Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1) in Never too Late to Read Classics

Aug 30, 2022 Laura (Reading is a Doing Word) rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: classics-trad-and-modern, books-i-own, proust, 2022-read

So, far later than my planned date, I finally finished Swann’s Way!
The writing is lyrical and beautiful but it’s not really plot driven and so distractions were hard to resist. I prevailed however and I can tell that this work will be worth the effort.

The first volume of Proust’s “magnum opus” introduces us to the narrator and to the flowing, meandering sentence structure. We also meet some of the other principal characters - Swann, Odette, Gilberte, the narrator’s family and many others.

It’s v So, far later than my planned date, I finally finished Swann’s Way!
The writing is lyrical and beautiful but it’s not really plot driven and so distractions were hard to resist. I prevailed however and I can tell that this work will be worth the effort.

The first volume of Proust’s “magnum opus” introduces us to the narrator and to the flowing, meandering sentence structure. We also meet some of the other principal characters - Swann, Odette, Gilberte, the narrator’s family and many others.

It’s very hard to know what to say about this book! I was gently swept along by it, like a boat on a lazy river on a summer’s day. There was no strong current to whisk me away but there was enough enjoyment to keep floating.

We’re introduced to, what I suspect, will become the prevailing themes: memory, time, perception, love, obsession, music, art.
This book made me want to pay more attention - to observe how light falls in nature, to relish in the taste of a cup of tea, to dream about the lives of Saints in paintings, to appreciate the small observations that combine to form our memories and ultimately our lives.

The narrator moves us around in time - the opening sequence coming from his childhood and then moving to Swann in Love, a tale of obsession predating the narrator’s birth. In the end we return to an unspecified “current” time examining the meaning place can have in our lives.

Capturing the essence of this book is beyond me but here are a few quotes I loved:

"But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. "

"..., my innermost impulse, the lever whose incessant movements controlled everything else, was my belief in the philosophic richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever the book might be. ."

"It's only what we do that counts, and not at all what we say or what we think"

"..the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment;..." ...more

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