Time Regained (In Search of Lost Time, #7) in The Year of Reading Proust

Nov 22, 2013 Fionnuala added it · review of another edition

Shelves: proust-and-related, read-in-french, treasured-reading-experience, proust-the-novels

The brilliant scenes where the narrator walks through the Paris night during an air-raid reminded me of this painting:

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Dec 06, 2013 Mala rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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

“After all, I have seen some beautiful things in my life.”

10 stars for the overall ISoLT experience - if Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove haven't already convinced you; then Time Regained should - of the validity & need of Proust worship in the world of literature, now and forever. Period.

For an year, an enchanted world of art, music, literature, history, and romance, opened up for us - we too could be a part of the hyper-sophisticated world of Faubourg Saint-Germain, but ultimately, In S ...more

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Nov 22, 2013 Margaret rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 20th-century-literature, literature, french, proust-2013, read-fall-2013, translation

Time Regained finishes up In Search of Lost Time, and it's an incredible power house description of and reflection on memory. Our narrator is in war-time Paris, and things have changed. Gone are the usual landscapes and usual social maneuvering (though there is of course still some because it's Paris high society), but the Narrator's memories and Françoise still remain.

And indeed this ignorance of people's true social position which every ten years causes the new fashionable elect to arise in a

Time Regained finishes up In Search of Lost Time, and it's an incredible power house description of and reflection on memory. Our narrator is in war-time Paris, and things have changed. Gone are the usual landscapes and usual social maneuvering (though there is of course still some because it's Paris high society), but the Narrator's memories and Françoise still remain.

And indeed this ignorance of people's true social position which every ten years causes the new fashionable elect to arise in all the glory of the moment as though the past had never existed, which makes it impossible for an American woman just landed in Europe to see that in an age when Bloch was nobody M. de Charlus was socially supreme in Paris and that Swann, who put himself out to please M. Bontemps, had himself been treated with every mark of friendship by the Prince of Wales, this ignorance, which exists not only in new arrivals but also in those who have always frequented adjacent but distinct regions of society, is itself also invariably an effect--but an effect operative not so much upon a whole social stratum as within individuals--of Time. (403)

Enough time has passed that what used to be the social norm is gone, and the fashionable set have even mostly forgotten Swann, with not insignificant help from both his widow and daughter marrying and erasing his surname. Time, not only bringing bombs and Germans to France, is also erasing the past history of the Narrator's world.

As her life drew to its close, Mme de Guermantes had felt the quickening within her of new curiosities....Her tired mind required a new form of food, and in order to get to know theatrical and literary people she now made herself pleasant to women whom formerly she would have refused to exchange cards but who, in the hope of getting the Duchess to come to their parties, could boast to her of their great friendship with the editor of some review. (465)

Time has even altered Mme de Guermantes and the pursuit of intellect, literature, and art that has motivated the Narrator since the beginning has spread to her as well. The Narrator has trouble recognizing Saint-Loup's old flame, Rachel, when she finally reappears, having completely reinvented herself since she was a girl in a brothel to a well respected actress. People have changed dramatically, and the Narrator is somehow having to keep up with all of this in addition to somewhat hinted ill health.

No doubt my books too, like my fleshy being, would in the end one day die. But death is a thing that we must resign ourselves to. We accept the thought that in ten years we ourselves, in a hundred years our books, will have ceased to exist. Eternal duration is promised no more to men's works than to men. (524)

Well, the joke is on the Narrator: not all men must accept that in a hundred years their books will be gone, since on hundred years since the first publication of Swann's Way, we are still reading his work. All the work that Françoise has put into fixing up the Narrator's manuscript has paid off because this contemplation of memory, change, and the past still is in print and still is incredibly powerful and poignant.

There have been a lot of small bumps along the way, including more than a little worry about social standing and Albertine's sexual orientation, but Time Regained is worth it all. As creeped out as I was by the Narrator's obsession with Albertine, I feel the same connection to the Narrator's entire feeling of time moving on while memories remain the same. 4,000 pages later, having finished Time Regained was not just an accomplishment but also a wonderful conclusion to reading In Search of Lost Time. ...more

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May 12, 2016 Sammy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: second-eleven

"Stories somehow lengthen when begun" - Lord Byron, Beppo

And so, after 11 months and 3 weeks, I find myself making the emotionally harrowing descent from Mont Proust. And, boy, has it been worth it. Le Temps retrouvé (Time Regained, also translated as Finding Time Again) is the final volume of the masterful Search, and is a distinct step up from its immediate predecessors, for a few reasons. (My reviews of the previous volumes : Unum Duo Tria Quattuor Quinque Sex )

Published a few years after Pro ...more

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Nov 17, 2013 Richard Magahiz rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, read-in-2013

I’m writing this with a wretched cold I caught on Christmas Eve day, the same day I finished the work by one of the most famous chronic invalids in literature, Marcel Proust. Over a million words into this set of books you get the feeling that anything you can say will seem ridiculously insufficient in the face of Proust's conception with its multiple intertwined themes, dozens of characters major and minor (some of the most important of whom undergoing three or four names changes over the work) I’m writing this with a wretched cold I caught on Christmas Eve day, the same day I finished the work by one of the most famous chronic invalids in literature, Marcel Proust. Over a million words into this set of books you get the feeling that anything you can say will seem ridiculously insufficient in the face of Proust's conception with its multiple intertwined themes, dozens of characters major and minor (some of the most important of whom undergoing three or four names changes over the work) the recurring motifs such as the famous one of involuntary memory that bookends all the rest, and it's too much for a reviewer to hope for an original insight.
I enjoyed reading those elements in this last volume which the author might have covered differently if it had come out during his lifetime with all the risks they would have entailed. The author’s voice is aloof and satiric, wistful at times when recalling past experiences both happy and unpleasant. There's a section devoted to life during wartime, a party where past acquaintances are transformed by the years to the point of unrecognizability, and a surreal scene of homosexual bondage. This sadism scene recaptured the horror of the World War so close to Paris in microcosm. Ghosts of the Narrator's grandmother, of his friend Saint-Loup, of Charles Swann whose obsessive love dominated much of the first volume, and of Albertine to whom the Narrator clung to the point of madness but has long ceased caring about haunt the pages as much as the shells of those who still lived.
I was trying to think of any other novelist who has depicted time ravaging characters we have grown to know and care about quite the way Proust has here. Besides the loss of beauty, the physical infirmities, there had been humiliating declines in status along with challenges to the exclusivity of the noble class from the bourgeoisie. What was cherished by the preceding generation fades from memory of the one that follows unless an artist can devote a lifetime to capturing them. This is as explicit a moment of identification between the Narrator of the story with Proust himself as we have been given. ...more

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Oct 08, 2012 Kekuni Minton rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Proust brings it all together in the last book. how "time" is regained outside of time. How age changes all perspectives, and the journey of the artist to regain time by rededicating to a deeper sense of truth inside himself, outside of habit, outside of social norms, outside of even the rituals of friendship and love--which may often form a kind of group deception that the artist must claw his way through to the sensation of his own shifting "reality".

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Oct 18, 2013 Fredrik rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, proust

P26 :: "…reading teaches us to place a higher value on life, a value which we did not know how to appreciate, and the true extent of which we come to realize only through the book."

P47 :: "…pretension is very close to stupidity and that simplicity has a less visible but still gratifying aspect." ...more

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