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Remembrance of Things Past Volumes 1-3 Box Set
The gift-boxed set of the three paperbacks.
3365 pages, Paperback
Published August 12, 1982
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398 people want to read
About the author
Marcel Proust
2,115 books7,362 followersMarcel Proust was a 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 the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51.
Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.
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 the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51.
Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
December 27, 2017
I finished this work. Each book is reviewed below. The only question left is "Was it worth it?". Was it worth 10 months of working my way through this opus? Was it worth what I got out of it?
The answer is a definite Yes.
Yes, there were times where it was an effort to read another page. Yes, there were times that it was mesmerizing and I didn't want to put it down. Yes, it was funny. Yes, it was sad. Mostly it was profound, thoughtful and very universal. It speaks to all people because it speaks of Life.
I really enjoyed the interconnections. The Six Steps of Kevin Bacon came to my mind at one point......Proust was incredibly ahead of his time with this concept; he nailed the interconnectivity thing.
This is definitely a worthwhile read. I can see why it's surviving the ages, despite those navel-gazing moments throughout.
Will I reread it at some point? Probably not the whole thing, from start to finish. However, I'm sure I'll pick up one volume or another at some point and reread it wholly or partially.
Final rating for the entire work as a whole: 5 stars.
Time Regained 5-star
The Fugitive 3-star
The Captive 4-star
Sodom & Gomorrah 4-star
The Guermantes Way 3-star
Within A Budding Grove (read March 2017) 4-star
Swann's Way 5-Star
(read Apr/2011 and again in January 2017)
The answer is a definite Yes.
Yes, there were times where it was an effort to read another page. Yes, there were times that it was mesmerizing and I didn't want to put it down. Yes, it was funny. Yes, it was sad. Mostly it was profound, thoughtful and very universal. It speaks to all people because it speaks of Life.
I really enjoyed the interconnections. The Six Steps of Kevin Bacon came to my mind at one point......Proust was incredibly ahead of his time with this concept; he nailed the interconnectivity thing.
This is definitely a worthwhile read. I can see why it's surviving the ages, despite those navel-gazing moments throughout.
Will I reread it at some point? Probably not the whole thing, from start to finish. However, I'm sure I'll pick up one volume or another at some point and reread it wholly or partially.
Final rating for the entire work as a whole: 5 stars.
Time Regained 5-star
The Fugitive 3-star
The Captive 4-star
Sodom & Gomorrah 4-star
The Guermantes Way 3-star
Within A Budding Grove (read March 2017) 4-star
Swann's Way 5-Star
(read Apr/2011 and again in January 2017)
November 3, 2023
[Part 1 of this review can be found here]
Part 2:
THE LAST PRE-MODERNIST
The amount of authors mentioned by Proust in his letters and in Temps perdu is staggering, and reflects the fact that he can't be easily placed into any single literary tradition. I think you can maybe make a case for Balzac as the central model for the structure (if not the content) of Temps perdu; Proust was a huge fan, and clearly Temps perdu is in some sense a ‘high society’ version of Balzac's La Comédie Humaine cycle (Proust referred to Balzac’s “admirable invention of keeping the same characters in all his novels”). You can also see Temps perdu as the inversion of Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart cycle (which was itself influenced by Balzac, of course); instead of a shaggy 3,600-page proletarian-realist novel in journalistic prose, we have a crystalline 3,600-page rococo novel about the nobility. But there are elements of so many other writers; the clearest stylistic influence is Nerval, but also Saint-Simon, Rochefoucauld, Stendhal, Eliot (Proust's favorite novelist), Ruskin, Dostoevsky, Chateaubriand, D’Annunzio, et al.
Proust is typically classed as a Modernist along with Joyce, Musil, and occasionally Kafka, but I think he can be more accurately interpreted as the final author in the nineteenth-century tradition of Hugo, Stendhal, Flaubert (well, just Sentimental Education), Eliot, Tolstoy, Austen, and Balzac/Zola. Proust is maybe closest to Mann in terms of his contemporaries, in the sense of bridging the gap from the nineteenth-century novel to certain aspects of literary Modernism. I can also see the case for aligning Proust with Musil; I was continually struck by the similarities between Ulrich, the narrator of Musil's Man Without Qualities, and Proust's Marcel, who are both feckless ciphers standing in for the author: MwQ also has something of Temps perdu's philosophical depth and sense of the impending doom of WW1 hovering in too-lengthy scenes of nobles and diplomats chatting at dinner parties.
I wonder if Proust is somewhat erroneously linked with Modernist novelists due to the fact that he was influenced by various Modernist/Symbolist poets, but really his main novelistic influences were the big nineteenth-century figures; I grant that the French Symbolist poets (many of whom Proust knew personally) had an influence on his ideas, but you can’t clearly see the influence of Mallarmé or Baudelaire in Temps perdu's structure or prose as written (beyond certain philosophical or aesthetic themes), imo. Beckett gets this right, I think, where he says that Proust “recedes from the Symbolists back toward Hugo.”
Proust is certainly innovative in his extreme emphasis on the unconscious/dreams, the fragmented narrative (though this fragmentation is overstated), the themes of homosexuality and transgressive sexuality . . . but the psychological depth is no deeper than, and is not a step beyond, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (both of whom Proust admired). Yet it's true that the character of Charlus, as written, simply would not exist (outside of De Sade, maybe?) in a novel written before 1900 or so. Proust was actually mildly disappointed that Book 4 didn’t create more of a scandal upon its publication; the flowery nineteenth-century framing perhaps tricked readers into thinking that the character was less shocking than he really was.
Another curious thing about Proust being generally grouped with Modernists is that he is often held to be difficult in the same way that, say, Joyce or Pound are difficult. Reading Proust is difficult, but this is not even remotely due to the prose, which is quite straightforward -- almost excessively straightforward. Despite the endlessly nested subclauses and semicolons and so on, Proust’s prose is all surface, with very little subtext. The ideas and themes have depth (and the interaction of the various first-person narrators -- young Marcel, old Marcel, and Proust himself -- requires some interpretive work), but the prose qua vehicle for these themes and ideas is quite straightforward (similar to Knausgaard).
In Joyce, for example, the inventiveness and near-infinite subtext of the prose is a part of the package; you can spend an hour unpacking a single sentence in “Proteus” or a few lines of dialogue in “Circe.” Proust is not difficult in this sense. With Temps perdu, what you see is what you get; it’s almost Dickensian prose, there’s no semantic richness in the prose itself. The narrator overexplains, if anything -- here Proust is closest to George Eliot or Henry James. Nothing is understated, nothing is allusive, everything is spelled out at near-infinite length. It’s very good prose, evocative, ecstatic, and it’s difficult in the sense of being hard to keep track of direct/indirect objects, but it's not the kind of prose where you get to the end of the sentence and have to figure out what happened at the beginning (as in, say, Broch’s Death of Virgil).
As Nabokov points out, Proust is ultimately quite similar to Tolstoy -- straightforward but impressive prose, psychological depth, a panoramic portrait of society, philosophical passages . . . Proust even has various mini-essays about military maneuvers and the Napoleonic wars (in Book 2), similar to W&P. Except with Proust you're stuck with a first-person narrator -- and, at times, willing to give your entire kingdom for a chapter or two with an omniscient third-person Tolstoyan narrator. Also Proust only covers about 25% of human experience, despite writing a novel significantly longer than W&P and Karenina combined. Which leads us to another issue:
YACHTS AND ROLLS-ROYCES
Proust is writing what he knows -- but what he knows apparently consists entirely of (1) obsessive, unhealthy romantic relationships, (2) high-end Paris salons, (3) art and literature, (4) sexual paraphilias, and (5) his own self-consciousness. He simply did not experience many things, and the world of Temps perdu is accordingly limited. For example, children are fascinatingly absent (Gilberte is actually 16 or 17, in Book 2). We meet the daughter of St. Loup and Gilberte in Book 7 -- which seems like sort of a big deal, maybe (?!) -- but we don't even learn her name, she is simply removed from the narrative.
Similarly, religion/faith is a non-issue for all of the characters (beyond Charlus's vague hypocritical piety, or Aunt Léonie very briefly in Book 1), which is especially hard to believe given the setting -- yes, this is La Belle Époque, but come on. Even the narrator's experience of war in Paris (in Book 7) is aestheticized, muted, abstract. You can tell that Proust is aware of this issue (beyond hints such as I:732), as he starts writing justifications in the later sections, e.g.: "As to the choice of theme, a frivolous theme will serve as well as a serious one for the study of the laws of character" (III:916). Well . . . not really? Frivolity doesn't exactly cause/express the full range of human behavior.
The fact that the novel is still so good is a testament to how talented Proust is, but it is not a coincidence that the consensus best passage in the book, the death of the narrator's grandmother and the intermittencies scene a year later (when he finally internalizes her death), is the only part of Temps perdu that deals with truly weighty themes. (And even here, again, Marcel is only writing what he knew; the death of his own mother.) The shallowness of the characters' lives is distracting enough to pull the reader (or at least this reader) out of the narrative -- the stakes could not possibly be lower, in most cases. For example, in Book 5, our fop narrator's wacky girlfriend is living in his fancy apartment in Paris, refuses to accept his gifts of a yacht and Rolls-Royce, and then chooses to leave, at which point Marcel states (III:433): "The present calamity was the worst that I had experienced in my life." Bruh?
I often had the sensation of wanting to step into the universe of the book, slap all of the characters, and march them off to go work in a coal mine for a month, just so they could understand at least some aspect of real hardship and human suffering. While reading Proust I was reminded of nothing more than Japanese princesses and ladies-in-waiting at the height of Heian-era Japan; I love Sei and Murasaki and all the rest, but holy shit ladies, how many peasants were starving to death two blocks away in Kyoto while you were writing overwrought waka poetry about how your dress wasn't exactly the right shade of green for the cherry blossom festival and wasn't it just so embarrassing, etc.?
Another curious thing about Temps perdu is that the narrator (and Proust) are thoroughly and undramatically amoral and nonreligious, such that art simply replaces faith (see I:478, III:944, III:1095, etc.). What is somehow charmingly shallow about this is that Proust doesn't seem to understand (even in his letters) the gravity or weight of this transposition. Proust was raised Catholic, had his first communion, etc., but there's never any sense of a momentous shift away from his faith, or an accounting of the steps that led him to accept aesthetic pleasure as his new God; he doesn't have any self-consciousness about it at all, no unease or polemics (versus, say, Joyce, Genet, Endō, et al.) -- Proust is just like, "nah I'm good, art is religion now." This also gives the narrator a curiously amoral valence; he partakes in various activities at brothels and underground S&M dungeons but reports on them from a purely aesthetic point of view. As Beckett rightly puts it, Proust is "completely detached from all moral considerations," and one can't help but see this as shallow in some way, especially when you compare him to other novelists -- some crucial part of Proust's character/self seems to be missing. One of the clearest downsides of Proust is that you have this sense of constantly drowning in the infinitely recursive consciousness of the world’s most neurotically oversensitive Parisian dandy.
Finally, I'm also not sure that the endlessly repeated theme of the social construction of personality, the effect of time on our memories, and so on, is quite deep enough to carry a 3,600-page novel (as ever, the addition of Albertine is likely the issue). With three pages left in the thing, on III:1104, Proust writes: "Not that there was anything new in the idea that we occupy a place in time which is perpetually being augmented. Everyone feels this . . ." Great, then why did you just spend so long writing about it at the expense of so many other ideas/topics?
Anyway:
THE TRANSLATION
I can read French well enough to compare translations, and in fact spent quite a while comparing Proust translations in 2019, and I'd say that Moncrieff is certainly the best. He has a distinct style that ‘feels’ like the original; his prose isn't precious or overwritten (as some have claimed), it's just accurate -- other translators change the atmosphere of Proust’s long sentences and make objectively incorrect word choices. Yes, there are a few passages where Moncrieff gets pronouns wrong or whatever, and I'm sympathetic to some criticisms, but show me a better translation -- is it possible? Sure. But Moncrieff is like an 8 out of 10, and the other translators are weaker at best.
And if you don’t trust some random dude on the internet, I should also note that (as I learned later) virtually every Proust scholar is in agreement on the generally high quality of Moncrieff. In terms of the Viking/Penguin versions, Lydia Davis’s translation is a crime against nature/humanity/art/truth, but the others aren’t bad, they just fall flat in an ineffable way. (Finally, it’s worth noting that Moncrieff was alive in Proust’s era and therefore has a better ‘ear’ for the subtleties of 1910s-1920s French prose than a 21st-century translator using a Hachette dictionary.)
MON COMBAT
Various literary types have said that Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Min Kamp is "erroneously compared" (Daniel Mendelsohn) to Proust or somehow not anywhere in the neighborhood of Proust. This does not seem quite fair -- forgive me for seeing interesting similarities between two six-volume, 1.3-million-word European autobiographical novels filled with 10-page reveries and philosophical reflections on the arts, literature, philosophy, obsessive sexual relationships, memory, the construction of the self (including a lengthy capstone essay in the precise midpoint of the sixth volume in each case, which caused me to take each author more seriously), etc.
Marcel and Karl Ove are very different people, to put it mildly, and I think it’s fair to say that Proust is somewhat more talented, but having finished Knausgaard last year, I was struck by the parallels. For example, both deal with the interaction of voluntary and involuntary memory; a constant theme of Min Kamp is the effect of Karl Ove’s childhood memories of his father, a traumatic involuntary memory that he tries to escape through drugs, art, etc. Obviously Min Kamp has many other sources and influences (Gombrowicz, Hitler, autofiction, various Norwegian authors etc.) but Karl Ove does mention Proust a few times, and it's not at all a stretch to think of these two 3,600-page novels as a curious pair of siblings. Anyway my point is that if you like one, I think odds are high that you'll like the other, and I highly recommend both -- notably, Karl Ove is about 10x easier to read (not an exaggeration), so maybe start there lol.
WORKS BY/ON PROUST
Proust, Essays on Language and Literature -- uneven but definitely of interest.
Proust, Letters of Marcel Proust -- everything up to 1907 is only marginally interesting, but the later letters are almost essential for understanding his personality and his work.
Proust, The Lemoine Affair -- Proust doing pastiche; clever, worth checking out.
Proust, Letters to the Lady Upstairs -- don't bother.
Proust, Collected Poems -- don't bother.
Proust, Complete Short Stories -- don't bother.
Proust, Jean Santeuil -- don't bother.
Jean-Yves Tadié, Proust: A Life -- magisterial and incredibly informative, though quite a time commitment; I skimmed the earlier years (books by/about Proust before 1907 are usually not worth your time).
William Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life -- appeared a few years after Tadié, a bit repetitive but not bad (haven't finished it); Tadié's biography appears to be better, but I'm no expert.
Edmund White, Marcel Proust -- good short biography.
William Sansom, Proust -- brief biography, especially strong on historical context; the pictures/paintings included are incredibly helpful.
George Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography -- not terrible but very outdated, as it's missing five decades of archive material at this point.
Davenport-Hines, Proust at the Majestic -- rambling and occasionally interesting biographical sketches, mostly focusing on the later Proust; has the best account of meeting Joyce at the Ritz in 1922.
Patrick Alexander, Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time: A Reader's Guide -- very helpful guide, I suggest reading it before starting Proust (don't worry about spoilers lol).
Roger Shattuck, Marcel Proust -- probably the best analytic/literary theory intro to Proust.
Samuel Beckett, Proust -- pretentious but very good; the earliest critical English-language essay and still one of the best.
Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, pp. 207-249 -- definitely worth reading.
Józef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp -- not worth your time.
Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust -- Céleste was the model for the character of Francoise; mildly interesting for biographical context.
Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life -- clever and reasonably witty, but not really about Proust.
Malcolm Bowie, Proust Among the Stars -- a mediocre NYT book review stretched to 280 pages.
Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs -- surprisingly un-insane, for Deleuze (who is always original, and sporadically brilliant), but this book has about as much to do with Proust as his book on Leibniz has to do with Leibniz (i.e. not much). I recommend it as a book by Deleuze, but not as a book about Proust.
HOW DID YOU GET THIS FAR
I guess that's it? Sorry for the long review -- believe it or not I ended up cutting about half of my original notes, lol.
Part 2:
THE LAST PRE-MODERNIST
The amount of authors mentioned by Proust in his letters and in Temps perdu is staggering, and reflects the fact that he can't be easily placed into any single literary tradition. I think you can maybe make a case for Balzac as the central model for the structure (if not the content) of Temps perdu; Proust was a huge fan, and clearly Temps perdu is in some sense a ‘high society’ version of Balzac's La Comédie Humaine cycle (Proust referred to Balzac’s “admirable invention of keeping the same characters in all his novels”). You can also see Temps perdu as the inversion of Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart cycle (which was itself influenced by Balzac, of course); instead of a shaggy 3,600-page proletarian-realist novel in journalistic prose, we have a crystalline 3,600-page rococo novel about the nobility. But there are elements of so many other writers; the clearest stylistic influence is Nerval, but also Saint-Simon, Rochefoucauld, Stendhal, Eliot (Proust's favorite novelist), Ruskin, Dostoevsky, Chateaubriand, D’Annunzio, et al.
Proust is typically classed as a Modernist along with Joyce, Musil, and occasionally Kafka, but I think he can be more accurately interpreted as the final author in the nineteenth-century tradition of Hugo, Stendhal, Flaubert (well, just Sentimental Education), Eliot, Tolstoy, Austen, and Balzac/Zola. Proust is maybe closest to Mann in terms of his contemporaries, in the sense of bridging the gap from the nineteenth-century novel to certain aspects of literary Modernism. I can also see the case for aligning Proust with Musil; I was continually struck by the similarities between Ulrich, the narrator of Musil's Man Without Qualities, and Proust's Marcel, who are both feckless ciphers standing in for the author: MwQ also has something of Temps perdu's philosophical depth and sense of the impending doom of WW1 hovering in too-lengthy scenes of nobles and diplomats chatting at dinner parties.
I wonder if Proust is somewhat erroneously linked with Modernist novelists due to the fact that he was influenced by various Modernist/Symbolist poets, but really his main novelistic influences were the big nineteenth-century figures; I grant that the French Symbolist poets (many of whom Proust knew personally) had an influence on his ideas, but you can’t clearly see the influence of Mallarmé or Baudelaire in Temps perdu's structure or prose as written (beyond certain philosophical or aesthetic themes), imo. Beckett gets this right, I think, where he says that Proust “recedes from the Symbolists back toward Hugo.”
Proust is certainly innovative in his extreme emphasis on the unconscious/dreams, the fragmented narrative (though this fragmentation is overstated), the themes of homosexuality and transgressive sexuality . . . but the psychological depth is no deeper than, and is not a step beyond, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (both of whom Proust admired). Yet it's true that the character of Charlus, as written, simply would not exist (outside of De Sade, maybe?) in a novel written before 1900 or so. Proust was actually mildly disappointed that Book 4 didn’t create more of a scandal upon its publication; the flowery nineteenth-century framing perhaps tricked readers into thinking that the character was less shocking than he really was.
Another curious thing about Proust being generally grouped with Modernists is that he is often held to be difficult in the same way that, say, Joyce or Pound are difficult. Reading Proust is difficult, but this is not even remotely due to the prose, which is quite straightforward -- almost excessively straightforward. Despite the endlessly nested subclauses and semicolons and so on, Proust’s prose is all surface, with very little subtext. The ideas and themes have depth (and the interaction of the various first-person narrators -- young Marcel, old Marcel, and Proust himself -- requires some interpretive work), but the prose qua vehicle for these themes and ideas is quite straightforward (similar to Knausgaard).
In Joyce, for example, the inventiveness and near-infinite subtext of the prose is a part of the package; you can spend an hour unpacking a single sentence in “Proteus” or a few lines of dialogue in “Circe.” Proust is not difficult in this sense. With Temps perdu, what you see is what you get; it’s almost Dickensian prose, there’s no semantic richness in the prose itself. The narrator overexplains, if anything -- here Proust is closest to George Eliot or Henry James. Nothing is understated, nothing is allusive, everything is spelled out at near-infinite length. It’s very good prose, evocative, ecstatic, and it’s difficult in the sense of being hard to keep track of direct/indirect objects, but it's not the kind of prose where you get to the end of the sentence and have to figure out what happened at the beginning (as in, say, Broch’s Death of Virgil).
As Nabokov points out, Proust is ultimately quite similar to Tolstoy -- straightforward but impressive prose, psychological depth, a panoramic portrait of society, philosophical passages . . . Proust even has various mini-essays about military maneuvers and the Napoleonic wars (in Book 2), similar to W&P. Except with Proust you're stuck with a first-person narrator -- and, at times, willing to give your entire kingdom for a chapter or two with an omniscient third-person Tolstoyan narrator. Also Proust only covers about 25% of human experience, despite writing a novel significantly longer than W&P and Karenina combined. Which leads us to another issue:
YACHTS AND ROLLS-ROYCES
Proust is writing what he knows -- but what he knows apparently consists entirely of (1) obsessive, unhealthy romantic relationships, (2) high-end Paris salons, (3) art and literature, (4) sexual paraphilias, and (5) his own self-consciousness. He simply did not experience many things, and the world of Temps perdu is accordingly limited. For example, children are fascinatingly absent (Gilberte is actually 16 or 17, in Book 2). We meet the daughter of St. Loup and Gilberte in Book 7 -- which seems like sort of a big deal, maybe (?!) -- but we don't even learn her name, she is simply removed from the narrative.
Similarly, religion/faith is a non-issue for all of the characters (beyond Charlus's vague hypocritical piety, or Aunt Léonie very briefly in Book 1), which is especially hard to believe given the setting -- yes, this is La Belle Époque, but come on. Even the narrator's experience of war in Paris (in Book 7) is aestheticized, muted, abstract. You can tell that Proust is aware of this issue (beyond hints such as I:732), as he starts writing justifications in the later sections, e.g.: "As to the choice of theme, a frivolous theme will serve as well as a serious one for the study of the laws of character" (III:916). Well . . . not really? Frivolity doesn't exactly cause/express the full range of human behavior.
The fact that the novel is still so good is a testament to how talented Proust is, but it is not a coincidence that the consensus best passage in the book, the death of the narrator's grandmother and the intermittencies scene a year later (when he finally internalizes her death), is the only part of Temps perdu that deals with truly weighty themes. (And even here, again, Marcel is only writing what he knew; the death of his own mother.) The shallowness of the characters' lives is distracting enough to pull the reader (or at least this reader) out of the narrative -- the stakes could not possibly be lower, in most cases. For example, in Book 5, our fop narrator's wacky girlfriend is living in his fancy apartment in Paris, refuses to accept his gifts of a yacht and Rolls-Royce, and then chooses to leave, at which point Marcel states (III:433): "The present calamity was the worst that I had experienced in my life." Bruh?
I often had the sensation of wanting to step into the universe of the book, slap all of the characters, and march them off to go work in a coal mine for a month, just so they could understand at least some aspect of real hardship and human suffering. While reading Proust I was reminded of nothing more than Japanese princesses and ladies-in-waiting at the height of Heian-era Japan; I love Sei and Murasaki and all the rest, but holy shit ladies, how many peasants were starving to death two blocks away in Kyoto while you were writing overwrought waka poetry about how your dress wasn't exactly the right shade of green for the cherry blossom festival and wasn't it just so embarrassing, etc.?
Another curious thing about Temps perdu is that the narrator (and Proust) are thoroughly and undramatically amoral and nonreligious, such that art simply replaces faith (see I:478, III:944, III:1095, etc.). What is somehow charmingly shallow about this is that Proust doesn't seem to understand (even in his letters) the gravity or weight of this transposition. Proust was raised Catholic, had his first communion, etc., but there's never any sense of a momentous shift away from his faith, or an accounting of the steps that led him to accept aesthetic pleasure as his new God; he doesn't have any self-consciousness about it at all, no unease or polemics (versus, say, Joyce, Genet, Endō, et al.) -- Proust is just like, "nah I'm good, art is religion now." This also gives the narrator a curiously amoral valence; he partakes in various activities at brothels and underground S&M dungeons but reports on them from a purely aesthetic point of view. As Beckett rightly puts it, Proust is "completely detached from all moral considerations," and one can't help but see this as shallow in some way, especially when you compare him to other novelists -- some crucial part of Proust's character/self seems to be missing. One of the clearest downsides of Proust is that you have this sense of constantly drowning in the infinitely recursive consciousness of the world’s most neurotically oversensitive Parisian dandy.
Finally, I'm also not sure that the endlessly repeated theme of the social construction of personality, the effect of time on our memories, and so on, is quite deep enough to carry a 3,600-page novel (as ever, the addition of Albertine is likely the issue). With three pages left in the thing, on III:1104, Proust writes: "Not that there was anything new in the idea that we occupy a place in time which is perpetually being augmented. Everyone feels this . . ." Great, then why did you just spend so long writing about it at the expense of so many other ideas/topics?
Anyway:
THE TRANSLATION
I can read French well enough to compare translations, and in fact spent quite a while comparing Proust translations in 2019, and I'd say that Moncrieff is certainly the best. He has a distinct style that ‘feels’ like the original; his prose isn't precious or overwritten (as some have claimed), it's just accurate -- other translators change the atmosphere of Proust’s long sentences and make objectively incorrect word choices. Yes, there are a few passages where Moncrieff gets pronouns wrong or whatever, and I'm sympathetic to some criticisms, but show me a better translation -- is it possible? Sure. But Moncrieff is like an 8 out of 10, and the other translators are weaker at best.
And if you don’t trust some random dude on the internet, I should also note that (as I learned later) virtually every Proust scholar is in agreement on the generally high quality of Moncrieff. In terms of the Viking/Penguin versions, Lydia Davis’s translation is a crime against nature/humanity/art/truth, but the others aren’t bad, they just fall flat in an ineffable way. (Finally, it’s worth noting that Moncrieff was alive in Proust’s era and therefore has a better ‘ear’ for the subtleties of 1910s-1920s French prose than a 21st-century translator using a Hachette dictionary.)
MON COMBAT
Various literary types have said that Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Min Kamp is "erroneously compared" (Daniel Mendelsohn) to Proust or somehow not anywhere in the neighborhood of Proust. This does not seem quite fair -- forgive me for seeing interesting similarities between two six-volume, 1.3-million-word European autobiographical novels filled with 10-page reveries and philosophical reflections on the arts, literature, philosophy, obsessive sexual relationships, memory, the construction of the self (including a lengthy capstone essay in the precise midpoint of the sixth volume in each case, which caused me to take each author more seriously), etc.
Marcel and Karl Ove are very different people, to put it mildly, and I think it’s fair to say that Proust is somewhat more talented, but having finished Knausgaard last year, I was struck by the parallels. For example, both deal with the interaction of voluntary and involuntary memory; a constant theme of Min Kamp is the effect of Karl Ove’s childhood memories of his father, a traumatic involuntary memory that he tries to escape through drugs, art, etc. Obviously Min Kamp has many other sources and influences (Gombrowicz, Hitler, autofiction, various Norwegian authors etc.) but Karl Ove does mention Proust a few times, and it's not at all a stretch to think of these two 3,600-page novels as a curious pair of siblings. Anyway my point is that if you like one, I think odds are high that you'll like the other, and I highly recommend both -- notably, Karl Ove is about 10x easier to read (not an exaggeration), so maybe start there lol.
WORKS BY/ON PROUST
Proust, Essays on Language and Literature -- uneven but definitely of interest.
Proust, Letters of Marcel Proust -- everything up to 1907 is only marginally interesting, but the later letters are almost essential for understanding his personality and his work.
Proust, The Lemoine Affair -- Proust doing pastiche; clever, worth checking out.
Proust, Letters to the Lady Upstairs -- don't bother.
Proust, Collected Poems -- don't bother.
Proust, Complete Short Stories -- don't bother.
Proust, Jean Santeuil -- don't bother.
Jean-Yves Tadié, Proust: A Life -- magisterial and incredibly informative, though quite a time commitment; I skimmed the earlier years (books by/about Proust before 1907 are usually not worth your time).
William Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life -- appeared a few years after Tadié, a bit repetitive but not bad (haven't finished it); Tadié's biography appears to be better, but I'm no expert.
Edmund White, Marcel Proust -- good short biography.
William Sansom, Proust -- brief biography, especially strong on historical context; the pictures/paintings included are incredibly helpful.
George Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography -- not terrible but very outdated, as it's missing five decades of archive material at this point.
Davenport-Hines, Proust at the Majestic -- rambling and occasionally interesting biographical sketches, mostly focusing on the later Proust; has the best account of meeting Joyce at the Ritz in 1922.
Patrick Alexander, Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time: A Reader's Guide -- very helpful guide, I suggest reading it before starting Proust (don't worry about spoilers lol).
Roger Shattuck, Marcel Proust -- probably the best analytic/literary theory intro to Proust.
Samuel Beckett, Proust -- pretentious but very good; the earliest critical English-language essay and still one of the best.
Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, pp. 207-249 -- definitely worth reading.
Józef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp -- not worth your time.
Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust -- Céleste was the model for the character of Francoise; mildly interesting for biographical context.
Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life -- clever and reasonably witty, but not really about Proust.
Malcolm Bowie, Proust Among the Stars -- a mediocre NYT book review stretched to 280 pages.
Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs -- surprisingly un-insane, for Deleuze (who is always original, and sporadically brilliant), but this book has about as much to do with Proust as his book on Leibniz has to do with Leibniz (i.e. not much). I recommend it as a book by Deleuze, but not as a book about Proust.
HOW DID YOU GET THIS FAR
I guess that's it? Sorry for the long review -- believe it or not I ended up cutting about half of my original notes, lol.
July 25, 2016
The year of reading Proust. Amen. This was monumental, a life event, like having a child or losing a friend or seeing a wonder of the world. Proust himself, I imagine, must have been rather annoying, but this subtle and (of course) incredibly long rail was unforgettable.
November 7, 2009
Andre Gide, who worked for the famous Gallimard press in the early 20th century, rejected Proust's manuscript for Swann's Way, which was the first installment of the epic Remembrance of Things Past. I often wonder whether or not he ever regretted this decision, but, then again, Gide had his reasons. As an avowed homosexual, he reproached Proust for the repressed homosexuality that was an obvious reality of the work. In example, the girl Albertine, who young Marcel pines for in the early stages of the work, was in actuality, Albert, based on one of Proust's lovers. Gide's criticisms weren't terribly inappropriate though. Through reading Proust's biography, one gets the impression that he was a shameless hypocrite. Then again, this also brings to light the question of whether Proust was less of a novelist than he was a philosopher/cultural critic/journalist/etc. It's funny because at one point in the work he references the literary critic Saint Beauve, who had a theory that the reader should be aware of every tiny detail of the writer's life in order to fully grasp the essence of their work. Remembrance is full of little tidbits like these; he also mentions the German literary critic August Wolf, who was famous for his theory that Homer was actually a sort of pseudonym for the various authors that had worked on the Odyssey and the Iliad.
Honestly, Proust is an overwhelming subject in the space of a review. Piles of books have been written on the man, as well as his works, so I'm not even going to attempt any of that. What I will do is offer my opinion of his work.
First of all, it's insane how what is Proustian plays into this analysis. In itself, my memory of Proust's work can be adequately evoked by a series of sensations that remind me of his work. For Proust, a lime tea soaked madeliene cookie (or tea cake) sparks the memory of an entire life time. This is essentially what is Proustian; any one of our given senses is capable of evoking a broad expanse of psychological memory. So when I am driving through, say, the desert in Southern Nevada, in the springtime, I am instantly reminded of the two or three months that I spent reading Proust. Of course, this is also clearly just another mysterious psychological quirk inherent in human memory, but it still stands as the inspiration for Proust's passionate reflections.
The eponymous character of Swann's Way is an exemplification of the Belle Epoque renaissance man. This is Proust's idol in the early chapters of his masterpiece, a person who is aware of cultural fashions, yet at the same time displays a sense of weariness about how this particular brand of social prestige can actually benefit people. Proust was notorious for his scathing parodies of the characters that frequented the salons of his cultural reality. In other words, Proust enjoyed poking fun at his contemporaries. After three thousand pages of eloquent prose (Allain de Botton once pointed out the fact the the longest sentence contained within Remembrance of Things Past can actually be wrapped around an entire wine bottle (he shows a typographical example of this by presenting the sentence in a circular form, literally)) I am at a loss in attempting to point out the more significant parts of the work, but I do remember bits and pieces.
Much of the scenes are contained within the confined space of the literary salons of Paris. These people discuss painting, classical music, literature, philosophy, the theater, etc. It's akin to Dickens in the way that Proust portrays each character. They are all presented as hyperbolic parodies of themselves. The Dreyfus affair acts as a political centerpiece for Proust's opinions; he once referred to himself as the most stalwart Dreyfusard (which is incorrect because the novelist Emile Zola was far more dedicated that he was, essentially facing exile for his fervent views on the subject, and the author who penned a letter of complaint to the president of France at the time).
Proust goes on (and on) like this throughout the entirety of the work. It's the story of a neurotic consumptive who aspired to become a great writer (I have nothing but faith in the fact that he accomplished this). It's a story of heartbreak, disappointment, lost love, and failed relationships. It's an historically contained account of the intellectual milieau of late 19th century Paris. It is, in general, a sweeping autobiography written by one of the most curious characters that the entire canon of western literature has ever had to offer. In short, it's life as told through the lens of a effete, bourgeois, dandyish genius.
The end is of course the most profound point in the story, as well as the most melancholy. At one of the very last social gatherings Marcel attends he can't help but notice how terribly everyone has aged. Oddly enough, it just now seems more apparent than ever. Proust muses on how literature has the profound ability to freeze moments of history in time. This rings true for him because he is the perfect example of what Freud would refer to as a man who replaced love and sex with research. Also, he is the perfect example of what Modernism would later become obsessed with, which is time, and the inherent difficulties that its philosophical significance carries. Given his fragile, physical state of being, it seems all too appropriate that his life goal was to offer us this intellectual insight into one of the richest moments of European history, that is, as opposed to actually living it.
"The idea of Time was of value to me for yet another reason: it was a spur, it told me that it was time to begin if I wished to attain to what I had sometimes perceived in the course of my life, in brief lightning-flashes, on the Guermantes way and in my drives in the carriage of Mme de Villeparisis, at those moments of perception which had made me think that life was worth living. How much more worth living did it appear to me now, now that I seemed to see that this life that at every moment we distort can be restored to its true pristine shape, that a life, in short, can be realised within the confines of a book!"
Honestly, Proust is an overwhelming subject in the space of a review. Piles of books have been written on the man, as well as his works, so I'm not even going to attempt any of that. What I will do is offer my opinion of his work.
First of all, it's insane how what is Proustian plays into this analysis. In itself, my memory of Proust's work can be adequately evoked by a series of sensations that remind me of his work. For Proust, a lime tea soaked madeliene cookie (or tea cake) sparks the memory of an entire life time. This is essentially what is Proustian; any one of our given senses is capable of evoking a broad expanse of psychological memory. So when I am driving through, say, the desert in Southern Nevada, in the springtime, I am instantly reminded of the two or three months that I spent reading Proust. Of course, this is also clearly just another mysterious psychological quirk inherent in human memory, but it still stands as the inspiration for Proust's passionate reflections.
The eponymous character of Swann's Way is an exemplification of the Belle Epoque renaissance man. This is Proust's idol in the early chapters of his masterpiece, a person who is aware of cultural fashions, yet at the same time displays a sense of weariness about how this particular brand of social prestige can actually benefit people. Proust was notorious for his scathing parodies of the characters that frequented the salons of his cultural reality. In other words, Proust enjoyed poking fun at his contemporaries. After three thousand pages of eloquent prose (Allain de Botton once pointed out the fact the the longest sentence contained within Remembrance of Things Past can actually be wrapped around an entire wine bottle (he shows a typographical example of this by presenting the sentence in a circular form, literally)) I am at a loss in attempting to point out the more significant parts of the work, but I do remember bits and pieces.
Much of the scenes are contained within the confined space of the literary salons of Paris. These people discuss painting, classical music, literature, philosophy, the theater, etc. It's akin to Dickens in the way that Proust portrays each character. They are all presented as hyperbolic parodies of themselves. The Dreyfus affair acts as a political centerpiece for Proust's opinions; he once referred to himself as the most stalwart Dreyfusard (which is incorrect because the novelist Emile Zola was far more dedicated that he was, essentially facing exile for his fervent views on the subject, and the author who penned a letter of complaint to the president of France at the time).
Proust goes on (and on) like this throughout the entirety of the work. It's the story of a neurotic consumptive who aspired to become a great writer (I have nothing but faith in the fact that he accomplished this). It's a story of heartbreak, disappointment, lost love, and failed relationships. It's an historically contained account of the intellectual milieau of late 19th century Paris. It is, in general, a sweeping autobiography written by one of the most curious characters that the entire canon of western literature has ever had to offer. In short, it's life as told through the lens of a effete, bourgeois, dandyish genius.
The end is of course the most profound point in the story, as well as the most melancholy. At one of the very last social gatherings Marcel attends he can't help but notice how terribly everyone has aged. Oddly enough, it just now seems more apparent than ever. Proust muses on how literature has the profound ability to freeze moments of history in time. This rings true for him because he is the perfect example of what Freud would refer to as a man who replaced love and sex with research. Also, he is the perfect example of what Modernism would later become obsessed with, which is time, and the inherent difficulties that its philosophical significance carries. Given his fragile, physical state of being, it seems all too appropriate that his life goal was to offer us this intellectual insight into one of the richest moments of European history, that is, as opposed to actually living it.
"The idea of Time was of value to me for yet another reason: it was a spur, it told me that it was time to begin if I wished to attain to what I had sometimes perceived in the course of my life, in brief lightning-flashes, on the Guermantes way and in my drives in the carriage of Mme de Villeparisis, at those moments of perception which had made me think that life was worth living. How much more worth living did it appear to me now, now that I seemed to see that this life that at every moment we distort can be restored to its true pristine shape, that a life, in short, can be realised within the confines of a book!"
September 22, 2015
3,365 pages. Over a million words. A boring story about a hypochondriac, spoiled, rich kid. And he's French! Sounds pretty terrible, and it was pretty hard to keep myself plodding along during some of the tedious sections on aristocratic dinner parties (some sections longer than most books). But! This dude can really write, and it's not just the paragraph long sentences or 3 page paragraphs, it was Proust's ability to get inside his own head and analyze his own thoughts and memories in a way that is difficult to do. And I think that the tedium of the story was part of the plan. He examined so many details of the narrator's thoughts and life that the book kinda felt like actually living his life. Even though I could not relate to the characters or story, the book changed the way I think about what I think about, particularly relating to love, jealousy, trying to impress others, and aging. Once again, be warned... It's BORING AS HELL, but it comes with the occasional mind-blow.
***EXCERPT***
For it seemed to me that they would not be "my" readers but the readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician at Combray used to offer his customers-it would be my book, but with its help I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves. So that I should not ask them to praise me or censor me, but simply to tell me whether "it really is like that."
***EXCERPT***
For it seemed to me that they would not be "my" readers but the readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician at Combray used to offer his customers-it would be my book, but with its help I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves. So that I should not ask them to praise me or censor me, but simply to tell me whether "it really is like that."
October 6, 2014
PRE-Reading: MEETING PROUST.
Proust made me do a couple of things with books
that I'd NEVER done before and have NEVER done since.
It was the same with Proust as it had been with other writers.
First the name would crop up, as it did with Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf and Austen. And you'd ask yourself: "Who?" and "Why??"
Shakespeare was easy - you saw the b/w film, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", on TV, with the boy Mickey Rooney as Puck accompanied by Mendlesshon's music and members of the Ballet Russe among the fairies and you were captive for life."Julius Caesar popped up on TV later.
With the others it was much harder.
Proust?
1976 - Grahames Book shop at Bankstown Square was selling off his 12 Volume Classic with a single volume going at a mere $2.95 each.
It was a BARGAIN.
But WHO was Proust?
Would I regret it later if I didn't buy now?
Gingerly I bought one or two and began with "The Captive" PartI Vol.9 of his "Remembrance of Things Past", a name borrowed from one of Shakespeare's Sonnets by the English translator and probably almost an equivalent with Proust's "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu."
It was early in the year.
By the end of that year, 1976, I had read 7 books either by Proust or about Proust. And I had torn out his photograph from "Proust and His World",a library book from Bankstown, framed it and still have it; now in the hallway on a special shelf along with postcard portraits of Colette and George Sand who had preceded Proust by several years. Shakespeare is there too...and books about or by them.
That takes care of the first NEVER!!!
The second was that I decided to stop reading Proust's Opus Magnus
"In Search Of Lost Time" when I only had the last 4 volumes to go.
This was in 1982. I'd decided that I was enjoying it so much that I NEVER wanted it to end. And it NEVER has.Until...
However, last year, 2013, I joined the group on Goodreads for "Proust in a Year".
I was always behind. But I wanted to finish it.
And after all, I was perilously close to being mortal.
But in May of 2013, when I was 100 pages into Volume 5 Mum died.
I recorded her death on the back inside cover of Volume 5 where I kept a record of what I had read on a daily basis.
There is an arrow under Weds 15 May pp.150/127 (the first number is the
target;the second what was actually achieved. At the end of the arrow is written: Mum, my Dottie, died 2.25pm Thursday 16th May 2013.
The next entry below 15th May is: Mon. 27th pp175/147.
I went on to complete Volumes 5, 6 and 7 and stopped.
Death in a Life were enough for the moment.
August 5, 2007
I haven't read this book. But I like to insinuate that I have.
April 12, 2015
Recommendations/What to Read:
I recommend this book to anybody who wants inspiration to be a writer because i don't know if i've ever read a better justification for writing or a more inspiring explanation of why someone wrote what he wrote. (Note: it’s waaaaaaaaaaay at the end, though.)
Read all 3,000+ pages IF AND ONLY IF you want to brag about such an achievement. (I feel a sense of accomplishment, but i’ve also got a lot more lost time after reading it all.)
If, unlike me, you do not want a dubious reason to pat yourself on the back, you might be happier reading just the long (enough), self-contained (pretty much), first part ("novel"), Swann's Way / Du côté de chez Swann, of the seven-part meganovel.
Or you could follow one of the many suggested abbreviated readings. The following is from Roger Shattuck:
+ "Combray" and "Swann in Love" sections of Swann's Way
+ "Balbec" section of Within a Budding Grove / A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs
+ "The Grandmother's Death" from The Guermantes Way / Le côté de Guermantes
+ first & last 30pp of Cities of the Plain / Sodom et Gomorrhe
+ first 30pp + ~200pp of the concert @ the Verdurins' in The Captive / La prisonnière
+ last 200pp of Time Regained / Le temps retrouvé
Mary Ann Caws, interviewed as part of the audio version of Swann's Way that i listened to months ago, has her own "greatest hits." I remember it being much like Shattuck’s but she specifically recommended "The Intermittencies of the Heart" from Sodom and Gomorrah. And when you consider that was one of the titles Proust considered for the entire work, it's hard to imagine skipping that section.
Some initial thoughts:
Not quite 3 months to read this 7-headed beast. Faster than i expected but probably because i gave a lot of the book less than my full attention. Huge sections of books 3, 4, 5, & 6 felt interminable even though—or is it because?—i wasn't even concentrating on the words, sentences, and (excruciatingly long) paragraphs.
Maybe it deserves 5 stars, but the fantastic ending, the befuddling but always intriguing beginning, the startling metaphors/similes (almost exclusively, for me, in the first 600pp), the astonishing depth and breadth of self-analysis, the curious theories (esp. about love & sex; an invert's [his own term] seemingly inverted version of inversion? [i.e., homosexuality] for example)—in short, the parts that i most enjoyed, even when they're all added up, fail to compensate completely for that whichbored me to tears tried my patience.
I triple underlined the following quote near the very end because i consider it the perfect seedling for all personal reviews
Shattuck's "field guide" touts Proust's "comic vision," but i think Shattuck confuses that term with "comedic timing" because in the chapter about comic vision he says that Proust withholds information so that we're mentally tickled when finally, at long last we receive it. If the "lull" (the set-up lines) must precede the "bang" (the punchline), then what kind of bang should we expect after about a 2,000 page doldrums? Was Proust so confident in his "punchline" that not even the anesthetized-with-boredom mental state i found myself in after 2 months of literary motionlessness could numb its effect on me? I was thrilled with the culmination of the novel, but i believe that i would've been thrilled even if i'd undertaken an abbreviated reading.
I always feel compelled to talk about translation. For this work, in English, just the titles provide enough content for entire volumes of exasperation. "Cities of the Plain"?! Why is anybody hanging on to that atrocious euphemism when "Sodom and Gomorrah" are no longer tabu? And as if "Remembrance of Things Past" isn't enough of a bastardization, what the hell were they thinking when they came up with "The Sweet Cheat Gone"? Is that another phrase cribbed from Shakespeare? Even if it is, it's a patently ridiculous "translation" of Albertine disparue.
I can't resist the urge to write like Proust. Can you tell? I yearn for more verb tenses. Why must English be so limited? ;-)
I'll try to write a real review eventually.
I recommend this book to anybody who wants inspiration to be a writer because i don't know if i've ever read a better justification for writing or a more inspiring explanation of why someone wrote what he wrote. (Note: it’s waaaaaaaaaaay at the end, though.)
Read all 3,000+ pages IF AND ONLY IF you want to brag about such an achievement. (I feel a sense of accomplishment, but i’ve also got a lot more lost time after reading it all.)
If, unlike me, you do not want a dubious reason to pat yourself on the back, you might be happier reading just the long (enough), self-contained (pretty much), first part ("novel"), Swann's Way / Du côté de chez Swann, of the seven-part meganovel.
Or you could follow one of the many suggested abbreviated readings. The following is from Roger Shattuck:
+ "Combray" and "Swann in Love" sections of Swann's Way
+ "Balbec" section of Within a Budding Grove / A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs
+ "The Grandmother's Death" from The Guermantes Way / Le côté de Guermantes
+ first & last 30pp of Cities of the Plain / Sodom et Gomorrhe
+ first 30pp + ~200pp of the concert @ the Verdurins' in The Captive / La prisonnière
+ last 200pp of Time Regained / Le temps retrouvé
Mary Ann Caws, interviewed as part of the audio version of Swann's Way that i listened to months ago, has her own "greatest hits." I remember it being much like Shattuck’s but she specifically recommended "The Intermittencies of the Heart" from Sodom and Gomorrah. And when you consider that was one of the titles Proust considered for the entire work, it's hard to imagine skipping that section.
Some initial thoughts:
Not quite 3 months to read this 7-headed beast. Faster than i expected but probably because i gave a lot of the book less than my full attention. Huge sections of books 3, 4, 5, & 6 felt interminable even though—or is it because?—i wasn't even concentrating on the words, sentences, and (excruciatingly long) paragraphs.
Maybe it deserves 5 stars, but the fantastic ending, the befuddling but always intriguing beginning, the startling metaphors/similes (almost exclusively, for me, in the first 600pp), the astonishing depth and breadth of self-analysis, the curious theories (esp. about love & sex; an invert's [his own term] seemingly inverted version of inversion? [i.e., homosexuality] for example)—in short, the parts that i most enjoyed, even when they're all added up, fail to compensate completely for that which
I triple underlined the following quote near the very end because i consider it the perfect seedling for all personal reviews
...with [my book's] help I would furnish [my readers] with the means of reading what lay inside themselves. So that I should not ask them to praise me or to censure me, but simply to tell me whether "it really is like that," I should ask them whether the words that they read within themselves are the same as those that I have written (though a discrepancy in this respect need not always be the consequence of an error on my part, since the explanation could also be that the reader had eyes for which my book was not a suitable instrument). [emphasis mine]On the sane basis of that method of assessing a book's value, i give Proust a "meager" 4 stars for his Herculean and fully laudatory efforts because in enough ways it "was not a suitable instrument" for my particular eyes.
Shattuck's "field guide" touts Proust's "comic vision," but i think Shattuck confuses that term with "comedic timing" because in the chapter about comic vision he says that Proust withholds information so that we're mentally tickled when finally, at long last we receive it. If the "lull" (the set-up lines) must precede the "bang" (the punchline), then what kind of bang should we expect after about a 2,000 page doldrums? Was Proust so confident in his "punchline" that not even the anesthetized-with-boredom mental state i found myself in after 2 months of literary motionlessness could numb its effect on me? I was thrilled with the culmination of the novel, but i believe that i would've been thrilled even if i'd undertaken an abbreviated reading.
I always feel compelled to talk about translation. For this work, in English, just the titles provide enough content for entire volumes of exasperation. "Cities of the Plain"?! Why is anybody hanging on to that atrocious euphemism when "Sodom and Gomorrah" are no longer tabu? And as if "Remembrance of Things Past" isn't enough of a bastardization, what the hell were they thinking when they came up with "The Sweet Cheat Gone"? Is that another phrase cribbed from Shakespeare? Even if it is, it's a patently ridiculous "translation" of Albertine disparue.
I can't resist the urge to write like Proust. Can you tell? I yearn for more verb tenses. Why must English be so limited? ;-)
I'll try to write a real review eventually.
Read
October 9, 2019I need to clean up my current reading list and this has been sitting there for two years. I was able to finally make it past the first part, but all the stuff about the narrator and his mother was just a little too weird. I think there's certain personalities who are drawn to and who like Proust but I'm not one of them. I do appreciate the deep, rich, sensitive psychology. I'm able to identify Proust's influence now (like in Gene Wolfe's "New Sun" books) but it's otherwise just too alien to me. I got a similar feeling reading Ulysses. I'm a Powysian, not a Proustian. Maybe I'm a failure as a reader, but I think it's more that the nerve in my brain that is sensitive to literature does not extend to this type of work.
March 27, 2013
I have just finished Swann's Way. Not sure whether I will continue.
I constantly wondered whether this book is revered not because of its insights, style, atmosphere, but because it is difficult. In terms of style, I am not sure it is better than Henry James, but on the whole I think it probably isn't. In terms of insights into human character it is certainly not as good as James - many of the characters are Dickensian parodies (no criticism of Dickens is intended there).
I am having trouble with the narrator - fine in the first section, but how does he get into Swann's (and other people's) heads in the second section? Will/would I find that out at the end? Or is this a quibble?
I constantly wondered whether this book is revered not because of its insights, style, atmosphere, but because it is difficult. In terms of style, I am not sure it is better than Henry James, but on the whole I think it probably isn't. In terms of insights into human character it is certainly not as good as James - many of the characters are Dickensian parodies (no criticism of Dickens is intended there).
I am having trouble with the narrator - fine in the first section, but how does he get into Swann's (and other people's) heads in the second section? Will/would I find that out at the end? Or is this a quibble?
August 2, 2008
My favorite book along with Tolstoy's War and Peace. This can be a bit slow because it is INTENSELY focused on details. It may also seem a bit solipsistic...and downright pointless. But Proust builds a marvelous, intricately nuanced account of the human being within time. The final novel, Time Regained, is just amazing. Overall, I easily see why this is so respected and I would recommend at least Time Regained to anyone--as essential reading for human existence!
May 13, 2010
The Renoir of writers. Patches of swirling color, highlighted with scintillating, hairline brushstrokes. Light leaps up from the canvas. Work, work, and more work is the only way to produce a masterpiece.
June 11, 2007
ah, what can come from a cookie!!
August 29, 2007
I have read this. What I really want to do is to reread it.
October 19, 2007
Please don't write a book after you read it.
July 10, 2009
Long, but worth the 3 months it took to read all 3000+ pages
February 24, 2011
Proust will stay with me for the rest of my life. Daydreams and pleasure have an added importance now. And the poetics of life will never escape me.
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