Simon’s
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(group member since Dec 27, 2014)
Simon’s
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from the One Year In Search of Lost Time ~ 2015 group.
Showing 81-100 of 176
It's funny, after seeing the short relative size of this part and your assertion of its shortness, I sat down to read it in one go expecting it to end at any moment (my edition has a long appendix, i was only at 70% or so right at the end of Proust's text), and that made it feel longer than the other parts. This observation felt very Proustian, though Proust would probably make something more elaborate out of it ;)Swann's illness is one of those rare dramatic events in the book, like the grandmother's death, and seems well placed at the end of this rather uneventful (though that in itself is not negative) volume.
I found Monsieur Charlus' raging friendship dismissal towards the narrator puzzling. As he was changing his emotional expression so often, sometimes in sweet and melanchonic tones between the raging, at the end even delaying Marcel's departure when before he said he couldn't even spare five more minutes for someone he didn't want to see again, i would in modern terms call this bipolar. This puzzling, intense behaviour definitely made for an interesting, refreshing read.
I found it a bit surprising that the narrator said he was disappointed by Madame de Guermantes, when a few pages before he explained her charm in her old-fashioned ways. But i guess he grew weary of that.
Overall, as i said before, i'm inclined to give this volume only three stars, as the saloon meetings were dreary, i guess proving Proust's point, but there were a lot of great ideas here too, and i'm looking forward to the next volume!
Of course Jacob is mostly away now, so i wonder whether we aren't a little late with this thread. And it seems like some people dropped the read or at least are busy and have fallen behind for now, so how many people might still be actively reading Proust and checking in here?By the way, Teresa, you seem to be quite active on goodreads and reading a lot, right? I think i saw you in another group. I'm also comoderating the Reading the Classics group and doing a read a month there, it's a nice place to discuss. It's decently active, though it seems lately people aren't that motivated to discuss, and there is another group called Catching up on Classics which seems a little more active and better organized, who have multiple optional reads every month and vote two months in advance. Maybe i'll check in there. I was also trying to start Mrs Dalloway on the side, but was busy with Proust and life these days ;)
Haha, nice to see that someone else is struggling with (part of) the Guermantes. But the end is well in sight.
I thought it might be nice to have a thread to have a little chit-chat, tell where you are with Proust right now, etc. We don't have a non-specific thread yet where we can talk about anything we want, so here we go!I'm looking forward to finishing volume 3, the last part this week is rather short.
I just read again that ISOLT is the longest novel on the record at 1,267,069 words, double the amount of War and Peace. Of course that means ISOLT is twice as good too ;)
By the way, i just found an excellent introduction article to How Proust can Change your Life, and its author Alain de Botton's video introduction to that. The 9-minute video makes some good points about what Proust does in ISOLT, how art allows you to have a more colorful vision of life, and may raise your motivation to read it some more. There are spoilers up to the Guermantes saloon meetings, which we're finishing now, so i think it doesn't spoil the read now.
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/06/...
This week, ending July 4th, is scheduled to end our read of The Guermantes Way.Of course, everyone can progress as he likes, but it would be nice to finish and discuss this volume together soon!
This last part should also be relatively short, as it's less than 8% of the volume.
Hey, maybe to start a more informal and general chat, where are you all at with Proust?I just caught up with this week's part.
As always, i found the saloon meeting a bit dreary, but i finally understood Marcel's now revealed interest in and enjoyment of the Guermantes and their saloon meetings. "I liked the mind of Madame Guermantes precisely by what it excluded (and what was the subject of my thinking) (...) the seductive robustness of elegant bodies that weren't disfigured by the work of thought"
Marcel is analyzing these noblemen, their socializing, gossiping, how they tick.
Then again, when Norpois talks about the army and politics, Marcel himself is bored and distracted, because these technical topics, poorly presented by Norpois, don't nourish his mind.
On the other hand, he is fascinated about all the old-fashioned talk of genealogy, how Monieur Guermantes tries to find relatedness to every person mentioned.
I liked the narrator's thought that it would be even more interesting for him to witness these saloon meetings without the influence of his presence, which changes what they talk about, eliminates the shared, secret insider topics.
I'm looking forward to switching to the english (Penguin) edition after this volume again, because i have to translate all my german passages here, and can't reference the english translation, which is quite a hassle.
Interesting "translation"!Here's the goodreads book link of volume 1:
Combray
Maybe i'll give this a try someday. Though as it's meant as an introduction to Proust, it likely won't be more than a neat extra thingy to us Proust readers.
I just noticed this is actually week 9, i accidentally repeated the title week 7 last week. I already corrected the thread titles here.
German tranlation ;) (Bernd-Jürgen Fischer):(view spoiler)
I compared the translations only shortly, interesting stuff. Only in the german version are the adjectives perpetual and quiet combined into "perpetually quiet" (or "eternally quiet"), in german "ewig still".
The most basic thing we see, again and again, is that every translation is different. Of course the original french has the authority, but i like to see the choices made in translations. And different languages have different advantages and disadvantages (the biggest disadvantage of english being the lack of gender in adjectives and (most) nouns).
Thank you, Marcelita! :)
Good point about the possession, Jacob.And i agree on the value of discussion, though that's especially so for philosophy. In other areas i'd value discussion less, unless your discussion partner has read exactly what you're interested in.
Especially in literature I find detailed discussion almost impossible unless you have read the same thing at about the same time not long ago (like here). After some weeks or months it's already hard to talk about what you've read in detail. Well, it's complicated ;)
"Then, as I looked and listened to Mme de Guermantes, I could see, calmly imprisoned in the unending afternoon of her eyes, an expanse of sky of the Ile-de-France or of Champagne, bluish, slanting, at the same angle of incline as in the eyes of Saint-Loup" (~82.38%).error fixed:
(view spoiler)
Somewhere early in this week's erotically charged part, around the narrator's impatient expectation to have dinner with and "possess" Madame Stermaria on the Isle de Bois, I realized that "to possess" in Proust means "to have Sex with". I vaguely recalled that he used it in earlier volumes already.Then I searched my digital editions and found this interesting passage from the second volume that shows a twofold use of the word:
I knew I could never possess the young cyclist, unless I could also possess what lay behind her eyes. My desire for her was desire for her whole life: a desire that was full of pain, because I sensed it was unattainable, but also full of heady excitement
(p. 375)
And other uses of "posess" in this way, which made me think that i should have recognized its meaning much sooner:
(view spoiler)
Later we find another tidbit of Proust's personal lifestyle philosophy, about the value of friendship, that I read about before in How Proust can change your Life. There it's shown that for Proust friendship should only be a mutual exchange of affection, that you shouldn't discuss intellectual matters among friends because you only endanger your friendship and the intellectual rewards are small, and that there's little inherent value in friendship.
"that it [friendship] is such a lowly thing, that I struggle to understand how ingenious men, Nietzsche for example, could have had the naivety to award it an intellectual value"
(my translation from german, loc. 12945 of 27382, 48%, Reclam Bibliothek edition)
I don't fully agree with Proust's view on friendship, though he made me shift further toward this direction and understand his viewpoint. Some people can't discuss critically or are hurt when you disagree with them, and with some friends intellectual discussion may not be fruitful at all. Meeting up with friends, casually talking to them about anything, while a pleasant activity, usually leaves you not much wiser than before.
There are more effective ways to progress intellectually than discussing vocally anyways, as you don't have access to material and you're forced to answer quickly.
That said, I believe you can gain important knowledge and little pointers towards things you could get a clearer picture of from talking to others, when they know something that you missed until now. Discussion has the advantage of interactivity, you can quickly get feedback about your thoughts, which may take longer to find among the undiscriminating information in books or other sources.
Also, mature, critically thinking people should be able to tolerate discussion with differing viewpoints.
And finally, friendship seems like one of the inherently rewarding aspects of life that make it worth living. It's just rarely as deep as we wished, and I more and more look for quality instead of quantity of friendship.
"...the same aberration that typified court life under Louis XIV, which removes scruples of conscience from the domain of the affections and morality and transforms them into questions of pure form" (~72.32%).
Kissing is also idealized in romantic fiction. It's the event that shows the point when two people come together, the most intense standard depiction of love, in film or writing. Well, i made my point above, but for me personally kissing isn't the highlight of coming together either. I find other modes of closeness like hugging much more intense.
Finally caught up, yay!I'm also surprised that many of you like The Guermante's Way so much in comparison to the books before. To me Swann's Way was by far the best and most densely impressive so far, i gave the second only four stars, and would probably give GW only 3 stars right now, though it's hard to evaluate a middle volume of a sequence of books, and i still do enjoy it a lot. There are just some rather dreary, lengthy passages (i didn't enjoy the Dreyfus affaire discussions) that didn't give me much to think about or like, mainly the saloon meetings. I guess I don't know the characters well enough yet to enjoy following these social pictures.
This part was much more pleasant and interesting for me again, without the issues i mentioned, much more like Swann's Way or volume two.
I liked the discussion of this spontaneous... scene of intimacy, for lack of a better word, with Albertine. How compared to Balbec, he desired her not for love this time, but simply physically, how their kissing and physical intimacy implied love and "mental intimacy" for Albertine, connecting and telling private stories, but not for our narrator, who just wanted to enjoy the moment.
And what really took me in was this notion that we have a desire for kissing, but lips are far from an ideal organ for that, and (later) that the nose and eyes are badly placed for that, the noses getting in the way, sometimes unable to smell (though that seems doubtful to me), and the eyes useless.
Seeing how idealized kissing is in our society and culture, i in large part have to agree with Proust's dissatisfaction. And i don't expect you to discuss this in detail, but i'm curious whether you agree. To me, the desire, intention and buildup to kissing is wonderful, but the kissing itself, the sensory feel, is somewhat lacking. No wonder there are many cultures in the world where kissing is rare or entirely replaced by other intimacies.
I didn't see a sexual subtext between Saint-Loup and Marcel, though what you quoted now actually strikes me that way, especially the "longingly". It's well possible the narrator is hiding something here. Interesting stuff!On the other hand, i don't find tenderness, smiles and soothing between two artistically minded people unexpected. It's indeed rare nowadays, but I've seen it. I guess this sensibility is stronger with people with homoerotic awareness (not necessarily homo- or bisexual), and it seems like a feminine quality (women are often good at this).
Ah, thank you, Book Portrait, that is encouraging! You said it right, the first time around all those saloon characters blend into an indistinguishable mess, but i already had a hunch that it would be interesting if you knew the characters better and could see how they develop there.In any case, my quest to catch up wasn't affected too much by this :)
I didn't enjoy this part that much. I'm always struggling a bit and being impatient with the high society saloon meetings, if they're not talking about music or something else reasonable, that is. I just find their talk and elitism, antisemitism, conservatism etc. mindnumbingly naive and uninteresting. I understand that that's part of the point, and the characters and dynamics in this high society are somewhat interesting, but I'm struggling to really enjoy it.And then there's the discussions of the Dreyfus affair. Again, it's interesting how the characters position themselves, and what they show of common political opinions, but all in all it's a bit vain too, in my eyes.
I just enjoyed much more Elstir, the girls or other parts of the book without high-society elitism and with more inspired dialogue.
i've fallen a bit behind, but i'm looking forward to catching up quickly :)
