From the Bookshelf of The Year of Reading Proust…

Within a Budding Grove (In Search of Lost Time, #2)

Marcel Proust,

C.K. Scott Moncrieff (Translator)

Start date: February 25, 2013

Finish date: April 28, 2013

Discussion: Within a Budding Grove, vol. 2

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Within a Budding Grove, vol. 2

Second book: difficulty staying interested
By Angnus · 8 posts · 83 views

last updated Jun 23, 2020 06:00PM

Through Sunday, 28 Apr.: Within a Budding Grove
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last updated Jan 10, 2016 06:53AM

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Mar 23, 2013 Darwin8u rated it really liked it · review of another edition

“Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.”
― Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove

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Marie Laurencin, 'Les jeunes filles'

My first recommendation when reading Proust is the reader MUST make sure they have a reliable bookmark, because when (not if, but when) you lose your place your faulty memory will not be able to remember exactly where you just were. One young nubile girl starts to blend into anot ...more

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Mar 09, 2013 Brian rated it it was amazing

Upon checking into a hotel in Venice in the summer of 2006, the man behind the reception desk raised his eyes in surprise when he saw the length of our stay. “Four nights,” he commented. “Lovely. We rarely see people stay for more than a couple of nights. Most only stay for one.”

Neither my wife nor I had ever been to Venice prior to this trip, and like any other person vaguely familiar with the city, we had a rich imagination of the charms we would behold: the canal streets, stripe-shirted gond Upon checking into a hotel in Venice in the summer of 2006, the man behind the reception desk raised his eyes in surprise when he saw the length of our stay. “Four nights,” he commented. “Lovely. We rarely see people stay for more than a couple of nights. Most only stay for one.”

Neither my wife nor I had ever been to Venice prior to this trip, and like any other person vaguely familiar with the city, we had a rich imagination of the charms we would behold: the canal streets, stripe-shirted gondoliers, Piazza San Marco. On our first day we visited the famous spots, took great pictures, drank some delicious wine while watching tourists feed the pigeons in the Piazza. It wasn’t until the second and third day that we learned a deeper truth of the City…

In “Swann’s Way”, Proust’s narrator takes the reader through the byzantine world of memory. In “Within a Budding Grove”, our narrator shows both the power and limitations of imagination. “We must have imagination, awakened by the uncertainty of being able to attain our object, to create a goal which hides our other goal from us, and by substituting for sensual pleasures the idea of penetrating into a life prevents us from recognizing that pleasure, from tasting its true savor, from restricting it to its own range.”

Proust’s protagonist pours his imagination into many things through these episodes of his adolescence. It is the band of young girls by the French seaside that awakens his full power of imagination, invoking a range of emotive responses to the possible – and ultimately a fear of what will become once that imagined barrier is crossed. “But to strip our pleasures of imagination is to reduce them to their own dimensions, that is to say to nothing.”

When traveling, my wife and I much prefer the peripatetic experience to the caged mass of humanity in a torturous tour bus. It was on the second day of our Venice visit, following an hour’s leisurely walk wandering around the side streets of the island when we happened to mis-time our walk and came upon the Piazza just as a giant load of tourists were disgorged from a cruise ship. The lines for gondoliers went from non-existent to twenty people deep, all of the notable guidebook “must sees” were packed – the whole island felt as if it had just inhaled a huge breath of humanity; at the end of the day, it exhaled them out back to their cruise ship. That night the vibe and energy of the island was one of relief.

The following day we stopped in a small shop that sold beautiful murano glass creations. The store was empty, the proprietor shocked to see us. “Has the cruise ship landed already?” he asked in surprise. We told him that we were staying at the hotel on the island, not here on a cruise ship. “Why would you do that?” he asked incredulously. It was then that we learned so much about the real Venice.

The proprietor told us that he was a descendant of a long line of native Venetians. He lamented that he would be the last of his family name to live on the island – all of his children had moved to the mainland, bored of the complete lack of, well, anything to do that didn’t entail the catering to tourists. He said that his plight wasn’t unique; other multi-generational families were suffering the same end-of-line fate.

Venice, in reality, had become an adult tourist version of Disneyland. The reality of this place had been molded to my (and countless scores of others’) imagination of what Venice should be. By making the imagined the real, we had killed the soul of the city and turned it into a canalled museum. Thus the "harmonious cohesion" sought by Proust’s narrator between the imagination (whether it be in memory or forethought) and the reality.

Towards the end of the novel, Proust refers to the arbitrary simplicity of our memory. That bridge between the recalled, or the imagined, to the reality must be short and well constructed - or we will destroy it and build it anew. “It would require so immense an effort to reconstruct everything that has been imparted to us by things other than ourselves – were it only the taste of a fruit – that no sooner the impression received that we begin imperceptibly to descend the slope of memory and, without noticing anything, in a very short time, we have come a long way from what we actually felt.” Does Proust's narrator try to mold the actuality of the object of desire to the imagined? Do I? Of course I do.

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. - John Kenneth Galbraith

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Dec 06, 2012 Cynthia rated it really liked it

Shelves: books-read-in-2012

I loved this as I did the first book but the self absorbtion wore a little thin...on the other hand that obsession is exactly what makes Proust so fascinating.

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