The Guermantes Way (In Search of Lost Time, #3) in The Year of Reading Proust

Mar 30, 2012 David rated it it was amazing

Shelves: france

Guermantes Way is like the pretentious, over-educated older sister of Budding Grove who constantly outdoes her little sister at everything. She's longer, she's more boring, she's more interesting, she's wittier and funnier, and she just loves to show off how much she knows.

We really get to know Saint Loup in this volume, as well as the Guermantes family in general - who are some pretty superficial crazies anyway. M., being a creep, stalks Mme. de Guermantes everyday on her morning walks, and be Guermantes Way is like the pretentious, over-educated older sister of Budding Grove who constantly outdoes her little sister at everything. She's longer, she's more boring, she's more interesting, she's wittier and funnier, and she just loves to show off how much she knows.

We really get to know Saint Loup in this volume, as well as the Guermantes family in general - who are some pretty superficial crazies anyway. M., being a creep, stalks Mme. de Guermantes everyday on her morning walks, and befriends her nephew, Saint-Loup and is like "oh can I have that picture of your aunt? ...why? uh......." - whatever, we've all been there right? ..right? ....anyone? anyone? Bueller?

We also get historical in this one with the Dreyfus affair as the background. There are a few Jewish characters, Bloch who is totally oblivious about being unwanted and annoying, and Charles Swann who of course we love and sympathize with since he married a whore. The Dreyfus affair really wears Swann out, which is sad, but as a reader you're really distracted by the total creepiness of Marcel so you get over it pretty quickly.

This chapter also emerges us in, what every book ought to have, TONS OF SOCIETY BITCHES. And they're all really obsessed with seeming witty (which I've learned from Balzac is REALLY important to French people). We get a LOT of Mme. de Guermantes superrr bitchy opinions about her friends and family. Like Princess de Parma and etc. We also hear lots of gossip about people we've met, like Charlus and his dead wife and M. de Norpois and his affair with Mme. de Villeparisis. SCANDALOUS. My only complaint about this volume is I felt like it talked about the lineage of the Guermantes for way too long, and like, the lineages of everyone in all of France. It got rather dry for a good 30-100 pages, but it picked up later.

This book kind of kills Elstir in M.'s eyes a little since the Guermantes don't like his paintings. Whatever...bitches.

There's a really funny scene (and witty, go figure) where B. de Charlus has given M. a book of Bergotte's (which happens pretty much right after he's all like "Bergotte sucks"), and then Charlus calls M. to his house and accuses him of slandering him because M. told people he would help him into society (which he did), and he says "Similarly, you did not even recognize on the binding of Bergotte's book the lintel of myosotis over the door of Balbec church. Could there have been a clearer way of saying to you: 'Forget me not!'?" I laughed out loud in an untrammeled geeky way, since it is totally absurd to read that much into such a thing.

The book ends on a CLIFFHANGER. Guys, Proust is basically the Agatha Christie of 4000 page novel-y things that sorta don't have a plot and sorta don't have action verbs and stuff. It ends and its like, WILL M. BE INVITED TO THIS PARTY? You would die without knowing if you didn't ever read volume four. How could you live with that suspense? You couldn't. Onto V.4: Sodom + Gomorrah! ...more

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Jun 05, 2013 Mala rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2013-the-year-of-reading-proust, classic-ever-enduring-appeal

We are attracted by every form of life which represents to us something unknown and strange, by a last illusion still unshattered.

I read this book in a purple haze of the summer daze–no, not the Hendrix variety, rather, a surreal read where words seemed to be scuttling across text, dropping off the pages, dimming when I focussed on them-closed the book, thinking, tomorrow is another day-& found no recollection of the previous day's read, started all over again... Didn't help that there were en ...more

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May 01, 2013 Fredrik rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, proust

P515 :: "I'm delighted you like it; these flowers are ravishing, just look at the little mauve velvet collars on them; the unfortunate thing is that -- as sometimes happens with people who are very pretty and very nicely dressed -- they have an ugly name and a dreadful smell. All the same, I'm very fond of them. But what is rather sad is that they're going to die."

P389 :: "…it occurred to me that our social life, like an artist's studio, is filled with abandoned sketches depicting our momentary P515 :: "I'm delighted you like it; these flowers are ravishing, just look at the little mauve velvet collars on them; the unfortunate thing is that -- as sometimes happens with people who are very pretty and very nicely dressed -- they have an ugly name and a dreadful smell. All the same, I'm very fond of them. But what is rather sad is that they're going to die."

P389 :: "…it occurred to me that our social life, like an artist's studio, is filled with abandoned sketches depicting our momentary attempts to capture our need for a great love, but what did not occur to me was that sometimes, if the sketch is not too old, we may return to it and transform it into a completely different work, possibly more important than the one we had originally planned."

P361 :: "Women who are encountered in a brothel are of no interest because they remain static."

P165 :: frebrifuge: A medication that reduces fever; an antipyretic.

P294 :: "It is illness that makes us recognize that we do not live in isolation but are chained to a being from a different realm, worlds apart from us, with no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body."

P180 :: "…suddenly, like some astral phenomenon appearing in the sky, I saw ovoid bodies assuming with dizzying speed all the positions they needed to form an unstable constellation in front of Saint-Loup. Hurled out like missiles from a catapult, there seemed to me to be at least seven of them. They were merely, however, Saint-Loupp's two fists, multiplied by the speed with which they were changing place in this apparently ideal and decorative pattern. […] The man had been loitering about with intent and, seeing Saint-Loup as the handsome solider he was, had propositioned him."

P165 :: brougham (pronounced "broom" or "brohm"): a light, four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage built in the 19th century. A small landau, a coupé with a folding top, was called a landaulet. A brougham called a brougham-landaulet had a top collapsible from the rear doors backward. A five-glass landau was fitted with a front glass windscreen and two windows on each side (including retractable windows on the doors).

P164 :: "She was so clumsy with her hands when she ate that one got the impression that she must appear extremely awkward on stage. She recovered her dexterity only when she was making love, with the touchingly intuitive foresight of women who are so in love with men's bodies that they immediately sense what will give most pleasure to those bodies, which are yet so different from their own."

P19 :: "For her [Francoise], wealth was like a necessary condition without which virtue wold lack both merit and charm. She made so little distinction between the two that she came to see the qualities as interchangeable, expecting material comfit from virtue and moral edification from wealth."

P21 :: "He's the one could tell me, but he's a proper toff that one, a great pedant…"
In British English slang, a toff is a mildly derogatory term for someone with an aristocratic background or belonging to the landed gentry, particularly someone who exudes an air of superiority.
A pedant is a person who is excessively concerned with formalism and precision, or who makes a show of his or her learning.

P49 :: "…I was already asking tomorrow's impression to provide me with the please yesterday's had denied me."
...more

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