Swann's Way

Okay, I only read the first book. It smells good.

Brilliant reading of vol 1 of proust' autobiography- this one his early years and his theory on the workings of memory. Very easy to listen to. Very memorable

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.

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.

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?

Verbal masturbation. Boring. Not a fun read. I don’t know what else to say.

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.

The theme of remembering: the way a cake tastes when dipped in tea, an involuntary memory when least expected. Like that first kiss, we spend our lifetimes trying to recreate all of the sensations of that fist time. It is impossible to do. Proust has a sensory understanding of the world at large and our place in it. Memory of certain foods or music or places have sentimental value because their taste, sound or sight are evocative of childhood's sweet innocence. Most of Swann's Way takes place in the country home of Combray where Charles Swann is a guest of the unnamed narrator's parents. Swann's way is one of extreme correctness and high society.Dialogue is interesting and accurate. First talking about Mme. Sazerat's dog and then jumping to Francoise's aspragus.

“How paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory.”

Published in 1913, Swann’s Way is the first installment of Marcel Proust’s seven-volume In Search of Lost Time. It is a book that is oriented toward memory and finding oneself in many different ways. It begins in Combray, at the childhood home of the unnamed narrator. We learn about his immediate family members, his Aunt Léonie, the family servant (Françoise), and a family friend, Charles Swann.

One of the primary set pieces of the novel is the description of Swann’s romantic obsession with Odette de Crécy. The narrator obviously admires Swann and relates the story Swann’s misdirected love for Odette. The narrator has been told of these events, since they occurred before he was born. The content, while rather tame through modern eyes, is certainly colorful (and fairly controversial) for the time period.

The writing is ornate. Everything is described in minute detail. It is filled with poetic language. It comments on art and literary expression. I very much enjoyed the author’s use of the sense of smell to transport himself to the past, which he uses as a launching pad for self-reflection. The writing style has a philosophical flavor.

“I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day.”

This is a book to be read slowly. I have to confess that the writing style, while beautiful and of great literary merit, gets wearying after a while. The story wanders down rabbit trails, only loosely connected to what I thought was the storyline. So, it is a book that requires patience and the willingness to go with the flow. Passages melt together in a stream of consciousness, conveying a dreamlike quality. I enjoyed it and am glad I read this literary classic, but I will not be picking up the rest of the volumes any time soon.

Two thoughts about reading this book. One is that I constantly thought about James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and how it's a 600 page stream of consciousness novel. And Two, reading this book while your sick versus reading this book while your not sick gives you a different feel.

This is a great book overall though. It's not one of my favorites, but like Ulysses, it's an experience for literary readers. However, just know what your getting yourself in too before you decided to pick this one up. This is over 600 pages and there are very few stopping points. You are basically reading a nameless Narrator talking to himself about other people (stuff that I usually love to read).

There are some parts that stood out to me, other parts that seemed to drag, and to be honest I don't think I fully understood what I read. Not that it's a bad thing, just might be translation or the fact it's French and that culture is hard for me to grasp sometimes.

I should note there are 6 volumes of this series and they are all over 600 pages. The chances of me reading the next one this year is very slim. I would love to get/read the rest of In Search of Lost Time. Like I said these books are an experience.

All at once both spectacular and a slog which I suppose would make perfect sense to Proust. A sensuous florid exploration of memory, love, jealousy, desire, melancholy and the gyrations of the mind. There were descriptions of scenes that almost took your breath away, they were so novel and correct.

Okay, you read Proust's first paragraphs and may have thought "Well, Proust isn't so difficult at all...."Then, up pops "metempychosis" to send many of us to a dictionary where we still may be puzzled,notably contrasting it with reincarnation. (Poe would hav loved this!)Next, one may be lulled back in until there's a "kaleidoscope of darkness...."Maybe back to read those first two pages again since light is usually a kaleidoscope factor.

"To think that I've wasted years of my life, that I've longed to die, that I've experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn't appeal to me, who wasn't even my type." “The comfort of reclusion, the poetry of hibernation” I have now read Proust. That would earn a quizzical, somewhat bemused look from my non-reading colleagues but it does hold a certain cache in literary circles. This is the first volume in his acclaimed In Search of Lost Time series. It is a novel about childhood, memory, and love, both genuine and imagined. It is also quite a challenge to get through despite the beautiful writing. The interminable mid-section dealing with Swann and Odette is particularly eye-glazing but I am glad I stuck with it. It did conclude in a satisfying way. If you have a desire to read this, after my somewhat lukewarm endorsement, please read the Lydia Davis translation. It was excellent and probably one of the main reasons I finished it.

Marcel Proust’s multi-volume Remembrance of Things Past is almost a long-running joke on books one has heard of that are deemed masterpieces, but seldom if ever read. After tackling Swann’s Way, I can appreciate the sentiment because while Proust’s writing is truly amazing, he does go on and on and writes what must be some of the longest sentences known to man.The book starts with the author remembering the trips he took with his family as a child to visit an aunt in Combray in northwestern France. There we get his charming recollections of his family and the haute bourgeoise society of 19th Century France. We are also introduced to Charles Swann, a wealthy friend of the family and a bon vivant in Paris.Proust then travels back to Swann’s youth in that same provincial French town and the obsessive love he has for the courtesan Odette which, in turn foretells the author’s own obsessive relationships in the future. And by the time you’re done with all that, you just want to go, “Whew! I’m done.”

If I were to write a memoir, I can imagine I too might try to focus on a single memory and then find the tangents from that and a depth of reflection upon it that so weighs down what was meant to be this one quick recollection, twenty pages later I would need to drop the topic for the sake of moving on. For Proust it is not accidental. His narrator's memories are also thought experiments, like his observations on how an object chanced upon can stir something to mind from long ago, or how reflecting on one memory leads to a completely unrelated thought about something else that may be far removed in time and place from the first but is still ultimately part of the same story. "Don't dwell on the past" is a common saying, and when Proust becomes lost in the semblance of digression then it feels like he is illustrating the dangers, but he is also finding and sharing the rewards. He speaks of the power of essence invested in places we were once attached to, such that when contrasted with even the most spectacular scenery the sight of a single run-down building carries more emotional weight. I'm less impressed by the second portion that steps out of the narrator's life into that of Mr. Swann and his romance with Odette de Crecy. Neither of them is much of a prize. Odette is happy to be a "kept woman" without forming much attachment to her keeper. Swann's investing her with far more qualities than she actually possesses - a common error in love - isn't complemented by much respect. Apparently it is fine for him to amuse himself with other women, but Odette must remain exclusive to him. Proust has a lot to say in his close analysis of romance - its triggers, its blindness, its follies, its wonders. There's some nice observations, but its subjects cost the exercise much of its charm. There's a concluding observation that when a new fact is discovered which puts a different spin on what was fondly recalled, the angry response is triggered at least in part by the damage that the pleasant memory has suffered.This first volume closes with a look at place names, what they suggest to us and how we attach preconceptions, creating hyperreal images that reality can't measure up to but forever remain as tags on those names in our minds. His final observation is one of the most poignant, about the way that everything changes and that a memory becomes about more than just an event. It is also the setting, the fashion of the time, the surrounding people, a combination of all of these things that is forever impossible now to reproduce. Yes, Proust says it better.

What can I say - exquisite prose... Lyrical, often anguished and oh, so beautiful.   The first volume of Proust's 7 part novel. Once you get used to the unusually long sentences (which in my experience I encountered mainly while reading Jose Saramago), you get the full appreciation of it.  And while some passages I had to read twice - due to the length of the sentence that covered half a page - it was more than worth it.  The intensity of feeling (be it description of nature or music or private emotion) can be compared only to Dostoyevsky. Part One is childhood/adolescence memoir -  unforgettable memories of French countryside, intense nostalgia for those days, mixed with a lot of agony felt by an exceptionally sensitive child, precocious and emotionally tuned into everything around him; his reading, his walks, his anguished attachment to his mother; his penetrating perception of the characters surrounding him (his family, the servants, members of the little provincial community, guests of the house - one of them is M. Swann, a prominent character, who is the protagonist in the second part of the book ). Part Two is Swann's story; his love (or rather his strong infatuation bordering on obsession) and all that comes along with it, all the destructive qualities of such love.  It was like watching a miracle transformation - transition from his indifference and her eagerness into his mad infatuation ("...the dawn of one of her glances, the evolution of her smiles, the emission of the intonation of her voice...") and her growing indifference; his infatuation so torturous, that "he would have liked to live on until the time came when he no longer loved her..." (Again Dostoyevsky comes to mind...) And then, the outcome - that might not have been suspected...  Part Three - the adolescent love of the author... Description of the Bois de Boulogne - where he would love to steer his caretaker Francoise to take him on the despondent days when there was no chance of his meeting the object of his emerging love Gilberte, Swann's daughter, in his usual playground ("we no longer love anyone else when we are in love" - he muses...);  his dreams of visiting beautiful far away places - only to be thwarted by his fragile health.And throughout - these marvelous ruminations of his... Whatever he describes, he never glazes over it - he goes deep into each detail, spurred by his uncanny imagination - be it a flower, a street, a person or a piece of music.  He says that his "moral duty imposed on me by the impressions I received from form, fragrance or color was so arduous - to try to perceive what was concealed behind them..." And he did - in a most elegant, all encompassing, distinctive way.   He explains that  "of all the feelings it awakened in me, nature seemed to me the thing most opposite to the mechanical productions of men. The less it bore their imprint the more room it offered in which my heart could expand".I've been looking forward to the time to start on this journey - Proust. And now that I've finished the first volume - I have to say: it was so worth it. Sentimental - yes, melancholy - yes. But in the best possible meanings of those words and more. Need some time before I go on, onto the rest of the volumes. Works like Proust's cannot be rushed...

Wouldn't you love to walk the Mesiglisse Way, see and smell the blooming hawthornes in Swann's alley, watch the street scene in Combray with Aunt Leonie, eat a meal prepared by Francoise, and meet Swann, poor Swann with his tragic obsession with Odette. "To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love I have ever known has been a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style." And to experience young Marcel's first love, an obsession almost parallel to Swann's, his yearning for Swann's daughter Gilberte.I liked this much more the second time around. There's everything to love about the lush language of course, but I made a lot more connections on this reading, and picked up on many details I don't remember, or maybe didn't grasp the first time I read it.Highly recommended.5 stars

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.

I've begun my journey to read all of In Remembrance of Things Past and I have to say it's off to a good start. This first volume begins with the narrator as a child visiting Combray, then shifts to Charles Swann's obsession with Odette de Crecy, and then ends with a short section where the narrator meets and begins his own obsession with Gilberte, Swann and Odette's daughter. This isn't a real review, because this is obviously only part of the whole. As such, it sets up many themes which I'm looking forward to seeing developed. Memory is important, both how it is triggered by the senses, especially smell and taste, and how it is hard to truly recreate a moment. Love, which I gather is going to be more about obsession, begins immediately, with the narrator obsessed as a small child with receiving a kiss from his mother each night. Swann's obsession and jealousy of Odette, a woman he barely knows, is already continued in the narrator's obsession about Gilberte. One thing that bothered me, though I think it was intentional to make a point, was how little Odette is developed. She doesn't have much personality of her own, and just seems to be a reflection of Swann's obsession. There's lots more - the set up between the aristocratic Guermantes vs. the Verdurins, the various discussions of the arts, etc. Suffice to say I'm enjoying the dreamy, reflective writing style and looking forward to starting the next volume in a month or so.

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.

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.

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.

I read Proust's masterpiece back in 1985. What did I know of life then? Nothing!Having recently read a Smithsonian editorial that made fun of the novels, and remembering all too well one particular hilariously snippy Monty Python sketch (the Summarize Proust Competition), I too wanted to be able to rub elbows with the elite intellectuals who mocked Proust, so I picked up the first of three volumes (the weighty Moncrieff editions because I have no french whatsoever) and got started. The first few pages were tough going, but soon I became mesmerized, then I fell in love, and by the end of the summer I was tucking flowers into the plackets of my blouses and wearing bows in my hair.Oh you kids. “Swann's Way” is the swiftest, plottiest volume in the monster, with “Un Amour de Swann” a little novel in itself, with a beginning, middle, end, and all that sort of thing. Originally drafted in a mere three volumes, the Recherche grew as Proust re-Proustified the later volumes while waiting for publication; many readers have wished that that long mini-book could be recovered. The pace picks up again in the last volume, which the author's death prevented him from reworking it, so that a dinner party—one of the greatest scenes in all literature, by the way—takes only a few hundred pages to describe, what with the jolts of consciousness with which Proust bracketed it, while the first half of the volume is impossibly brilliant about the first World War without ever leaving Paris. It's best to have time for such idleness, best to be so besotted with the possibilities of literature that you love rather than loathe the lengthiness; which is to say that you need to encounter Proust at the right time of your life and possibly even the right place, so that Proust's times and places become yours. I hope that luck will be yours; without it, the task may prove impossible. If you find yourself fatally at a loss to know what and why you're reading, check out Samuel Beckett's slim monograph; for all its showy intellectuality—it's a youthful work—it's still the best compass for getting across that ocean.Read it twice in English - took me a year the first time and six years the second. I re-read it once again in English this time around, which is a whole new level of pleasure and I hope will take me many more years to come. After all I'm more mature and also wiser...I really recommend the Proust Screenplay by Harold Pinter, which accomplishes the amazing feat of boiling the whole thing down into a 90-minute screenplay without losing any of the flavour. When I felt lost at the beginning of my first reading, Pinter's work revealed the whole structure to me and enabled me to carry on.So far, I've found reading Proust a strangely claustrophobic experience. I got the overwhelming impression of a man who observes, dissects and minutely describes life, but perhaps forgets to live it?As a reader, I feel the novel takes me over. There is no room for separate interpretation or thought. The author leaves no margin for error. It's a bit like the difference between watching butterflies fluttering in a meadow and having them pinned and labelled, dead, on a board for inspection. Some books just have that effect on me. The great one, that is.

I'm not sure what to make of this. At one level, nothing much happens - the first 20 odd pages are about him struggling to go to sleep and how is mind wanders when it does. It wanders back to his childhood and his relationship with his mother and father. this then moves on to where he spent childhood holidays, and the village. It introduces Swann, who is then the topic of the second section, which retells a love affair in his life. The third section is back with the narrator, and feels to be later than the first section. In the book not a lot actually happens. It does, however, do not a lot it in very languid and descriptive prose. It almost seduces you.

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.

Proust's lush descriptions and long sentences were not my predilection but I found many of his ideas thought-provoking. Overall the characters and plot were interesting enough that I will continue to the next book in the series.

I read the first part, Combray, which was reasonably enjoyable. But then the part about Swanns love became more and more annoying and I gave up, restarting at the last part which unfortunately continued with the endless philosophies about love, this time as experienced by the young author. Reading the afterword in the Dutch translation tells you more or less what you may learn from the novel, but then in a few pages only! If you love the authors style, you may enjoy entire 500 pages. For me, the authors style doesn't really add to the content of the story. I prefer Flaubert.

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.

It's probably a rather banal thing to say, but what I really noticed when I picked up the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu again after a long Proust-free period was that I'd completely forgotten how good he is at getting his complicated ideas about art, society, nature and mind across. The story might be frustratingly slow in getting anywhere, but on just about every page there was a phrase that seemed exactly to capture something I could relate to my own experience and give it an extra dimension. One part of you wants to tell the narrator not to fret and reassure him that his mother is going to come up to say good night to him after all in about 500 pages from now, but at the same time you're surfing the ideas as they roll towards you with a reassuringly predictable rhythm that's modulated just enough to keep you alert and focussed as they come at you. The first-person sections are more immediately and obviously appealing than "Un amour de Swann", of course - I even caught myself checking "that most erotic of books, the railway timetable", to see whether I might be able to fit in a trip to Normandy next year to have a look at "Combray" and "Balbec" in real life. It's much easier to identify with the narrator-as-a-small-boy than with Swann the Parisian sophisticate falling for the courtesan Odette, but even so there is a remarkable amount in the development of his affection, need, jealousy and mistrust that strikes a chord. And the Duchess is magnificent!I don't think I could read all seven volumes straight through without a break - I need a bit of laughter and flippancy from time to time, and that's something Proust would dismiss as the unworthy province of the small-minded Verdurins. But now that I've started the re-read, I am in the mood again, and the other volumes are going to have to follow sooner or later. As a pastime, re-reading Proust certainly beats "strangling animals, golf and masturbating"...

Sentimental, vivid, and intricate in its management of interior memory / external plot. Finally getting to Proust after all these years.