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.
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Swann's Way, vol. 1

Through Sunday, 6 Jan.: Swann's Way
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What Members Thought

May 22, 2012 Mike Clinton rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

It took me a long time to complete this first novel in the series, in part because it felt too self-indulgent to spend the time reading and savoring it. Fortunately, the GR group "The Year of Reading Proust" has provided me with sufficient motivation and incentive to commit the quality time required. I say "quality time" because the book requires the kind of focus - deep reading - that circumstances and distractions make less and less available; in fact, at the risk of sounding Proustian!, even It took me a long time to complete this first novel in the series, in part because it felt too self-indulgent to spend the time reading and savoring it. Fortunately, the GR group "The Year of Reading Proust" has provided me with sufficient motivation and incentive to commit the quality time required. I say "quality time" because the book requires the kind of focus - deep reading - that circumstances and distractions make less and less available; in fact, at the risk of sounding Proustian!, even the kind of surrender to long, detailed (but carefully structured) reveries that make up the content of the whole "Lost Time" series seems elusive - as if there's no longer time to lose.

At times I felt that Proust had taken Dante as his model, guiding readers not through the rich variety of heaven, hell, and purgatory, but through the dense, dynamic psychological and aesthetic processes - epiphanies, in the more dramatic moments - that not only reflect but compose human experience and identity. Proust guides readers through situations that parallel each other - his longing as a child for his mother to visit him in his room to say goodnight, Swann's jealous obsession with Odette, Proust's adolescent infatuation with Gilberte - and explores the association between these interior, emotional sensibilities with sensory experiences, such as the taste of a madeleine, a phrase heard in a violin sonata, architectural styles, scents in a garden, the sound of place names, etc. This core idea and the way it's structured in the novel struck me most strongly during the scene in the second part when Swann attended a party at the Marquise de Saint-Euverte's; there he heard once again the phrase from a violin sonata that he had long connected with his love for Odette de Crecy. At this point, however, his love for her had transmuted into a painful obsession, and this moment marks a critical point in this psychological process. Swann notices that the phrase sounds different to him this time, not because the piece has changed - although Proust suggests that the musicianship on this occasion is superior - but because Swann has changed and therefore receives and processes the sensation differently. This moment reminded me of the striking passage in the first part of the book when the young Proust observed a distant church spire taking on different aspects shaped by distance, light, but most importantly his own observation. In Proust's world, these aesthetic epiphanies are the vehicles that allow us to recognize the continuity and change that marks our lives and selves.

There are far more threads woven through the book, and I've only just begun the seven-novel series. ...more

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Mar 15, 2012 Sandi rated it it was amazing

Shelves: classics, favorites, france, literature

As just about everyone that admires this work has praised it far better than I ever can I will only say this.

If you are a reader that skim reads then don't even bother with this as you will get nothing out of it. Each sentence and description must be read in full to appreciate Proust. (I wish I could read it in French).

If you don't want to think even a little bit then again, don't bother. This book makes you think. Well maybe it doesn't make you but it highly encourages it.

If you like stories ab ...more

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Aug 26, 2012 Sammy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: books-of-my-life

For a long time I would go to bed early.

With those words, one of the greatest achievements of Western literature begins. Despite being a lit major, classicist and language-lover, I have somehow lived 28 years without ever committing myself to read Proust. In retrospect, I'm not sad about that, as I feel my heart, soul, and mind are more open to understanding the Frenchman's great 20th century tome with every passing year of my life.

In the opening volume, Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way, perh ...more

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Jan 01, 2013 Muzzy added it

Can there be any doubt that Proust is the master of nostalgia?

The only author I know who compares to Proust is William Faulkner. But where Faulkner is parochial, Proust comes close to universality. What child hasn't played at love, years before he can know anything about it? Have you never heard a short phrase of music, and thought it represented a secret message only for you? Who hasn’t travelled back to a scene from the distant past, only to feel disappointed at how the past refuses to reappe Can there be any doubt that Proust is the master of nostalgia?

The only author I know who compares to Proust is William Faulkner. But where Faulkner is parochial, Proust comes close to universality. What child hasn't played at love, years before he can know anything about it? Have you never heard a short phrase of music, and thought it represented a secret message only for you? Who hasn’t travelled back to a scene from the distant past, only to feel disappointed at how the past refuses to reappear?

Very few authors have portrayed such feelings. Proust dramatizes them all with such panache, I almost want to believe he’s the first to try.

Where Faulkner can sometimes take himself too seriously, Proust’s sense of comic irony is never sad, but lifts the weight of his drama. One day Swann fears that his lover Odette will ask him for money to rent a castle for her and her friends. Swann thinks, no, I’m being silly, that couldn’t possibly happen. And then, in the very next paragraph, “Yet this was in fact what happened the very next day.”

With sentences that meander and distract, it’s easy for Proust's jokes to sneak up on you. A couple of times the joke didn’t hit me until the page after the punch line. Another hilarious moment: “Sometimes he hoped she would die in some accident without suffering . . . and when se returned safe and sound, he marveled that the human body was so supple and so strong.”

By the way, both those citations I just quoted were from Lydia Davis. I compared them to the Moncrieff version, and found that she rendered them with more economy and style. Davis’ work is a massive achievement, and it’s hard to imagine a more clear translation.

Harold Bloom says In Search of Lost Time is “a comic novel about sexual jealousy.” That may be accurate of the total novel. But for this first volume, I think it’s too narrow. The sexual jealousy only applies to the section Swann in Love. In the other sections, the characters seek to possess each other in more diverse ways, and the narrator tries and fails to possess his own memory and past sensations. So I would expand the definition to “a comic novel about possession” – and how it’s as impossible to possess the past as it is to possess a person.

This expanded view becomes clear in the book’s final lines, so gorgeous that I had to read them out loud:

“Nature was resuming its rule over the Bois, from which the idea that it was the Elysian Garden of Woman had vanished; above the artificial mill the real sky was gray; the wind wrinkled the Grand Lac with little wavelets, like a real lake; large birds swiftly crossed the Bois, like a real wood, and uttering sharp cries alighted one after another in the tall oaks which under their druidical crowns and with a Dodonean majesty seemed to proclaim the inhuman emptiness of the disuses forest, and helped me better understand what a contradiction it is to search in reality for memory’s pictures, which would never have the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from not being perceived by the senses. The reality I had known no longer existed. That Mme. Swann did not arrive exactly the same at the same moment was enough to make the Avenue different. The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.”
...more

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