From the Bookshelf of The Year of Reading Proust…

Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)

Marcel Proust

Start date: January 1, 2013

Finish date: February 24, 2013

Discussion: Swann's Way, vol. 1

Why we're reading this: Alternate translation.
[close] Alternate translation.

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Swann's Way, vol. 1

Through Sunday, 6 Jan.: Swann's Way
By Kris · 373 posts · 819 views

last updated Mar 29, 2025 09:41AM

Through Sunday, 24 Feb.: Swann's Way
By Kris · 142 posts · 381 views

last updated Feb 27, 2015 10:45AM

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What Members Thought

Jan 01, 2013 Richard Shea rated it it was amazing

I'm going to need a while to come to terms with the first volume, but here are some initial thoughts:

1.) It isn't as long or as difficult as it is rumored to be. Sure, there are digressions, asides, long sentences, complex structures, minute details, more clauses than a legal contract, and countless allusions to art and history. It's a book for grown-ups, so I don't see a problem with that.

2.) It's more complex and difficult than it is rumored to be. It's about time. It's about the way we experi ...more

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Jan 04, 2013 Fredrik rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction, proust

P396 :: To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!

P363 :: Maybe it is the nothingness that is real and our entire dream is nonexistent, but in that case we feel that these phrases of music, and these notions that exist in relation to our dream, must also be nothing. We will perish, but we have for hostages these divine captives who will follow us and share our fate. And death in their comp ...more

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Dec 30, 2012 twrctdrv rated it it was amazing

read #3, in lydia davis translation again. my original copy, margins full of line drawings of swann and self-important memories of high school, is gone now, donated somewhere in miami, likely trashed. i’m still sad about it. i’ve added new line drawings to this volume as well

it’s easy to forget how great a book this is. i couldn’t go on about that, but elsewhere. bloch won’t use an umbrella because it’s bourgeois, and i won’t write a review in the same way. no one would read it. read proust inst ...more

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