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Swann's Way
Swann's Way
Swann's Way
Audiobook17 hours

Swann's Way

Written by Marcel Proust

Narrated by Simon Vance

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

4.5/5

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About this audiobook

Swann's Way is the first novel of Marcel Proust's seven-volume magnum opus In Search of Lost Time. Following the narrator's opening ruminations about the nature of sleep is one of twentieth-century literature's most famous scenes: the eating of the madeleine soaked in a "decoction of lime-flowers," the associative act from which the remainder of the narrative unfurls. After elaborate reminiscences about his childhood with relatives in rural Combray and in urban Paris, Proust's narrator recalls a story regarding Charles Swann, a major figure in his Combray childhood, and his escapades in nineteenth-century privileged Parisian society, revolving around his obsessive love for young socialite Odette de Crecy.

Filled with searing, insightful, and humorous criticisms of French society, this novel showcases Proust's innovative prose style. With narration that alternates between first and third person, Swann's Way unconventionally introduces Proust's recurring themes of memory, love, art, and the human experience-and for nearly a century, audiences have deliciously savored each moment.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 29, 2010
ISBN9781400186150
Author

Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust was born in Paris in 1871. His family belonged to the wealthy upper middle class, and Proust began frequenting aristocratic salons at a young age. Leading the life of a society dilettante, he met numerous artists and writers. He wrote articles, poems, and short stories (collected as Les Plaisirs et les Jours), as well as pastiches and essays (collected as Pastiches et Mélanges) and translated John Ruskin’s Bible of Amiens. He then went on to write novels. He died in 1922.

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Reviews for Swann's Way

Rating: 4.417721518987341 out of 5 stars
4.5/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Second time around, I have no idea why I was so focused on Proust's weird bougieness the first time. He's lovely, and this book is lovely, and I found it the most comforting thing I could imagine.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The only way I can truly describe this book is by analogy. You know when you have a really sore spot on your gum, and it hurts, and you are compelled to press on it, which doesn't relieve the pain but changes the sensation to something strangely enjoyable (or at least less painful), then you remove the pressure and the pain returns? That is reading this book. It has been lauded as a masterpiece, so I tried to get it, but all I came away with was a very original, sometimes sublimely written, self-indulgent piece of inner vision. It makes sense to me it was written by a guy in a room lined by cork. Short on story and action, long on self-consciousness. The breathtaking prose is oddly compelling, but I often felt cheated. Unlike others, I will not be reading the other volumes. I saw the beautiful movie, "Time Regained", and that satisfied my need to find out what happens/doesn't happen in the opus, but I'm not so masochistic that I'll actually read page after page of description of a leaf. I'll just accept my philistine status when it comes to Proust.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    OMG. Sure, 'omg' is a very modern slang word, but it applies to this novel. Swann is a melodramatic dude who falls in love with a rather modern woman named Odette. Swann pursues her for years, being odiously possessive, dishonest, and manipulative with her all along, swearing he loves her and that his love is why he acts the way he does about her. He does end up married to her, but by the end of the account of his years 'courting' her, I was a bit surprised that she would accept him. For all the narrator's insistence that Odette was not intelligent, she seemed smart enough to see through Swann and find someone more trustworthy to marry. The narrator seems bipolar, throughout the book, though I was a bit confused as to who the narrator is from one section to the next. In the last chapter Swann is old, married to Odette, and has a daughter named Gilberte, who the narrator falls in love with, and the narrator in this section is a boy still living with his parents, so he can't be the same narrator as the one telling about Swann's romantic obsession. I was not really impressed with Proust's storytelling so far, with his narrators being so unsatisfactorily introduced, and so many pages devoted to drivel.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Delicious exposition on falling asleep. Author very econimcal with periods.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Eerste deel van 7. Heerlijke scenes (het wakker worden, de madeleine-ervaring, ....). Trage, spiraliserende zinnen. Ogenschijnlijk niet spectaculair, maar Proust blijft ook lang na de lectuur door je hoofd spoken.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I would complain to my husband about this book. "Nothing's happening! There's no plot! All there is are meandering sentences, paragraphs that last for pages, and beautiful words."Then I realized that I needed to read Proust not in my usual manner, but in the manner of poetry book, dwelling in the prose and letting it wash over me, finding the rhythm of his "remembrances" and simply taking it in. What Proust needs is time, quiet, and a mind that can attune itself to his love of nature and imagination.Even after the semblance of a story arose halfway through the novel I still needed to time to follow his lead on the path of a romance from the beginning to the bitter end. I fell in love with the last line of the second part - "To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!"This has turned out to be one of my favorite books.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A friend on LT recommended I read In Search of Lost Time, and after resisting for a while, I finally dove in. This is now my summer reading project. First, this is an intimidating book. It is volume one of six, and they are long volumes, with very long paragraphs and long sentences. (I tracked one sentence for two pages.) Second, it is, so far, well worth the read. Proust is doing something entirely different here. He is taking us inside his own mind, and to my way of thinking, he does this better than Joyce. Marcel, the narrator is reliving his life, and taking you with him, and he is not leaving a lot out. In one sense his story is everyone's story. We all have our minor issues as kids, fall in love with the girl next door, and think our world is immense. We all have infatuations, both romantic and non-romantic. HIs telling of Swann falling in love is both touching and hilarious. Proust pokes gentle jabs into the belly of the French aristocracy, while at the same time realizing that is the world he knows. Is there a theme here? I think "LOST" is essential. Marcel cannot really hold on to anything, or really enjoy anything, because he realizes it is merely a moment that cannot last. This is not for everyone...the plot is almost non-existant, and Marcel as a character is both highly interesting and higly irritating. (I was relieved we got to spend so much time with Swann in this volume.) But for reasons I don't understand, I keep reading. Perhaps perception is the content of reality.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Not gonna lie, this wasn't exactly the easiest book to get through. I started reading it because my beloved John Linnell said he had read the whole series, and he added that it took him fourteen years. I can kind of understand why.It was just *incredibly* dense, and required a lot of concentration. There were parts I liked a lot, particularly the third section, but a lot of the second (and longest) section just didn't really hold my attention. But overall I did enjoy it, and I am planning to read the others.One issue I had with this particular translation was the footnotes. I love footnotes because I'm a nerd like that, but I didn't really get very much information out of the ones here. They were almost all about references Proust was making to art, contemporary French culture, etc, and the footnotes would just say "oh this is a painting by this one guy" etc rather than explaining exactly how that painting etc related to the story. So that was frustrating.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I've been listening to this book on and off for quite a while. I've listened to some parts over again. It's beautifully written, with lyrical, lush depictions of people and places and the feelings of the narrator and other characters.

    I still have no idea how to describe this book. I totally, though, want to read or listen to the next two volumes.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Eerste deel van 7. Heerlijke scenes (het wakker worden, de madeleine-ervaring, ....). Trage, spiraliserende zinnen. Ogenschijnlijk niet spectaculair, maar Proust blijft ook lang na de lectuur door je hoofd spoken.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Proust describes everything beautifully...and I do mean everything. When he's describing something that you care about - books, say, or love, or music - it's pretty great to read. When it's something else - flowers, medieval painters, more fucking flowers - it gets a little boring. So next time you hear people arguing about Proust, and one person says he's one of the most gorgeous writers ever, and the other person says he's fucking boring...they're both right.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Having recently purchased a twelve volume set of Proust's Novel, I was anxious to make sure I was going to enjoy seeing it through. This worry soon seemed quite unnecessary upon finishing the first section of Swann's Way, sixty odd pages, when I looked at my watch and wondered where the lost time had gone, how it had fled so quickly. The first impression the reader will get of Proust, aside from his predilection to very long sentences, long descriptions about things which at first seem uninteresting, and his poetic sentimentality, is that he seems to be a bit of a “mummy's boy”. The opening of the book gives this impression, and the rest of the novel enlarges upon this to show that his strong emotional attachments form also with others, and become apparent too when he is narrating other characters feelings. However, a critical detachment between himself and his state of mind, despite not freeing him from it, allows him to depict things in a way the reader can appreciate without gagging, which may not have been possible had he been wholly carried away with it all. The leitmotif of longing, established by the pains the author goes through as a boy waiting for his mother's bedtime kiss, is not only repeated later as his bed-ridden aunt's expectant waiting for her favourite visitor to arrive, but also in Swann's startlement to unexpectedly find himself desperate to see his object of affection after he has missed his habitual meeting with her, and too in Proust's fretful waiting for his play mate to turn up in the afternoon near the end of the novel. To balance all this heart stabbing, though purely psychological, pain, are the moments of sublime joy which the characters enjoy. These not only stem from merely insignificant things, as the pains do, but also from the more refined aspects of European culture, such as a phrase in a certain piano sonata, a certain famous painting which resembles someone he knows, or a certain author, and come to be associated directly with his worldly loves; with the memories and images of the one becoming inextricably linked to the other. This association of ideas is another theme, most obviously seen in the earlier passage where he comes to a state of absolute bliss through the recurrence of one of his most precious childhood memories, brought on by a cup of tea with a certain type of cake dipped in it, something he had enjoyed years ago.To compare Proust with any other author is never going to give him his dues, but he writes so much of love, here, that it is difficult not to be reminded of Stendhal; Proust being almost a Stendhal Squared, minus the adventure story, and plus an array of assorted idiosyncrasies which would take too long too number. He is undoubtedly more decorative in his writings than the English or Italian novelist, more effeminate, and more sentimental, but this allows his high sensitivity to the varied and wide ranging beauties of the natural and artistic worlds to be felt and shared with his reader.The plot doesn't make this a page turner, like a Stendhal or a Dumas, and none of the characters do anything that exciting, so it won't appeal to some people for this reason. However, for the fan of literary fiction, this could quite well be the zenith. -Translation by C.K. Scott-Moncrieff
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    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, perhaps better translated as The Way By Swann's), the Scott Moncrieff-twice-updated-by-Kilmartin-and-Enright translation depicts the narrator's youth at Combray, his first crushes, and his elderly reminiscences of a world now gone by. Meanwhile, piecing together a tale that occurred before his youth, the narrator tells us of Charles Swann and his love for Odette de Crecy, in the fractured world of Paris society. It's a portrait filled with endearing and frustrating characters, precise observations about all kinds of humanity, always painful or poignant, hilarious or sly, erudite and insightful. I am eager to read the second volume, and excited for the journey I will take with Proust for the rest of my life.

    Oh, marvellous independence of the human gaze, tied to the human face by a cord so loose, so long, so elastic that it can stray alone as far as it may choose!

    Of course, it's no surprise that most people of my generation would never dream of reading these books, and many who start won't finish. Proust (or, perhaps, his narrator) is absorbed by description and detail. Pick any 20 pages and it's unlikely that much will happen - although I believe that's partly because this is the opening book in the series, and there is still much setup. Yet, for me, I've rarely been so delighted by a novel in all my life. Even when little plot moves (for instance, the sequence in which Swann grows increasingly jealous of Odette takes a good 100 pages), there is so much dense character development, growth of the novel's world, and immense understanding of human nature. After all, unlike what today's soap operas would tell us - or, indeed, what the 19th century romances before Proust would either - the story of love and human connection is not told in big revelations. It is told in those tiny moments, those repetitions, those instances. And they are so ably captured here. I've been reading an intelligent (if tragically brief) blog as I go, "182 Days of Proust", and have thus learned that many of the characters and places here will go on to develop later in the seven-volume sequence. This was something that, of course, Proust's contemporaries could not have known, which explains why some found the novel meandering. Everything has a place in this great study of memory; it's just a case of waiting for when.

    "I love Odette with all my heart, but to construct aesthetic theories for her benefit, you'd really have to be quite an imbecile."

    The country idylls at Combray present comedies of manners, in which the narrator gradually develops his psyche while a part of larger situations, some of which he cannot comprehend, even though he is often frustratingly aware that there is something he cannot comprehend. This contrasts with the middle-class character portraits of the Verdurin couple and their house parties, and the somewhat off-putting, satirised lives of the aristocracy. At this point, as a reader, I'm not yet sure how Proust felt about the class system, or where this great story is heading, but I'm quite excited for the experience. Admittedly, many of the references and social mores are now challenging for someone of my age to understand. As with any book focused on relations between people, there are parts that will always ring true, and parts that fade quickly as eras change. Yet, a little background reading and open-mindedness will cure you of that problem. Proust's lengthy sentences - and I mean lengthy, these babies can go on for a page when he feels like it - are also fascinating to us, and not always in a good way. For me, I adore the untangling of his wit. They are as luxurious as any older person's memories can be. The actor Neville Jason, who recently recorded 153 hours of the unabridged complete "In Search of Lost Time" for Naxos, said that these sentences are like music: one must find the way to phrase them, the way to link up each scattered segment. When one does, joy awaits.

    I asked nothing more from life in such moments than that it should consist always of a series of joyous afternoons.

    All of which is to say, starting "In Search of Lost Time" is a big commitment. Like any great work of art from a previous generation, it requires some willingness on the part of the reader to be patient, to absorb themselves in the world. Yet it will reward in spades, and is often not as hard as one might think. So many of the social jests still ring true, and certainly all of the giddiness and confusion of the young narrator - and the complexities of Odette and Swann's relationship - haunt me so. Perhaps I will find the later novels harder, as I have not yet lived through some of the experiences, but when it comes to young love and development of artistic and social temperament, it's delightful (or, occasionally, sorrowful) to feel one's own past experiences so represented in print. Particularly when the book's entire discussion is on what we have lost, and whether or not we can ever regain it.

    What we suppose to be our love our our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral...

    (A note on translations - the new Viking editions, each by a different translator, are apparently quite good in bringing a more modern taste to the works. For me, I'm very happy thus far with the current Modern Library/Vintage edition. The original English translation, by Charles Scott Moncrieff, has been regarded as a classic for more than 90 years. However, it had notable Victorian traces that obscured some of the greatness of Proust, and has now been updated twice, first by Terence Kilmartin in the 1980s, and more recently by DJ Enright. One day, I will certainly read the Vikings, however I am currently enjoying the connection to the past. Scott Moncrieff lived in Proust's era; to have his works complete with expert emendations seems fitting, particularly for someone like myself interested just as much in the academic conversation around the books which, for many years in the Western world, used Scott Moncrieff as the foundation stone.)

    A.E. Housman said, "This is the land of lost content". Over the course of this first volume, the narrator - and, as I'm sure will be confirmed once I read my first Proust biography - the author himself desperately attempts to return to this land, taking us all with him, reminding us all of how much we have lost with each passing year. The question becomes whether we let ourselves drift back, desperately, to that land, or whether we attempt to fashion a life out of what remains. I trust Marcel Proust to take me further on this journey, aided by the skilful English translators, and I have no doubt that the "Search" will prove to be the masterpiece of the Western canon that as so many great minds before me have discovered.

    The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    After I first read Remembrance of Things Past twelve years ago, I liked to tell people that everything I had ever known or experienced or felt was like a tiny mote of dust in the vast universe of Proust's imagination. For a long time, any new fact or idea would prompt me to say, "That's just like in Proust, when..."

    Rereading it now, I don't love Swann's Way the way I did once. At some point, I grew up and out and in a different direction. I'm not so dazzled by the glamour, I'm more disturbed by the ugliness. But there was a time when Proust swallowed me whole, and I still recognize myself in the pages. The mark it left on me was that deep.

    But what is Swann's Way? A coming of age story, maybe. It starts when our narrator is a young boy trying to make sense of the adult world. He's observant, sickly, pained by his own powerlessness. His transition into adulthood is interrupted by a synopsis or overture, a foreshadowing of things to come, when the book shifts away from him to the story of Charles Swann's obsessive love for a courtesan, Odette de Crecy.

    But like all great books, the story is just the crust for the pie, the plate for the steak. Swann's Way is a book of inversions and perversions. It's a book where every flower and tree is anthropomorphized; every petal is made of silk, every garden a ballroom ("Lilac time was nearly over; a few, still, poured forth in tall mauve chandeliers the delicate bubbles of their flowers"). The built world is so drenched in emotion that every building, chair, and lamp comes alive, as seasonal and mutable as the flowers and trees. The natural and artificial collapse.

    Of course, Remembrance of Things Past is a book about memory. Everybody knows that. But it's not just a book where the narrator, as an adult, dips a bit of spongy madeleine cookie into a cup of tea and the taste recalls memories of his youth with a startling, impossible clarity. That does happen, and Swann's Way is explicitly about memory in a lot of ways. But it's a text conjured from memory, every character a "transparent envelope" stuffed with memories, every tree alive, the whole world palpably made of the same stuff, cut from the cloth of the narrator's imagination.

    There is no objectivity, ever. Yet the characters suffer when they fail to recognize their own subjectivity. Swann cannot see that his great love for Odette is, for her, a burdensome business arrangement. While Odette, venal, stupid, and coarse as she is, always has a canny sense of what drives other people, and how to get what she wants from them.

    It's not a coincidence that a prostitute, for all her faults, sees so clearly. There's an economy, a commerce, of esteem here -- the Swann family's bourgeois respectability has great value in Combray, none in Paris. The Verdurins' clannishness invalidates other forms of social currency, making Swann's most valuable assets -- his aristocratic friends and good taste -- worthless. And Odette, who might otherwise covet the introductions that Swann can make for her, loses interest in all the duchesses and princesses in France when she loses interest in Swann.

    I spent a lot of time, as I read, despising the characters and cherishing Proust's psychological insight. The narrator's feeble, anxious need for his mother's kiss is creepy. Swann's possessiveness, which evolves into outright abuse, is horrifying. Odette's shamelessness is awful. Swann's Way is full of brief, vicious character sketches and there aren't many characters to like, at the end of the day.

    But even if they can't be liked, they can be understood -- and Proust traces every action, every repellant personality trait, to its source. He shows us how decisions are made, how people can be blind to their own worst faults, how hard it is to see ourselves as others see us, how self-destructive behaviors persist even after we've recognized the harm they do.

    It's astonishing that in a book that overflows with gorgeous, glittering imagery, the real subject matter is so base. Our flaws, our failures, our weaknesses. Proust is sympathetic and cruel by turns -- but always thorough. I don't see how anyone could read this book and not come out of it understanding themselves, or other people, a little better.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Even better than you've been told. Except, it can be pretty wearing to start. I recommend reading the beginning up to the madeleine section (less than 20 pages), then skipping to chapter 2, which is far more engaging. You can always go back once you've fallen in love with it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This isn’t a review so much as response. With Proust, anything deeper is beyond me. And even just a description is tough in the sense that his writing creates its own atmosphere that I can’t possible capture.Swann’s Way is divided into two very different parts (there’s a short third section too: ‘Place Names – The Name’). The first part is Proust’s fictional ‘Combray’, a small village in a rural area with a very old church and a lot of obscure history. It took a little patience to get into this and a lot of mental prep of getting myself into something like the right mood, but then Proust hits Combray – the village – and something happened. Some kind of awe broke out, the pages got blurry and a bright light shined across my emotional spectrum and…I no longer have a clear idea what Proust actually said, but it did things to me that, while desired, are never actually done by books. It was wonderful experience in everything that the word ‘wonderful’ in reading should mean.Then comes the second section, ‘Swann in Love’ and a jarring change comes. Proust still has his way of writing sentences so complicated you need to keep little places reserved in your mind for all ten hanging fragments he hasn’t quite gotten back to yet, which slows you down and also quite firmly instills his point – if you’re still able to follow. But it’s just words and thoughts and ideas and observations and nothing particularly special.What changed? Well, ‘Combray’ was in 1st person, and ‘Swann in Love’ is in 3rd person, so we lose the intimacy. But, it’s not just that and it’s also not something I completely understand, or know how to put into words. Proust, as I’m learning, excelled at place and at making a place intimate - at integrating the whole thing - its look, feel, taste, colors, character, history, mysteries and so on. He descriptions feel exacting sort of like a mythical naturalist’s description of a newly discovered animal. It formal, precise and somehow enthralling or at least it can be. He does the same kind of thing with people, as observed, and most remarkably, with his own semi-fictional emotions. But, it’s in his description of place, in the nature of how he goes about it, that, I think, most clearly shows his strengths. These descriptions come directly from his autobiographical narrator’s self and they are all sensual descriptions, and very personalized.When he tries to do the same thing in 3rd person, in his study of Swann, two things happen. He tends towards pronouncements which are open to criticism (at least to mine). Proust ideas can be great, but not always. But, more importantly, people are more complicated and they change – or at least their emotional states change in a connected swirling time-dependent kind of chain. Proust, by his writing nature, tries to capture every subtle aspect in the state of mind, and how it changes and how the nature of the changes affects this whole thing. In a way it actually works, but not in the same way or with anywhere near the same magic. Quite frankly, Swann drags, and, coming after Combray…But, still, Proust is special. I think what makes Proust particularly special is the mental state he puts you, the reader, in. You can’t get Proust idly. In order to read him and really follow, he demands a clear, careful and active mind. And then he rewards you. What a state of being?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Kicked off by the memories raised from a Madeleine dipped in a hot cup of tea Marcel re-lives his time as a boy in Combray where the family stayed to visit. How his memories of the walks they took and the time spent with M. Swann were a part of the earlier years. And how as a child he loved his mother and never wanted to be seperated from her and when he was planned how to get her to come and say good night to him without angering his father.But then Swann disappears from their life and rarely visits. And when he does he is never joined by his wife.....and then the story turns to tell the story of M Swann And Odette. The girl he meets at a weekly get together and falls in love with. As the stories of her reputation begin to filter down to him he still stays with her. And even when she get to the point of tiring of him he still, as much as he tries cannot break the habit of Odette.So much so at the end of the book you go back to Combray to see that the never seen Mme Swann is Odette and they have a daughter who Marcel falls in love with and the cycle of love from Marcel and being tolerated from Gilberte starts the cycle again.Definitely a book to take your time with and one to read if you really want to. Not one to pick up on a whim.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I have a love-hate relationship with this book, or more accurately, a 'occastionally like - often hate' relationship. The prose is lyrical with amazing word selection. Listening to this in audio felt like I was hearing poetry. Much of the story describes Swann falling in love with his mistress who has several affairs with other men. The feelings of jealousy and frustration were so incredibly written and described. But several things drove me absolutely crazy about this book. First, the structure. The sentences are long making it difficult to parse and follow a thought. I read along with this on my Nook and many sentences took more than a screen so that I had to flip back and forth just to capture the entire thought. Much of the story is stream of consciousness musings about memory and the past making it hard to completely grasp. But my biggest complaint is that the two major characters, Swann and the narrator Marcel (Proust as a young boy perhaps?) were over the top as far as expressing their emotions. Marcel, a young boy, is devastated when his mother does not kiss him good night and when he leaves Combray, he weeps over the fact that he won't see the beautiful hawthorns. Swann's angst over his cheating lover was genuine and well described but the emotions associated with it were way too intense. This is only the first book of seven in this very LONG series. I'll definitely wait before picking up the next one.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is the battered copy I struggled with in 1971. Proust or his narrator may have been unable to sleep waiting for his mother's kiss. I lay awake trying to unravel the long sentences and wanting to call for help.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A wonder of lyrical introspection; an enthralling guide to the labyrinths of the mind.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The opening book of In Search of Lost Time is Swann's Way. It in turn is divided into three sections, the first being Combray. We enter the world of the narrator as a young boy when he is trying to sleep while being interrupted by his thoughts. It is these thoughts, described as "reflections on what I had just read" that engage us on the first page of this first section of the first of many volumes. The young boy gradually returns to sleep only to find himself dreaming of the origins of woman from the rib of the first man. It may be that this is one way to view the beginnings of Proust's long tale as the origin of the story of one man's life from the imagination of our narrator as he remembers the events of his life as a young boy at the village of Combray in the house of his Aunt Leonie with his parents. Why is it that reading generates in the imagination of the young boy such strong reflections that they interrupt his sleep? One way to answer this is to look first at the mind from which the imagination emanates. It is a mind described thusly,"And wasn't my mind also like another crib in the depths of which I felt I remained ensconced . . . When I saw an external object, my awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, lining it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever directly touching its substance; it would volatize in some way before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought near a wet object never touches its moisture because it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation." (p 85)Marcel's mind (for Marcel is his name) is invigorated by his reading "from inside to outside, toward the discovery of the truth," reading that aroused his emotions as he experienced the dramatic events in the book. It is these emotions that bring with them an intensity that makes Marcel feel more alive than any other activity. He relates,"And once the novelist has put us in that state, in which, as in all purely internal states, every emotion is multiplied tenfold, in which his book will disturb us as might a dream but a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer, then see how he provokes us within one hour all possible happiness and all possible unhappiness just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them" (p 87)It is not only reading that defines young Marcel, but also his relationships with people around him, not only his mother and aunt, but others including the faithful servant Francoise, the wealthy Jewish neighbor Swann, also Legrandin and Bloch who are introduced to him at Combray. Bloch is interesting in part because he introduces Marcel to the writing of Bergotte. It is Bergotte who above all others entrances the young boy."In the first few days, like a melody with which one will become infatuated but which one cannot yet make out, what I was to love so much in his style was not apparent to me. I could no put down the novel of his that I was reading, but thought I was interested only in the subject, as during that first period of love when you go to meet a woman every day at some gathering, some entertainment, thinking you are drawn to it by its pleasures. Then I noticed the rare, almost archaic expressions he liked to use at certain moments, when a hidden wave of harmony, an inner prelude, would heighten his style; and it was also at theses moments that he would speak of the "vain dream of life," the "inexhaustible torrent of beautiful appearance," the "moving effigies that forever ennoble the venerable and charming facades of our cathedrals," that he expressed an entire philosophy, new to me, through marvelous images" (pp 95-96)Reading Bergotte yields a "joy" within Marcel that allowed him to experience "a deeper, vaster, more unified region" of himself. It is through such experiences of reading and the resulting flights of imagination that the reader is introduced to the book that to be read and understood must yield similar emotions for the reader. Yet it is not only reading that thrills Marcel in Proust's story but also, as can be seen from the description of Bergotte's novel, music and its even stronger impact on his imagination.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Not going to lie, this was a challenge to read and it took me 4 months. "A Love of Swann's" was the biggest chore as it was just energy draining to read about Swann's fanatical jealousy of Odette's imagined (or not) other lovers for two hundred pages. For a few weeks I only managed a page a day. The comparative lightness of the introductory "Combray" and the charm of the childhood crush in the concluding "Place-names: The Name" sections were a relief in comparison.TriviaAn observation from mid-read:I'm very keen on ASMR* these days, so re-reading the madeleine passage now, it seems very ASMRish to me: "I carried to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had let soften a piece of madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake-crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening in me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause. It had immediately made the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not in me, it was me." - pg. 49 in the Lydia Davis translation.Previously the only literature that has had any ASMR association is a passage from Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf: ""'K . . . R . . .' said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say “Kay Arr” close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper’s, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. A marvellous discovery indeed—that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life!"*Autonomic Sensory Meridian Response = a pleasurable tingling sensation in the head that radiates down the spine and sometimes further throughout the body. Very few people have this and the apocryphal story is that those who have it will never physically meet any other person that does have it (I can personally vouch for this). With the advent of the internet, experiencers have made connections esp. through cult videos on YouTube where ASMRtists speak softly and perform friction sounds which are the most likely to trigger the response. Painting videos by Bob Ross are also well known to trigger the response due to his gentle, pleasant manner of speaking.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Five stars. Review to come. This volume alone, of course, could inspire multiple volumes of reactions and analysis, but it would only be fair to add my meager offerings after I close Volume VII.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    "Swann's Way," the first book in Marcel Proust's epic "In Search of Lost Time" is definitely a challenging read. But I got so much out of it and enjoyed it so thoroughly, I really didn't mind.Plotwise, there are essentially two different stories here. Our faithful narrator famously dips a cake known as a madeliene into tea and is flooded with memories from his childhood. Branching off into a tangential story about a figure from the narrator's childhood, the book also tells the story of Swann and his love affair with the unworthy and promiscuous Odette. The book's prose is just astoundingly beautiful and filled with eye-opening ideas and philosophical points. This is definitely a book that I would get more out of reading it again.Looking forward to reading the remaining six volumes of this series as the year progresses.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    amazing writing...
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Sentimental, vivid, and intricate in its management of interior memory / external plot. Finally getting to Proust after all these years.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    More than a commentary on Swann’s jealousy or M. Charlus’s homosexuality or the frivolity of the Guermantes’ sorties, Marcel Proust’s monumental work In Search of Lost Time paints the unsuccessful reconstruction of a forgone world and a lost existence from fickle memories, which like morning mists would fade with the rising sun. The narrator Marcel, longing for a past that didn’t exist but must be created, sought to experience Bergson’s continuous time rather than the fragmented and still-framed instantaneous moments by attempting to blur the boundaries between Cambray and Paris, childhood and adolescence, and Swann and himself and integrate here and there, before and after, and him and me through memory fragments of previous objects, people and sensations. As in a neural network or a mind-map, the madeleine linked his aunt to his mother, who in turn was linked to Albertine through jealousy, which also connected Marcel with Saint Loop and Swann, who, as with his (Marcel’s) grandmother, linked his childhood and adolescence. And through recollection, Marcel would try to relive the buried years and resurrect his grandmother and Albertine.But even during the narrative, Marcel realized memory’s willfulness and the variation in hues, shapes, pitch and timbre between the actual object and its mental reconstruction. When he encountered an old friend, the facial features were so different from his recollection and reconstruction, for better or for worse pregnant with all the emotions, preoccupation, biases, that he could not match face with voice.Because recollected sensation can never equate with the actual experience and time, like a patient thief, steals memories a morsel at a time until one day the owner would realize he was ruined, Marcel ultimately would fail to recapture and assemble stolen sensations and decayed seconds and in the end, must create new moments, new sensations and ultimately a new biography, through the synergy between past experiences and creative imagination. From those deceased hours and decayed memories sprouted In Search of Lost Time, not only Proust’s novel but also that of the narrator. Whether we savor Marcel’s frailness, Swann’s infatuation, Charlus’s pompousness, Franscoise’s independent-mindedness, the sorties’ frivolousness or the social revelation of the Dreyfuss Affair, we can enjoy Proust’s classic without resorting to Marxist or Freudian or Feminist critique. And the sentences, like the serpentine Amazon, seemed to flow unceasingly into the distant horizon carrying with it the sparkling sunlight. Although ascending the novel’s three thousand pages appears precipitous, the effort will be well worth the while and, at the end of the adventure, the reader can rest on the crisp apex and savor time’s transience and memory’s playfulness as if they were alpine zephyrs.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    There are already many reviews of this book, and I don't want to repeat what has already been written quite well by others. What I would like to add is what a pleasure it is to read this particular translation of Swann's Way by Lydia Davis. Davis and Proust are an odd pair. He is best known for labyrinthine sentences that meander through time and space, while fusing similes and metaphors and myth. The description of the scent of a particular flower or the taste of a particular food could stretch for pages. One party scene is hundreds of pages long. Davis, on the other hand, is known for whole stories that are only a page long, sometimes only a few sentences. She would seem a poor choice to translate Proust, but the tension that arises from their very different writing styles makes for an excellent read. The text is lively and well-paced--I can't believe I'm writing this either, but it's true--once you allow yourself to sink into Proust's world. It is infinitely more readable than the Moncrieff translation.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Was this ever a slow, difficult read! Though I typically become very absorbed in novels (even lousy or trashy ones), I never managed to truly get into this. I love Lydia Davis's other work, so I don't think the problem is the translation.

    I'm generally a very fast reader, but this was impossible to take at anything but a glacial pace--the sentences are so long and ponderous that it's easy to lose the thread of meaning unless you focus intensely. The payoff was not always equal to the effort expended.

    I will say that there were many staggeringly beautiful descriptions, especially of flowers.

    On top of all that, at times I was frustrated and disappointed by both the narrator and Swann. I just wanted them to build a bridge and get over their issues.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Walter Benjamin, writing on Proust’s In Search of Lost Time series, mentions in passing that it is partly a work resulting from ‘the absorption of a mystic’.Proust is not a mystic, in my view, but a realist - a realist of a certain, unusual type. For Proust understands certain arcane facts about the functioning of our universe. He believes that the universe is too complex to be fully understood or mastered, but at the same time, by concentrating on what we can know, the ways of human-kind, and the animate and inanimate kingdoms*, we can delve in some degree of detail into the idiosyncracies and half-known truths of our world. It is a path related to the ancient wisdoms that is being followed here I believe, followed implicitly in all but name.As such, Proust contributes a certain fecundity to the undergrowth at the far limits of our understanding. In this he joins certain other authors and thinkers, amongst these ranks I include Balzac, Burns (1), Tolstoy (2), Kafka (3), Camus (4), Atget and Schwitters.Ultimately, these (amongst others who share the same implicit understanding) have in common the view that everything is subjective, a projection by each individual of the world, which can neither be proven nor disproven by any outside, objective agency. The default position, once one understands that one cannot master the world, nor share a common platform with others to achieve such mastery, is to dig deeper into the richness, the complexity, the contradictions of the world. It is like looking at a shattered mirror, with only a few shards of reflective glass left intact, attempting to reconstruct the reflection - an ultimately futile task - but being distracted by the colours, textures and patterns which you can see in the shards, and drawing solace and a certain richness of understanding from this part-world.The best passage to illustrate P’s view, that meaning can be attached to all things, and that this allows a rich, idiosyncratic understanding of the world around us, if we do but look, is not the famous madeleines, but a short extract on the beginning of the route when taking the Guermantes way. When taking this route the family would exit through the garden and into the Rue des Perchamps, “…narrow and bent at a sharp angle, dotted with clumps of grass among which two or three wasps would spend the day botanising, a street as quaint as its name, from which, I felt, its odd characteristics and cantankerous personality derived…” The street had long since been demolished (echoes here of Atget’s photographs of condemned Parisian buildings with the demolishers already evident working on the surrounding buildings), and Proust rebuilds the street through memory, preserving its existence, through the remembered image - “…perhaps the last surviving in the world today, and soon to follow the rest into oblivion…” This illustrates ‘lesser’ animates, wasps, equally participating in everyday existence, and the inanimate, the street itself, deriving a personality from its name and individual, slightly eccentric shape. Furthermore, the whole excerpt, an evocation of time and place, relates to a time long gone, and furthermore, of things that no longer exist in place (although they do in time, at least as long as someone is there to remember them. Although what happens to them once that person dies?)Ultimately, this view of the world equates all 'things' as having equal importance, but infinite depth. This is what makes life worth living, an infinite web of relationships, meanings and obscure connections and reasons that cannot be explained, just understood for what they are.Notes:* We know that P. considered the inanimate world, from some early writings on the artist Chardin. Proust noted in this context how the artist was able to show “…the hidden life of the inanimate…”(1) I remember the phrase used in a review of at least 20 years ago, of Burns poem ‘To a mouse’, that stated that he understood ‘the inherent dignity of all living things’. Proust goes one step further in embracing the inanimate into this hierarchy of belief.(2) Isaiah Berlin notes that Tolstoy believed in observable facts rather than the abstract or supernatural: "History, only history, only the sum of the concrete events in time and space...this alone contained the truth...", but at the same time this meshed with the traditional peasant view that although events were too complex to predict, certain protocols and obscure methodologies needed to be heeded in order to receive good fortune.(3) Walter Benjamin argues that Kafka followed ancient wisdoms, articulating in his writing "... the rumour about the true things (a sort of theological whispered intelligence dealing with matters discredited and obsolete)."(4) Camus, speaking of the phenomenologists: they " reinstate the world in its diversity and deny the transcendent power of the reason. The spiritual universe becomes incalculably enriched through them. The rose petal, the milestone, or the human hand are as important as love, desire, or the laws of gravity. Thinking ceases to be unifying or making a semblance familiar in the guise of a major principle. Thinking is learning all over again to see, to be attentive, to focus consciousness; it is turning every idea and every image, in the manner of Proust, into a privileged moment."