlit walk, Paris threatens to become another Pompeii.

Years later, after the war's end, Proust's narrator returns to Paris, where Mme. Verdurin has become the Princess de Guermantes. He reflects on time, reality, jealousy, artistic creation, and the raw material for literature-his past life.

This volume also includes the indispensable Guide to Proust, an index to all six volumes of the novel.

در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته - مارسل پروست (مرکز) ادبیات؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: ماه نوامبر سال 1992میلادی و ماه نوامبر سال 2007میلادی

عنوان: در جستجوی زمان از دست رفته، کتاب اول: طرف خانه سوان؛ نویسنده: مارسل پروست؛ مترجم: مهدی سحابی؛ تهران، نشر مرکز، 1369، شابک 9643054810؛ چاپ دهم 1389؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان فرانسه - سده 20م

کتاب نخست: طرف خانه سوان؛ کتاب دوم: در سایه دوشیزگان شکوفا؛ کتاب سوم: طرف گرمانت یک؛ کتاب چهارم: طرف گرمانت دو؛ کتاب پنجم: سدوم و عموره؛ کتاب ششم اسیر؛ کتاب هفتم آلبرتین گمشده (گریخته)؛ کتاب هشتم: زمان بازیافته؛ توصیخ اینکه کتاب سوم در ایران دو جلد است برای همین زمان بازیافته جلد هشتم شده است

مبهوتم از توان اندیشه و توانایی بشر، لبه ها و مرز این توانایی تا کجاست، واژه ی «تداعی معنی» آیا برازنده ی این تعبیر تواند بود، یا بهتر همان است که بگویم یادآوری و بازیابی خاطره ها و دانسته هایی که در یکی از نشانه ها شریک هستند؛ یا نوآفرینی و بازآفرینی یادها، استمرار، و ساخت و کار، در ذهن آدمیان است، «پروست» این توانایی را بسیار خوب به خوانشگرش نشان داده است

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 10/12/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی ...more

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Mar 28, 2014 Renato rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: all-stars, read-more-than-once, 100-best-books-world-library, the-novel-100, proust, reviewed, 2014, a-la-recherche-du-temps-perdu, absolute-favorites, 1001

Longtemps I asked myself if, instead of reading Marcel Proust on my Kindle, I shouldn’t have bought physical books to read in my bed to perhaps be an inch closer to his conditions while he was writing his masterpiece, as having a cork-lined bedroom proved to be impossible this year. Each time I started and finished a volume, I would again ask myself if I should get a paperback edition instead. However, as I had already all seven volumes digitally, and I knew such a big commitment of reading week Longtemps I asked myself if, instead of reading Marcel Proust on my Kindle, I shouldn’t have bought physical books to read in my bed to perhaps be an inch closer to his conditions while he was writing his masterpiece, as having a cork-lined bedroom proved to be impossible this year. Each time I started and finished a volume, I would again ask myself if I should get a paperback edition instead. However, as I had already all seven volumes digitally, and I knew such a big commitment of reading weekly sections for the entire year would eventually clash with other obligations, I never got to switch and kept on reading on my Kindle for it was easier and more convenient than carrying tree books from one place to another and it also allowed me to read in the dark.

While I was reading tonight - just moments ago, actually - and I looked down at my Kindle screen (something that I do constantly and also happens to be a reason for this desire to stop reading digitally, as I feel it rushes my reading when I know that I’m near the end of a chapter or to finishing the book, and I keep calculating if the estimation is right or if it'll take me more or less time instead), I noticed the “Time remaining” information telling me that Time Regained would be over in 28 minutes.

Like quick flashes of lightning, memories of all the previous six moments of when I was this close to finishing each volume - along with the place I was reading them, the season of the year, the weather, my mood - jumped in front of me (perhaps it would be more accurate to say “out of me"), initially blurring my vision, and then completely blinding me, as if they were trying to stop me, because finishing this last volume would also end my first read of À la recherche du temps perdu, in which they were included and, because of that, still alive, but fearing their afterlife was bound to be over in mere 28 minutes. Wouldn’t you do all that you could to stop Time - or just to extend it a bit somehow - if you knew you’d be gone in a matter of minutes?

As quickly as these memories surrounded me - it’s amazing how many things can happen so fast in a second inside of our heads - I figured that they weren't trying to stop me from finishing the seventh volume, they were actually standing over my shoulder to watch the birth of their little sibling, the new special moment I would hold dear forever in myself, to welcome it and, of course, to watch over me as I finished reading the novel that would be forever considered my favorite and the best thing I have ever read in my life. Had I switched to physical books, these sensations wouldn’t have been triggered this way, or perhaps different ones would have appeared. Who knows? I’m just glad it all happened the way it did.

I know this isn’t a proper review as it only accounts for my reading experience instead of actually addressing the book. I made the conscious decision of not reviewing any of the volumes as I felt unprepared - for I believe I still have so much to extract from these beloved pages - and I want to wait until I do at least one more read - how could I stop now? Even so, I decided to acknowledge what just happened, for I think this was an experience that I couldn't let go without writing at least a few - as silly as they might be - words, specially after taking such a fondness for involuntary memories because of Proust.

Do yourself a favor: pick up Swann's Way and meet him, in case you haven’t yet.
You’re most welcome. ...more

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Nov 07, 2012 Kalliope rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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

This is not a review of this book. This is a testimony of having reached the end of marcel Proust’s La Recherche du temps perdu, as scheduled in The Year of Reading Proust 2013. I started on January 1st and finished it on December 29th.

I have actually read the 53 weekly reading divisions at least two times. So, I have read the full novel twice. I also listened, while reading, to the 111 CDs of the Thélème audio edition.

If the novel was written in bed with the light from one single side lamp, I h ...more

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Aug 09, 2010 karen rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: i-am-reading-proust, not-a-polyglot, littry-fiction

take that, proust - i have finished you!!

summer of proust is OVER!!

if i were to make a collage of the final volume of proust, i would use the following images:

this one started off with some really tantalizing situations and then quickly backed off into more philosophical abstractions. dammit, proust, when you have gay bondage, stay with gay bondage!! and war!! these are exciting themes!! don't drift off into thinky time!!

the frustration i have with this one is the frustration i have with philoso ...more

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Oct 20, 2015 Adam Dalva rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

Somehow, someway, Proust sticks the landing. This is the strongest part of the entire novel (even surpassing the wonderful SWANN IN LOVE), unifyiing both plot and thematics in an absolutely magical way. If you're considering starting Proust and find yourself lost in the weeds, know that all will become clear in the end. There is some amusing and shocking content in this book, which I'll avoid spoiling at all costs, but three instances stand out: The famous last party, where a justifiably legenda ...more

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Sep 01, 2016 Michael Finocchiaro rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, novels, read-in-french, favorites, french-20th-c

You made it! After 2000 some-odd pages, you made it to the end of La Recherche. Your reward is a breath-taking description of Paris under falling bombs during WW I, one of the most incredible passages that Proust ever wrote, "La Bal des Masques" (The Masked Ball), and an end to the most incredible literary voyage ever attempted by an author. He, like Mozart and Bach, literally died with the pen in his hand finishing his blessed cahiers (notebooks) in a race against death. It is a perfect ending ...more

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Jan 18, 2013 Aubrey rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: french, prose-prose-prose, reviewed, translated, ever-on, 5-star, r-2013, person-of-translated, r-goodreads, antidote-think-twice-all

My clearest memory of reading Swann's Way consists of pouring over one of the large illustrations, softly colored and darkly lit and so much more interesting than the Biomaterials lecture I was sitting in, an aisle-edged seat that necessitated swift cover ups from the professor's gaze as well as ensured a swift getaway at the ring of the bell. Now, I am at the close of eleven months on, more than three hundred miles away from the beginning and likely to never join in on such a high and mighty sc My clearest memory of reading Swann's Way consists of pouring over one of the large illustrations, softly colored and darkly lit and so much more interesting than the Biomaterials lecture I was sitting in, an aisle-edged seat that necessitated swift cover ups from the professor's gaze as well as ensured a swift getaway at the ring of the bell. Now, I am at the close of eleven months on, more than three hundred miles away from the beginning and likely to never join in on such a high and mighty science lecture ever again. Older, and wiser, I would hope, but as the latter lacks as much concreteness that stuffs the former to a painfully nostalgic brim, I will leave it to others to determine that particular note.

I had been wondering whether I would need two reviews, one for the parcel and one for the whole, but this is Proust. Forty two hundred pages and counting, an author that died before the work had ripened into a fully snipped and spliced together piece, and still it all comes together. The color, the music, the people, the literature, the feverish thralls of machinated society culminating at long last in war, Paris' own Pompeii. And Time. Always Time.

I will still put something down for the megalodon of the complete edition, but later, I think. I think, in that I will leave it to Time to determine whether it is truly necessary or right to an attempt an encompassing of my first experience in Searching for Lost Time, a Time spent alongside my own Time so full of turmoil, temperament, and translation. French and I did not part on the best of terms after so many years of it being just another grindstone for my unwilling youth, but I still remember. And after this work, I begin to wonder, if it would not perhaps be worth it. For Le deuxième sexe, for Les Misérables, for this. That question I will leave to Time as well, for unlike the narrator finally embarking on his composition at the end of so many pages, that I have in plenty.

I didn't used to think so. Decide your career at 17, obtain a career at 21, work at said career for the rest of your life. It wasn't so long ago that books seemed the only future left to my own true volition, and I still find myself speeding ahead into the void if I'm not too careful. The thing about writing is the cultivation of it; a reading here, a friendship there, a life that does not require a filled résumé to be worthy of script. The path I am walking now is slower, but surer, and the beauty found in its natural growth of passionate productivity is all its own. I am not so set in the concept of interchangeability of people and places as Proust, but I do see the wisdom in living for the sake of living, letting the gardens grow without worrying too much about the resulting opus.

If you wish to write: read, watch, listen, think, live. A piece here, a piece there, when the spirit takes you. Look for beauty, look for hypocrisy, look for the intersection of details in reality, memory, and iridescent mist that lies between. Mind your illusions, but also love them, for as long as you are able. Find your niche, pursue your instincts, and no one will be able to say that your Time has been wasted. Every so often, cast your line back, far back into that cloaking brilliance and those soft-edged shadows, and wonder.

Fragments of existence withdrawn from Time: these then were perhaps what the being three times, four times brought back to life within me had just now tasted, but the contemplation, though it was of eternity, had been fugitive. And yet I was vaguely aware that the pleasure which this contemplation had, at rare intervals, given me in my life, was the only genuine and fruitful pleasure that I had known.

I do not agree with everything Proust has said, but what I do is of immense value and phenomenal insight. I do not view my loves the way Proust did, but much of it I recognize in parts of pain and parcels of profundity, and will color my effects forever on. Ever so often I snorted and sneered at his pompous pratfalls, and more times than I can count was I lost in a rapture of sight, of sound, of trains of lines of letters flitting this way and that over coursing streams of thought and form and sometimes, sometimes, the very soul of a name, a place, a pleasure. I have spent a longer length of effort in his pages than I have with any other author, a plunge that was in no way previously prepared for to any practical extent. Fifteen hundred and fifty-six people there are now in '2013: The Year of Reading Proust' group, and the percent I've interacted with is a mere smidgen of a handful of a precious few. I am a poor player in the daily discussion realm, but I do hope that my small contribution of reviews have helped.

Thank you, Proustitute, for your leadership as both coordinator and titular figurehead of the most witty sort. Thank you Kalliope, Aloha, Kris, for your efforts within the group as well as without. Thank you one and all for every like, every comment, every spur onward towards this final conclusion, the culminating finality of the first journey through word, through page, through volume, through Proust. Much has changed since that first library check out of that first ponderous edition, and much remains the same. The entirety of all that is what this reading experience has given me, that which will play out for the rest of my days as both influence and insight and whatever saying that one has read the entirety of ISoLT is worth in the world these days. Not much to most, quite a bit to those who count, and most importantly, however I see fit to me. And I see fit to value it very, very much.

I know that I am far too quick in my finishing for most, so for those in the midst, those in the beginning, those on the cusp of finishing, those who have finished within the last month or so and still bear the flitting of certain pages on the borders of that electric spitfire of the brain, those who made their last way long ago enough to be thinking on another journey. Those who are halted partway, those who view with trepidation, those who have yet to come. Good luck, good reading, good living. Come for the reputation, come for the incentive, come for the love of others past, present, future. Proust is not perfect, but by god he is something special.

Sweet Sunday afternoons, beneath the chestnut-tree in our Combray garden, from which I was careful to eliminate every commonplace incident of my actual life, replacing them by a career of strange adventures and ambitions in a land watered by living streams, you still recall those adventures and ambitions to my mind when I think of you, and you embody and preserve them by virtue of having little by little drawn round and enclosed them (which I went on with my book and the heat of the day declined) in the gradual crystallization, slowly altering in form and dappled with a pattern of chestnut-leaves, of your silent, sonorous, fragrant, limpid hours.

-Swann's Way

Adieu, Marcel Proust, adieu. Till we meet again. ...more

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Oct 01, 2017 Roy Lotz rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: novels-novellas-short-stories, francophilia

I did it.

May 2014 – October 2017

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Nov 15, 2013 Darwin8u rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Wow, Proust kills it with this last book in his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time. He pulls it all together. I loved Proust's reflections on literary and artistic creation, reality, memory, pain, death and time -- and how in 'Time Regained' he draws all his themes together.

I'm almost sad my stroll with Proust is over. There are few books I've ever wanted to start reading again immediately after finishing. Today as I was setting down 'Time Regained', I almost reached for 'Swann's Way'. I feel l ...more

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Aug 01, 2011 Michael rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: aa-francelit, xlong-over-400, xxlong-over-800, translation, modernlit, proust-marcel, aaa-top-translation, penguin-modern, multivolume-lit, literature

201119: well this is conundrum for though it is not like there are no other books to read, the question is- should i try to read it in French? yes say some, no say others- the translations are good enough... cannot decide... i am told to try 'les liaisons dangereuses' by de laclos maybe...

there are two reviews of 'proust', this one i think has everything the other has on 'swann's way'Swann's Way... maybe? (28 likes here, 12 there...) same difference...

230619: looking at books that are more ‘achi ...more

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Sep 12, 2014 Lee Klein rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

To say I've read the complete seven-volume novel now is truth and lie since it'll take a few more trips down the pair of "ways" and "transversals" before I can really call this "read." Maybe my favorite volume for the fifty-page stretch where M. explicitly addresses the work to come. Some of the best writing about writing I've read. Otherwise, threads are tied up -- plus there's literal tying up (bondage), pedophilia (only a mention), WWI in Paris, zeppelins and airplane fighters at night (the p To say I've read the complete seven-volume novel now is truth and lie since it'll take a few more trips down the pair of "ways" and "transversals" before I can really call this "read." Maybe my favorite volume for the fifty-page stretch where M. explicitly addresses the work to come. Some of the best writing about writing I've read. Otherwise, threads are tied up -- plus there's literal tying up (bondage), pedophilia (only a mention), WWI in Paris, zeppelins and airplane fighters at night (the prose takes off during the wartime sections). Toward the end everything is degraded by age, war, perversion -- entropy uber alles. The shortest and most accessible volume -- I'd maybe even suggest that intrepid readers might want to try reading this first before Swann's Way? Every fifth page dogeared. Proust, by this volume, has perfected his epigrammatic skills, for sure. Now at the end I have a better grasp on everyone in the world of Paris, Combray, Balbec and I'll appreciate it more next time through -- a volume a year every year forever. In this one, there was some satisfaction that M's stated intentions regarding solitude and society, and the moments of perception that make life worth living, jibed with my impressions of the novel -- it worked for me exactly as M. states he hoped it would. I experienced what had been experienced as the language sharpened as M. emphasized an impression's importance -- the maybe-too-famous madeleine, the pink hawthorns in bloom, the little phrase in the sonata, the aeroplane climbing the sky, his grandmother's death, Albertine asleep, slipping on uneven paving stones, sitting in a library room conceiving this cathedral dress of an Arabian Nights-like masterpiece -- ie, all these memorable solo ecstastic moments of sensory intensity rendered in riveting and superclear language, compared to long scenes in society of always perceptive yet oft-soporific calibrations of character. Loved that the church at Combray was ruined during the war; the image of old Odette; Charlus a depraved exaggeration of the charming invert he'd been; the tragic dissolution of Saint-Loup and the flat-bottom of his daughter's nose, same as her mother and grandmother's; M. the narrator dissolving into Marcel the author. As with most of these volumes, there were stretches were I was like will I really give this four stars? But then Proustian expository overdrive would kick in and save the day. Again, this was really just an introduction to a text I'm sure I'll return to throughout life thanks to its wisdom and insight, its structure and exemplary language, its world and its riches.

I've collected impressions of all volumes (started reading August 17, 2012) as one long review of In Search of Lost Time here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ...more

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Aug 13, 2013 Paul rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: european-novels

I've been reading Proust for just over a year, just a little a day. I'm going to miss dipping into it, it's become part of my life. Still so beautifully written that it's almost impossible to review. Some of the old favourites return again; Gilberte, Charlus, Morel, Mme Verdurin amongst others. The time period spans the First World War and takes us into the narrators' middle age and towards his own death. Memory and the weight of the past recur as themes and it is as though the narrator is makin ...more

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Jul 03, 2010 Greg rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

As of 20:50 on July Seventh, Two Thousand and Ten, I'm still slightly reeling from finishing this book, roughly twenty two hours ago. Like ninety nine point some high number percent of my reading experiences I read this in less than optimum conditions; by plowing through the last hundred pages or so at a un-Proustian pace. There are parts of the text I'm sure I missed, little subtleties I could have enjoyed and blah blah blah, but I think the overload was also Proustian, especially in light of w As of 20:50 on July Seventh, Two Thousand and Ten, I'm still slightly reeling from finishing this book, roughly twenty two hours ago. Like ninety nine point some high number percent of my reading experiences I read this in less than optimum conditions; by plowing through the last hundred pages or so at a un-Proustian pace. There are parts of the text I'm sure I missed, little subtleties I could have enjoyed and blah blah blah, but I think the overload was also Proustian, especially in light of what the last hundred, or so, pages are like.

Jasmine asked if I really thought this was five star book. I don't know. Probably not. Time Regained wasn't the strongest of the novels, but like red-headed step-child of Recherche, The Captive, what this novel lacks in straight-forward appeal it makes up for in being essential to the over-all structure of Recherche as the novel, and each book being just part of the whole. Some of the other volumes are probably examples of where the parts are greater than the whole, or whatever. I don't know if it is a five star book. Maybe it is to you, and maybe it is not. Probably depending on what you find appealing in Recherche will depend on what you think of this book (do I hear a big uh-huh! from anyone?). I'll warn you though, if you really only get giggles over the wit of the characters, this book probably isn't going to be the one that makes you feel all tingling inside.

On a similar note, before reading this, about a two weeks ago, a co-worker, Dana, asked me to tell her if she would enjoy this book. I must state a strong, NO!. No. No, Dana, you will not like this book. The fascisticly titled book 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read (I think this is the book, if it's not it is another book that uses must read in the title, or maybe it was have to read, but it is a very bossy order) says that Time Regained is perfect for gays who want to enjoy the gayest of Proust, and they will then know if they like Proust and if they want to they can go read the rest of the books. One, this novel is maybe the most explicitly gay, but if you are looking for something explicit and gay you'll probably do better to google "gay french erotica whipping". You'll be more satisfied. Time Regained should not be read by anyone who hasn't read the books coming before it. Except for a scene where someone gets erotically whipped, pretty much everything that happens is tied with previous events. You will be bored to tears without having read the other books. Seriously. The editor of this book (if it is in fact this book, I will check tomorrow for sure) is an idiot (Hi, Harold Bloom!!) and should be tied to a bed with heavy chains and get whipped and sodomized for making such a stupid demand on people to read something they will be in no position to enjoy. Proust has a bad enough rep without this kind of nonsense.

Now for some notes.

1. I mentioned wit above. For the record I'm sick of cleverness. I'm as guilty as the next person for using cheap tricks but it gets so boring after a while. Yeah, it might actually take a lot of work to pull off something clever, but it's so fucking meaningless except for a chuckle or two. I'm sure I'll do something 'clever' soon and I'll be a hypocrite. But cheap gimmicks are bullshit and if I have learned nothing else from Proust it's that all the wit and cleverness in the world is a farce, a waste of time, a spectacle.

2. "....pretentiousness is next door to stupidity....." nicely put Proust.

3. How about a line of Proust to deal with Republicans? "The smug satisfaction that an imbecile takes in the justice of his cause and the certainty of victory are peculiarly irritating."

4. "....real books must be the products, not of broad daylight and small talk but of darkness and silence."
...more

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Apr 03, 2021 T.D. Whittle rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: reviews, marcel-proust

I now understand why and how people become devoted to Marcel Proust. Although I read the first two books of In Search Of Lost Time (AKA Remembrance Of Things Past) for the first time when I was about the same age as our protagonist when he meets Albertine (barely out of adolescence), it is only now, when I am a few years older than Proust at his death, that I have read his masterpiece straight through.

What has captivated me and held my attention throughout these many hours of reading is the enc I now understand why and how people become devoted to Marcel Proust. Although I read the first two books of In Search Of Lost Time (AKA Remembrance Of Things Past) for the first time when I was about the same age as our protagonist when he meets Albertine (barely out of adolescence), it is only now, when I am a few years older than Proust at his death, that I have read his masterpiece straight through.

What has captivated me and held my attention throughout these many hours of reading is the enchanting experience of being a trusted (though invisible) friend to our eloquent narrator, as he walks us through his life over several decades. While it is true, and has been said often, that Proust "gives us a whole world"—that being, in basic facts of culture and geography, France from the Belle Epoque through the first world war—what makes Proust's writing so different from other books of this same place and time is the intimacy and immediacy of his voice, and the beauty of his vision.

One of young Marcel's realisations is that there is not one world but millions of worlds, upon which millions of persons open their eyes each morning. Some other writer might offer us a view of the drawing rooms and salons of Paris, visits to the Norman coast in summer, and side trips to a charming country town in springtime; but only Proust could give us the rich and luminous dream that is In Search Of Lost Time. He is an absolute delight as a writer. He is openly idiosyncratic, often witty, and sometime hilarious. His aesthetic tastes are sophisticated but his pleasure in the natural world is uncomplicated and joyful. A man of contradictions, he is a snob who disapproves of snobs, and a consummate liar who hates being lied to. He is complicated and messy and infuriating and loveable. He describes sunsets over an apple orchard in a way that makes us long for the very same sunset, over the very same orchard.

There were times, I admit, when my sympathy slipped away from the Marcel who is our narrator. The Marcel who acts as sugar daddy and would-be warden to a young Albertine is a man driven mad by possessive jealousy. His behaviour is invasive, controlling, and unbearably tedious. To most of us, this is not only unattractive but also threatening. When I was convinced that the Albertine being described truly was a young woman, I spent much of the reading feeling suffocated and irritated and worried on her behalf; over many pages, this morphed into a feeling of incredulity, until, finally, the penny dropped: Albertine is not a girl. Clearly, her sex has been switched and is being only thinly disguised.

Why I had not thought of this much earlier on, I cannot say, except that I tend to take what authors give me and run with it. I don't really like or respect reading through a "lens" that is outside the context the author provides, and presumes too much.

In this case, though, I had to reconsider because the whole Albertine section of the series does not work most of the time unless one imagines that Albertine is really an Albert, in which case it all makes sense. So much of the behaviour and dialogue attributed to Albertine is completely unbelievable for a young woman of this time and culture, but very credible for a sexually profligate young man. (The only young girls with such a wide range of sexual experience were prostitutes.)

Regardless of the sometimes awkward inversions for which Proust is famous, every volume of this great work shines in its own light. I am so sad to have finished it because I can never again read it for the first time. ...more

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Nov 15, 2015 Teresa rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

So, I am finished, ... and I could've finished the night before, but as I approached 98% on my Kindle, I decided to stop as I was so tired at that point, I didn't want to rush that last percent (documents stop at 99% on my device); it was a good decision, as the last percent was one to especially savor. I then got on GR to announce my accomplishment (because without GR, I doubt I would've ever read this opus) and almost immediately Kalliope congratulated me on becoming a fellow Proustian, genero So, I am finished, ... and I could've finished the night before, but as I approached 98% on my Kindle, I decided to stop as I was so tired at that point, I didn't want to rush that last percent (documents stop at 99% on my device); it was a good decision, as the last percent was one to especially savor. I then got on GR to announce my accomplishment (because without GR, I doubt I would've ever read this opus) and almost immediately Kalliope congratulated me on becoming a fellow Proustian, generous of her, as I feel I'm far from that, one reason being I have no desire to start over as I've heard others have afterward, plus I know I've not made even a small dent in all the themes and references she and others have.

But...since I was far from tired after just reading that one percent and I didn't want to start something new and also feeling a bit bereft, as one does at the end of a long work one has been immersed in, I went back and skimmed the Overture and Combray sections of Swann's Way, so perhaps I am a very tiny bit of a Proustian after all. I feel, though, I'll never be much of one, at least not in the way I'm Dickensian. (Why is it the former label can be used as a noun, but the latter is always used as an adjective?)

Similar to my going back to Swann's Way last night, I went back this morning to my reviews of the earlier volumes: "Proust's [psychologists insights] arrive with a nod of the head. Like a sculptor is said to bring forth what is already there in his block of unformed marble, Proust has put into words what the sympathetic reader already feels and knows, yet he's rendered it all in fresh, vivid imagery...The closing section brought the novel (Swann's Way) together into one beautiful cohesive whole." Those are lines I wrote in my review of Swann's Way and, though here I found the section on aging visages and sagging bodies a bit annoying in its overdoneness, those words hold true for this book and thus for the whole novel, all seven volumes.

So, I am finished, ... but as with any great work, you're never finished. It becomes implanted in your head and colors how you view other works by other artists with what I've heard called a Proustian lens. Yes, I can see that, in the same way that I view life and literature through a Dickensian lens. Add to your own list great authors you've immersed yourself in and it's like a visit to the eye doctor when he switches multiple lenses to ask you: "Does it look better here?...Or here?" ...more

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Nov 22, 2008 Manny rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: french

What Didn't Happen In 1927

ANCHORMAN: And now we're going over to Paris, where crowds have been gathering since early evening waiting for the midnight release of Le temps retrouvé, with pre-ordered sales already totalling more than eleven million copies! Margaret FitzWilliam reporting.

[Paris street. Large number of people in fancy dress lining up outside bookstore. Carnival atmosphere]

JOURNALIST: Yes, all the Proust fans are out in force tonight waiting for the conclusion of the series! I can see ...more

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May 23, 2020 Roman Clodia rated it really liked it · review of another edition

As much a literary manifesto as anything else, this final volume pulls together the threads that have been in play in the earlier books: questions of memory and time, consciousness and representation, desire and suffering, love and absence, aging and death, subjectivity and the self, all come together in a finale which is satisfying in itself but which also invites us to return, in circular fashion, back to the beginning to re-read with the endpoint now known.

Proust's great achievement is to of As much a literary manifesto as anything else, this final volume pulls together the threads that have been in play in the earlier books: questions of memory and time, consciousness and representation, desire and suffering, love and absence, aging and death, subjectivity and the self, all come together in a finale which is satisfying in itself but which also invites us to return, in circular fashion, back to the beginning to re-read with the endpoint now known.

Proust's great achievement is to offer up the representation in language of subjectivity both in inevitable flux and yet also coming to recognise itself, however unnamed and thus incompletely stabilised the speaking 'I' may be. He discovers 'an involuntary memory of the limbs', a kind of muscle memory that involves the senses, and uses an example of this in the famous madeleine which initiates the narrative we have now read.

There are some surprising moments (view spoiler), and some axioms that can feel less than fresh: 'for the only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost'.

There are also some assertions that don't make sense to me: after all the agonising over the self as a palimpsest, the narrator retreats to the idea of 'our true self' as something that can be fixed and defined. I also can't understand his idea of 'extra-temporal' time: surely, to be outside of time is to not exist at all? Proust seems to be trying to get at a time-point beyond the ravages of time that exists, for example, in a work of art - but surely both the creation and the multiple receptions of any work of art are themselves shaped by the horizons of the 'present', whenever that present might be? (I'm not undermining Proust in saying this, just grappling with what he seems to me to be saying).

Reading Proust may not have changed my life, but it is an experience that I'm glad to have had.

Note on translations
For those of us reading this in English, I'd highly recommend this new Penguin edition which updates the previous Penguin Scott Moncrieff/Kilmartin and seems closer to Proust in tone and clarity. Each volume is by a different translator (Lydia Davis' first volume feels particularly crisp and captures the gentle humour of the original) and has a brief but helpful 'translator's note' at the start which touches on textual history (especially problematic in the last three volumes). I had previously read the first two volumes in the Scott Moncrieff/Kilmartin with dips in and out of the French original but re-reading them in this English edition was noticeably different, rendering the text much cleaner, less 'flowery' for want of a better word. ...more

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Aug 25, 2009 Bram rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2009, proustophilia

Sunday was Community Day at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which meant free entry to all. Deciding to take advantage of this at the expense of a gorgeous late summer day, I spent a couple of hours wandering through the impressive but under-construction building, primarily in the European and American wings that cover the last few centuries. I stopped in front of 200 or so paintings, but only two “spoke” to me. While in many circumstances a one-percent hit rate implies a horrible failure or d Sunday was Community Day at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which meant free entry to all. Deciding to take advantage of this at the expense of a gorgeous late summer day, I spent a couple of hours wandering through the impressive but under-construction building, primarily in the European and American wings that cover the last few centuries. I stopped in front of 200 or so paintings, but only two “spoke” to me. While in many circumstances a one-percent hit rate implies a horrible failure or disappointment, I left the museum with feelings of utter satisfaction and delight at my good fortune. Similar, in fact, to how I feel right now after finishing In Search of Lost Time. The connection between the museum and novel run deeper than that, however. My ability to be transported by art (or music, or _____) has been permanently enriched through reading Proust’s ideas on Lost Time, and how this Time actually can be recaptured in reality (additional and annoyingly incoherent musings on this below). Like many of the ideas contained within this book, this recapturing of Time is something about which I’ve somehow always and never known—that is, I’ve known it intuitively, yet without a concreteness or completeness that would allow for a full experience beyond the fleeting moment it can occasionally inhabit in quotidian existence. The initial lightning strike that leads to a discovery of Lost Time is inevitably involuntary, but it can be harnessed, extended, and savored through recognition and analysis, as old Marcel finally discovers while sitting in the library of the Prince & Princess de Guermantes.

As I gazed at (or more accurately, into) de Crissé’s The Bay of Naples, the unconscious displacement that I began to feel in both time and space was met with a newly-awakened consciousness that tried to hold onto and understand this feeling of joyful abandonment to a past experience. I must admit that, like Marcel in his initial attempts at clarifying The Search by dwelling on the madeleine or the steeples at Martinville, I was not wholly successful. I couldn’t quite understand where I was trying to go temporally or why I was so moved, but thanks to Proust, I understood what was happening. While an explanation of The Search mentioned in the book’s title is probably appropriate here to elucidate my point, I hesitate to summarize the narrator’s precious conclusion (one that offers a revelation at once sui generis and instantly familiar) for fear of doing it, and any readers of this review, an injustice. The Search is a thematic thread that begins almost immediately in the novel with the famous madeleine scene (and who knew that this small part was actually an adumbration of the novel’s key theme?) and reaches a peak with a final discovery that takes place some 200 pages from the end of the book. And despite the fact that this Search is the remarkably robust thread that binds these seven volumes together, it actually makes up very little of the bulk of the novel. But in its entirety, in the perfect satisfaction of its resolution, this theme amounts to a tour-de-force that is, in my humble opinion, unequaled in literature. For how often can I say that I actually experience certain parts of my life differently (and with greater, fuller satisfaction) as a consequence of reading a book?

I didn’t start out so smitten with the book’s final volume. Indeed, I was more bored with the first 150 pages (even with the shocking scene of flagellation) than with any other part of the novel. Now, this was most likely due to reading only three or four pages at a time over a period of a few weeks. I can’t get into a flow with an intermittent pace like that. Luckily, I had to fly to Chicago for work this weekend, and unlike David’s average airborne reading experience, mine is usually filled with uninterrupted stretches of intense reading. Two point five hours of Proust and only Proust each way—a perfect scenario for finishing a book begun over eight months ago when I first cracked open Swann’s Way. And Marcel delivered. Big time. Shortly after the aforementioned flagellation scene, he finally delves into his Lost Time thesis with unfettered ecstasy and pellucidity; sixty straight pages of glorious enlightenment. Honestly, I reread some parts of this section four or five times before moving on. Ever wanted to know how to travel through time and space? Proust tells you. And, perhaps because you already know this is possible in some vague way, it’s convincing as all hell. Seriously. And the joy of reading this section was compounded by a bizarre meta-effect, wherein I experienced the exact feelings Proust was describing as (or because?) he was finally describing them in full. Whoa.

Then we get the bal de têtes (masked ball), which contains the illuminating and humorous ruminations on the still-living society characters, each of whom has undergone tremendous physical, social, moral, and intellectual changes since the narrator last saw them years before. And then, quite suddenly, I found myself only a few pages from the end. How could Proust possibly wrap up this book appropriately in so short a space? Not only does he do it appropriately, he does it masterfully. I suppose it’s fitting that the most rewarding read of my life contains the most satisfactory conclusion. But “satisfactory” sounds like it’s easy or happy when it is, in fact, neither. Rather, the ending of the book has a calm inevitability that, when finally reached, reveals itself to be as inescapable and natural as death. Or, of course, life—life, which is finally crystallized for our narrator in the person of Mlle de Saint-Loup, who allows him to reflect on every important character relationship in the book, which together are (mis)woven into an incestuous tangle, all within a single heroic paragraph. In that one paragraph it becomes clear how many variations each character comprises, and it’s likely that if I started rereading this book immediately, I’d find that my “initial” impressions of Odette, Swann, Legrandin, Saint-Loup, Charlus, et al. lined up not at all with the farewell views I’m left with in this final volume. Which, when I think back through my own life and the personal permutations that would make me nigh-unrecognizable to myself, sounds just about right. ...more

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Jan 22, 2016 Susan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

When I first begin reading, “In Search of Lost Time,” I had planned to read it throughout 2015. I now find myself halfway through 2016, but I have – eventually – finished this enormous work. I can say that, rather than get to the last page with relief, I actually feel a great sense of loss. Proust has become my companion and to think I will not be in his company during any part of the day almost makes me want to go back to the beginning and begin again!

This last volume has, “Time Regained,” and When I first begin reading, “In Search of Lost Time,” I had planned to read it throughout 2015. I now find myself halfway through 2016, but I have – eventually – finished this enormous work. I can say that, rather than get to the last page with relief, I actually feel a great sense of loss. Proust has become my companion and to think I will not be in his company during any part of the day almost makes me want to go back to the beginning and begin again!

This last volume has, “Time Regained,” and also, “A Guide to Proust,” which is more an alphabetical index of characters, people, places and themes. If, as a reader, you do make it this far and get to the end of this great work, you will realise that ‘what’ happens is less important than in most novels. There are whole volumes which seem to revolve around a never ending dinner party and, as such, you need to put away your previous thoughts of what a novel should do and just relax into Proust’s words. Allow him to guide you and you will be rewarded with one of the great reading experiences of your life.

There are certain themes which run through the novels and the Narrator always tries to bring these into play. For example, he begins this last volume walking with Gilberte near Combray; where the very first novel began. During this last book he realises the Meseglise way and the Guermantes way are linked, while Gilberte also informs him that she was attracted to him a child. Immediately, we are thrown back into those early days as a child and all of those childish uncertainties and concerns. Later, our Narrator returns to Paris. It is now 1916 and so we have muses on WWI. Old characters appear, including Saint-Loup, Gilberte of course, Charlus, Jupien, Legrandin, Mme Verdurin and others. The past and present seem to collide at a party in the Guermantes house, but it is obvious that the war has both changed society and the behaviour of those people, and places, he once knew.

The role of memory is certainly central to this novel, but I would simply suggest that, if you have never read this before, begin at the first novel and embark on one of the greatest works of literature you will ever read. It is unlike anything else I have read – which, in itself, is enough to recommend it.
...more

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Dec 06, 2013 Mala rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classic-ever-enduring-appeal, all-time-favourites, 2013-the-year-of-reading-proust

“After all, I have seen some beautiful things in my life.”

10 stars for the overall ISoLT experience - if Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove haven't already convinced you; then Time Regained should - of the validity & need of Proust worship in the world of literature, now and forever. Period.

For an year, an enchanted world of art, music, literature, history, and romance, opened up for us - we too could be a part of the hyper-sophisticated world of Faubourg Saint-Germain, but ultimately, In S ...more

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Jun 24, 2020 Luís rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, favorites, france-belgium-swiss

The moment I dreaded so much has finally arrived; this morning, after having laid my eyes for the premiere on the side of Swann's, I finished reading the seventh volume of the incredible masterpiece by Marcel Proust. Terminus, everyone gets off, the journey is over, we have found the lost time.
Thus, time regained is the volume that closes the Research series. In a Paris overthrown by the First World War, the author reviews all the characters that we have encountered throughout our reading. Some, The moment I dreaded so much has finally arrived; this morning, after having laid my eyes for the premiere on the side of Swann's, I finished reading the seventh volume of the incredible masterpiece by Marcel Proust. Terminus, everyone gets off, the journey is over, we have found the lost time.
Thus, time regained is the volume that closes the Research series. In a Paris overthrown by the First World War, the author reviews all the characters that we have encountered throughout our reading. Some, like the charming Marquis de Saint-Loup, are dead; others are always the same; still, others have changed a lot, or maybe it's the world that has changed. Oriane, the beautiful Duchess of Guermantes, has started to associate with artists, has become a sort of new Marquise de Villeparisis, and the new generations no longer know that she has long been the most popular woman. Most sought after in the capital; Madame Verdurin ("that insufferable old shrew" as I have often surprised myself calling her) has succeeded in marrying the Prince de Guermantes. What appears to be a stroke reduced the terrible Baron de Charlus to an almost childish state. In a word, war and time swept away the tremendous Parisian salons.

Now, when it comes time to give you my opinion on this volume and Research more generally, I feel that no praise is enough. I am still young and, after having read such a work, I fear very much to be bored in my next readings, even with the most significant authors, as my father, who experienced it before me, predicted it to me.
Besides the extreme beauty of the sentences, by which one lets oneself easily be lulled, never during my readings, however already numerous, I had never met characters with such well-developed psychology. We are a long way from the stereotypical characters that we too often meet in novels. Each one here has its qualities, its faults and all evolve over the volumes.
This marvellous escapade in the salons of the end of the 19th century has often made me regret not having been born 150 years earlier how I would have liked to know this world!
Dear Mr Proust, I have only one word to say to you: Thank you! ...more

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Jul 16, 2014 Whitaker rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: france, zz-box-09, z_2016-read, canon, recommended-unreservedly, _français, would-kill-if-thrown

Note: In this review, I will use “Proust” to refer to the writer of the work and “Marcel” to refer to his name sake character in the work.

When I started learning French, one of the goals I set for myself and promised myself was that I would one day read A la recherche du temps perdu, all of it, in French. I even shelled out for a leather bound illustrated version of the French classic, which was my pledge to myself towards redeeming that promise. Those seven volumes sat on my shelf for more tha ...more

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May 05, 2010 Geoff rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

A work of art is experienced as a temporal, durational phenomenon. It is also an object of physicality, something that is reacted upon and reproduced by our senses and processed, firstly, by our intellect. Therefore a work of art is an object of space-time, as it contains within itself dimension and duration, properties availing themselves of our immediate sensory perceptions and our ruminative, reflective abilities at the same instant. If an image especially strikes us as it is burned onto the ...more

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Dec 13, 2018 W.D. Clarke rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

For it seemed to me that they would not be “my” readers...
Oh yes we are....

...but the readers of their own selves...
That too.

...my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician at Combray used to offer his customers...
10x magnification!

—it would be my book, but with its help I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves.
All too true, alas.

...So that I should not ask them to praise me or to censure me...
Praise.

but simply to tell me wheth ...more

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Feb 04, 2009 Bettie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: wwi, autumn-2015, re-visit-2015, radio-4x, glbt, autumn-2013, france, lifestyles-deathstyles, lit-richer, fradio

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0076qw1

Description: Paris is ravaged by the Great War. Marcel despairs at his own failures, but the simplest of discoveries awakens astonishing possibilities.
Stars James Wilby.

Revisiting, via BBC R4x, all the books in remembrance, our world has altered too. ...more

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Mar 22, 2015 E. G. rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, à-la-recherche-du-temps-perdu, translated, 5-star, proust, france-algeria, own

--Time Regained (In Search of Lost Time Volume VII)

Notes
Synopsis

A Guide to Proust:
Foreword
Index of Characters
Index of Persons
Index of Places
Index of Themes

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Apr 27, 2015 poncho rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: queerness, read-in-2015, favorites

There’s this thing I do when I like something very very much and it is that I try to delay the end as long as possible. In fact, when I become obsessed with TV series, and they come to an end, I don’t watch the last episode: if I never do it, there’s always some piece of it remaining. However, this is the first time I do it with a book, for it’s been almost three months since I read the previous volume. So reading In search of lost time took me one year, two months and three days — partly, becau There’s this thing I do when I like something very very much and it is that I try to delay the end as long as possible. In fact, when I become obsessed with TV series, and they come to an end, I don’t watch the last episode: if I never do it, there’s always some piece of it remaining. However, this is the first time I do it with a book, for it’s been almost three months since I read the previous volume. So reading In search of lost time took me one year, two months and three days — partly, because I wanted it to last a little bit longer, like I said; partly because I bought the volumes online and each one took about a month to arrive; and partly because I’m a slow reader, to be honest. But it’s been one of best literary experiences in my life, and, in fact, I think this changed my whole perspective upon literature.

The very first time I heard of Marcel Proust was at the age of 17, when I watched Little Miss Sunshine — at that time it was one of my favorite movies; even though I recently rewatched it and I didn’t like it as much as I used to. So there’s this (maybe 40 year old) man in the movie, a scholar, a Proust expert, who is an invert (now I love using the expression, by the way) and tries to commit suicide after one of his (young) students, with whom he fell in love, breaks his heart. Yes, Charlusism set in praxis. Anyway, ever since I watched the movie, I tried so desperately to find some of Proust’s work so I looked for it all around my little town, but couldn’t find any. Finally I gave up, until five years later I went to visit my family in the US (whom I hadn’t seen in fourteen years) and my aunt took me to a bookstore and… there it was! Swann’s way! I was so happy that I almost forgot about the other books I was looking for. And, generally speaking, the whole vacation with my family is quite memorable in my life; I use to think of it as my own search of lost time. So even if one day I had the chance to get some pretty cool edition of Swann’s way, I wouldn’t get rid of mine, since it’s got a very special meaning for me because of the day when I bought it and the time when I read it. Which is funny, you know, since there’s a part in Finding time again when Proust says had he became a bibliophile, like the Prince de Guermantes, he would be the kind who acquires editions not because of their historical value but because of their personal meaning. And I think In search of lost time came into my life at the perfect time, for I think that I might not have appreciated it as I do when I was 17. And, as an additional fact, this is what encouraged me to start reading in English, since I couldn’t find any Spanish editions.

It’s hard to explain things the way Proust does, but I think I have thought myself of most of the things he wrote; but my mind, being the mess it is, unlike his (so organized and harmonic), could never achieve such a powerful yet soft stream of consciousness flowing into the reader’s head. Therefore, reading some parts was not discovering something: it’s rather gaining a new perspective upon what’s already there. But I also learned so much. I think it admirable that someone can be capable of teaching the beauty of life through dinner parties and some other things that we take for granted in our everyday lives.

Speaking of common and taken-for-granted objects, there’s the famous amulet: the madeleine, which seemed to be resting during the past volumes and when Proust mentioned it again in this one, I knew something big was coming, just as in Swann’s way. And so it happened: he starts developing some of his already planted theories about memory, life and art, and it’s quite mesmerizing and pleasing, and I couldn’t help thinking “This is just so Proust.” And it also made me think that it’s funny how it all started with him going to bed early for a long time and dreaming of whatsoever he read before going to bed, and then it moved to a madeleine dipped in tea and then, like an explosion, it’s all romance, jealousy, sexuality, society, masochism, art… God! It’s just amazing!

After this last madeleine epiphany, at the Guermantes’ party, Proust manages time quite dizzily, but with his particular and aesthetically pleasing narrative; and there’s one point where one feels that fiction turns progressively into reality, mingling the creative process of the work you’re reading and the work itself, until the story is over and you get to read the imminent, cruel epitaph: “The end”. Even for an oeuvre that could not be revised as it should have been by the author, it is magnificent.

It saddened me how in this volume every single character is either aging or is already dead. This was like the foretelling of the imminent end. For me, it was as if the world into which I lived parallely for one years and two months started to crumble and disintegrate into ashes. And how was I supposed not to get attached to this world when every character becomes so familiar and so intimate, especially the narrator. They are characters whom we see grow old and our perspectives upon them changes along with M.’s. For example, in this particular volume, there’s Charlus, giving us a very interesting plot twist about his pleasures and fetishes. I do not know you, but he is one of my favorite character in the whole story. And besides, he and Albertine are the personification of Sodom and Gomorrah; they are some sort of center for everything that turns around inversion, almost just like Mlle. de Saint-Loup, about whom we get to understand, almost at the end, that she is the summary of the Proustian world, the recapitulation, the link between different dots, like the lines we draw in order to join the stars of a constellation. The narrator sees in her the demonstration of time and its dregs. She is the Apocalypse, while Swann is the Genesis.

I feel like there’s so much to say about this outstanding masterpiece, but whatsoever I write, nothing shall make justice for how great it is. The only thing that I’d like to add for the moment, it’s that it took me seven volumes to realize that I had already found Proust’s lost time since I read the lines “For a long time I went to bed early…” So, for me, the only question remaining is not whether time has been found, but what Virginia Woolf said herself:

My great adventure was undoubtedly Proust. What else is there left to write after that?

...more

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Sep 23, 2020 Gary Beauregard Bottomley rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This was the best of all the seven volumes.

It read as one long sentence with multiple pauses between thoughts only to reflect further on the process of time as we live our life in the present of the now as we reflect upon what was and think about what soon will be because as we stare into the abyss it never stares back at us since existence is time and time is finite.

Once, when I was younger, I attended a wedding slightly over 40 years ago and knew to embrace that moment for the sake of the mo This was the best of all the seven volumes.

It read as one long sentence with multiple pauses between thoughts only to reflect further on the process of time as we live our life in the present of the now as we reflect upon what was and think about what soon will be because as we stare into the abyss it never stares back at us since existence is time and time is finite.

Once, when I was younger, I attended a wedding slightly over 40 years ago and knew to embrace that moment for the sake of the moment because in a flicker of time all that was transpiring than would transpire latter in time multiple times in my life and the players in the play, some who I love such as my mom and dad would be gone and my memories would be all I had, and those memories would ultimately become just my memories of the memories and I thought to myself life is good and life justifies itself since existence is the only thing in the universe that is self-justifying. Proust understood what the 1920s were getting at and if one were to identify two of his influences Schopenhauer and Henri Bergson would be on the short list. Or one could read Wittgenstein, or Heidegger, or Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and understand what Proust is getting at in 4000 pages and giving the reader a chance to understand themselves just a little bit better before it no longer matters.

As I listen to this book, once again I got disturbed by the social milieu and the phoniness of the social set and the Paris newspapers with its obsession about society and trivialities that Proust describes in such excruciating detail, but then I realized that today’s America is no different, except our obsession is with celebrities, or sports, or worst yet, the most now of the now, politics, and the crazy players who manipulate us with their distractions because in the end they know less than we do. (I did say ‘listen’, as with almost all books, I listen to them rather than read them by putting the book into ‘voice dream app’ and then I have a computer generated synthetic emotion free voice read me the story and by doing that I never get fooled by the emotional prosody inherent within actual human renderings, and therefore, I only focus on the logical connections of the logos itself and miss the pathos of misdirection that a narrator or even myself would impute if I were reading the written word for myself).

Experiences and intuitions make our memories which give us reflections (oh, you Madeleine, I remember remembering you tasting so very good!) and as long as we have our now with our remembrances that abyss will never quite stare back at us until one day it will and it will be as if we were never here. Proust knows that we always think we are the same as we ever were, it’s just that the attendees at the party who have aged. Once we assume away the world, our being becomes our thinking (cogito ergo sum); we are no longer of the world and the world has moved on without us as if we were never really here, so, if at possible never assume away the world, but, rather, experience it, feel it and find your meaning the best way you can and dabbling in Proust is not a bad way to start your search of lost time and remembrances of things past since you exist in time and time is finite. ...more

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Dec 04, 2020 Michael rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: translation, classics, french-lit, proust

“If you've read Proust, you must read Proust.”

It's a remark I came across somewhere, cryptic perhaps for the uninitiated, a concise way of saying what I've now come to understand and believe, having recently finished In Search of Lost Time for the first time: Now that I've read it, now that I've completed the long journey, I'm not sure I want to leave it: it must be read again and again.

Closing the cover on this final volume, Time Regained, I realized, I'll always be reading In Search of Lost T “If you've read Proust, you must read Proust.”

It's a remark I came across somewhere, cryptic perhaps for the uninitiated, a concise way of saying what I've now come to understand and believe, having recently finished In Search of Lost Time for the first time: Now that I've read it, now that I've completed the long journey, I'm not sure I want to leave it: it must be read again and again.

Closing the cover on this final volume, Time Regained, I realized, I'll always be reading In Search of Lost Time. So rather than attempt yet another review/synopsis of this volume alone, I offer some remarks on my newfound love for this entire work.

Until now for me there have been few novels to rival the reading experience of Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, The Magic Mountain, Gravity's Rainbow, and Women and Men. Not to diminish all the other great novels I love, but these particular novels occupy a special place in my life of reading. And now I have Proust, whose magnificent seven-volume novel might just tower above those mentioned, above my most cherished books. It is that good.

For most of my adult life, Time and Memory have interested me – philosophically, scientifically, and most importantly, phenomenologically. And now, with quite a few – make that, many – decades behind me since I first took up this fascination, I have a perspective granted me by that Time. As a child I experienced summers as eternal. Now, years pass as a subjective few months. Time now seems a dwindling commodity. A fairly universal human experience. Why?

What is Time, from where does it derive, how do our experiences of it differ, change? Where are the answers to be found, if answers there are? What is that intimate relationship between Time and Memory? Over the centuries, scientists, philosophers, mystics and occultists have all had their say. Newton, like Plato, said Time was independent of objects and events, Time is absolute, a container of sorts, and we are in it. Then there is Aristotle and others who believe that Time is not independent of events and motions of objects – discussions of Time can be reduced to discussions about relationships between the events and objects themselves. Lately, some physicists, like Carlo Rovelli, believe that once a unified theory is worked out it will describe a universe in which there is no Time.

And yet, here we are, obedient to it.

A digression I had not planned on, but it does speak to my fascination with, love of, In Search of Lost Time, for this is Proust's overriding theme, Time. Time, what it does to memories, how it changes and takes from us friends and loved ones. How it changes us. And how it can be defeated by a madeleine and a cup of tea. What physicists and philosophers cannot explain, Proust has rendered in art.

And through his art, Proust has certainly defeated Time.

There is so much I could say about this novel, how, like Marcel, I, too, fell in love with Albertine; the beauty of living with the deeply drawn characters we come to love or hate as they change and age through the course of the novel – Swann, the Baron, Marcel's mother, the girls of Combray, so many others; how many times, countless times, I saw myself in Marcel's experiences, his loves and losses, his longing for memories just out of reach. The human condition in seven volumes.

A truly incredible experience. ...more

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Jul 14, 2009 Jessica rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, happyendings

I'm moving, so I'm packing, which is making me very nostalgic and contributing to some pretty embarrassing online procrastination. It's also making me think a lot about Proust because you know, moving and reminiscing about all the places I've lived over the years and going through all this old shit, well, it's obviously getting pretty Proustian pretty quick around here. Well, except it is and it's not, because when Proust moved he didn't have to beg for boxes at the supermarket or pack things or I'm moving, so I'm packing, which is making me very nostalgic and contributing to some pretty embarrassing online procrastination. It's also making me think a lot about Proust because you know, moving and reminiscing about all the places I've lived over the years and going through all this old shit, well, it's obviously getting pretty Proustian pretty quick around here. Well, except it is and it's not, because when Proust moved he didn't have to beg for boxes at the supermarket or pack things or rent a U-Haul or beg his friends for help lugging all his crap all around the boroughs, because he had tons of servants to do this all for him. This is sort of the crux of Proust, I've decided: his descriptions of consciousness and memory and love and desire and nostalgia and all that feel so personal and universally relevant, but then there's so much about him that's ridiculously foreign and spoiled and removed that it's jarring and strange. Like usually reading about some really rich guy wouldn't make me feel personally offended like that, but because I feel so close to him in some ways, it does feel like a weird affront. It's an unusual response to a book, for me anyway. I don't normally think about characters like this at all, and in fact I know that a lot of the reason I love reading Proust so much is precisely because he's so rich and old-timey and crazy and weird. But there's something very unique and powerful about the sensation that one's having a Proustian moment, then getting all pissed off when you realize that Proust's Proustian moments were a lot more glamorous than yours. I don't know.... there's really not point to all this, I'm just procrastinating because I'm trying to delay the moment of reckoning that is confronting the two huge boxes of cassette tapes that, as of AD 2009, I have moved with fifteen times. Shall we make it sixteen? What if I someday am cloistered in a cork-lined room, trying to evoke a spring day smoking pot out of a Coke can on Albany Hill in 1993? Won't I need these mixtapes to elicit those memories? Won't western literature potentially suffer a great loss if these disintegrating cassette tapes don't come along?

What would Proust do??

Anyway, it's a good thing Proust is not here helping me pack up my CDs, because they're really gross and dusty and with his terrible asthma, it'd probably have killed him dead.

Okay. Enough of that. Back to Facebook, I mean packing..... ...more

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About Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust

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French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.

Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during t ...more

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