What seems to be nothing more than a simple moment where a spoiled child, a brat, disobeys and challenges his parents is indeed the beginning of a long lasting disorder that will be pivotal to the comprehension of the path the narrator walks in life up to the last moments of Time Regained.
Enter then the celebrated madeleine episode. Just like him, we must also wait to understand what this passage really meant in his life. With all of his remembrances at hand thanks to that singular taste of madeleine dipped in tea, the narrator then unveils the enchanting, alluring times he spent with his family in the small town of Combray. This section Combray, pt.
The next chapter, Un Amour de Swann is an extensive - and intensive -, comprehensive analysis of love and all of the feelings that come with it or derive from it, or because of it. Proust analyses every aspect of this happy, glowing feeling that can turn into a malady, dissecting everything, putting every action under many different lights and observing them from different perspectives from the very beginning, the reasons love appeared, to how it grew, to how it went sour and faded away.
The effort one made in order to seduce switches sides and becomes the effort the other has to make in order to break-up. After Odette landed Swann and he fell for her, she turns cold and distant, leaving him jealous and wary. He needs to know her every thought, as if it was possible to detach her scalp and pick up her brain like a woolen ball that, once disentangled, would become a long thread of readable sentences containing all of her opinions and ideas.
I thought this would be a much slower read; I planned to let the book dictate its own pace and take as much time as needed to get through this second read, for I had a feeling this was how it would go. For having already read these 3, pages of the Recherche once - and precisely because of this intimidating length - the only promise I made was to re-read Swann's Way , although I did feel the lingering desire to re-read everything.
But I imagined that I would be better equipped in making that decision after reading the first volume. Despite its name, it does borrow scenes, characters and episodes from the other volumes, not confiding itself strictly to chapter 2 of this book, so be advised of spoilers.
The Guermantes Way : review Vol 4. Sodom and Gomorrah : review Vol 5. Albertine disparue The Fugivite : review Vol 7.
Time Regained : review View all 37 comments. Memory is a slippery little sucker. It constitutes an elusive, transient cache of data, the reliability of which decreases in reverse proportion to the length of time it has been stored. It can even be a blatant liar! How often have we found ourselves convinced of the details a particular memory only to have those details called into question by some testimony or other of which we have been made newly aware?
It is almost frightening how quickly and naturally the bytes of our mind can be removed Memory is a slippery little sucker. It is almost frightening how quickly and naturally the bytes of our mind can be removed and supplanted by ones more convenient, ones designed to soothe our psyche, thereby allowing us to live at peace with ourselves. Though we believe a person or a place from our past remains stationary in our idea of them while its true-life counterpart adapts and progresses, Proust shows us how memory can have a life of its own, as well.
And yet when his narrator bites into that famous piece of sponge cake and transports us back to the days of his French childhood, we go willingly, not hesitating to question the accuracy or the validity of his musings. Their relationship is doomed from the start, being based on superficialities at its onset and becoming increasingly toxic as it progresses, yet by no means does its toxicity ever invalidate the love Swann has for Odette. That part of it is wholeheartedly genuine.
For anyone who has ever been in such a relationship, it is kind of wild how realistically it is depicted. For all the difficulties I anticipated reading Marcel Proust, I have to admit how pleased I was by its readability. I think what I enjoyed most, besides its perfectly constructed sentences, was that if I had been able to track the number of times I would encounter a passage that so exquisitely peels away the complicated layers of the human condition, exposing its unadulterated innards, I View all 72 comments.
An involuntary anxious childhood memory Whether or not you like Proust, mostly depends on if you like the type of narration.
As he dips a Madeleine into hot tea, his childhood memoirs of being afraid to go to bed at night come back to him. When Charles Swann, a friend of his grandparents is visiting, matters get even worse, as his mother cannot come kiss him goodnight.
That causes him so much anxiety, that he stays up until Swann leaves. Marcel then traces the roots of his decision to become a writer back to Combray. His grandparents and friends encourage him to read and introduce him to his favorite author Bergotte. He is overwhelmed by the beauty of the landscape, especially the hawthorn blossoms that line the path to Swann's house.
When he watches the sun reflect off the roof tiles of the church, he decides to become a writer. On a walk through town, Marcel and his family meet Swann's wife, Odette, and her daughter, Gilberte. Marcel instantly falls in love with Gilberte, but idealizes her to such an extent that he thinks her black eyes are really blue.
Combray- descriptions of architecture are an important part of the novel The reader is then carried back fifteen years to relate the second story-that of the love affair between Swann and Odette. Swann finds her only vaguely attractive, until he realizes that she resembles Botticelli's beautiful painting Zipporrah, which leads him to idealize and obsess about her.
Odette takes Swann to a nightly salon, where Vinteuil's sonata is being played. Swann fixes an association in his mind between the music and his love for Odette and ultimately becomes her lover. But Odette quickly gets tired of Swann and starts to cheat on him. He suspects her betrayal, but ignores the truth about their failed romance until he is confronted with her infidelity and pushed out of her social circle. Swann retreats back into the high society of aristocrats and royalty that he had enjoyed before meeting Odette.
His suffering soon diminishes and he realizes to which extend he obsessed about her, based on the idealized version of a Botticelli figure, even though she actually isn't even his type. Marcel and Charles Swann Charles Haas was role model for the character of Charles Swann Marcel is the narrator of the novel, and a representation of Marcel Proust himself, though noticeably different as well.
He suffers from anxiety and longs for the nightly comfort of his mother's kiss. He is fascinated by art and becomes an avid reader and lover of architecture, theater, painting and music. He loves to walk around Combray by himself and admire the stunning hawthorn blossoms that inspire him to become a writer. After losing himself in books and his imagination, he is easily disappointed by reality, especially with women he loves. He even imagines the dark eyes of Gilberte to be blue so that they will be more beautiful to him.
Charles Swann is a friend of Marcel's family in Combray, and a celebrity in the social scene of Paris, just as his friends the Prince of Wales and major players in the French aristocracy. A wealthy stockbroker, he becomes an expert art critic and dealer. He is also a womanizer and compares them to paintings in order to make them more attractive to him. This tendency leads him to fall hopelessly in love with Odette even though she is not even his type.
Swann's idealization of Odette keeps him from seeing her as she really is, to the point that his love for her becomes a tragic form of vanity and self-love. When Swann first hears Vinteuil's sonata, it stays with him and comes to express the defining aspects of his character. The peaks and valleys of the violin crescendos make him feel successively enthralled and depressed. The music becomes an association for his love affair with Odette, ensuring that whenever he hears the music, he will think of her.
When Odette's love fades, the sonata makes Swann's love persist, becoming a sort of anesthetic, elevating his spirits by allowing his memory to recreate their love from the early moments. Proust wanted his writing style to be a form of painting. He was an expert art critic and chose specific painters and styles to influence and form his prose.
Marcel's fascination with the architecture and natural landscape in and around Combray recalls the works of Claude Monet, as do the references to water lilies and flowered fields, as well as the variations of sunlight on church facades. Swann also shares Proust's admiration for Botticelli, especially his paintings that have prominent blond women whom Odette faintly resembles.
Swann compares Odette to Botticelli's Zipporrah. The descriptions of nature are frequently references to the art of Claude Monet Marcel also loves the art of literature and escapes into the world of fictional characters, whom he finds more sympathetic and understandable. Proust argues that since readers shape, in part, the characters that they read about, they can learn much more about themselves from reading than from observing the people around them, whom they cannot shape.
Marcel is often disappointed with the real world's failure to live up to his expectations. But if you live for a fast progressing and tensioned story, like many modern readers do, you probably will be bored to death. However I would suggest for everyone to have a look at Proust at least once. Whether you like it or not, is learning something about this form of literature and yourself for the rest of your life.
You have to appreciate the written word in a way that an art critic appreciates going to a museum or a lover of classical music listening to vinyl records.
View all 15 comments. Sep 28, Kenny rated it it was amazing Shelves: queer-lit , proust , spenky-says-so , people , favorites , classics , french , long-haul-reads. Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life. And what a novel it is.
It is a monumental achievement. Truman Capote wrote of Proust's magnus opus in glowing terms. He was, himself, working on an American homage to Proust , Answered Prayers.
I actually tried reading Proust around age 14, and I gave up pretty quickly, on one of those long sentences Proust is famous for. Through the years the goal of reading this lingered in my mind. Tonight I finished the first volume. The taste of a small cake conjures up the village of his childhood holidays. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.
I've barely scratched the surface here. We learn of young Marcel's parents, his great aunts, his playmates, love of music, literature and theatre. He suffers insomnia when denied his nightly kiss from his mother and blames Swann for this. Swann is seen as someone who separates Marcel from motherly love. Much of Swann In Love is concerned with the revelation of secrets to Marcel, the boy. Proust is a writer for the patient reader.
He is able to extract meaning from scenes and situations that other writers would pass over as unimportant, and the reader is richly rewarded in return. And what did I learn from Proust in my first encounter?
He reminds me that love is painful, torturous, brutal, cruel, nightmarish, and bleak. And all in the mistaken belief that we know what will be.
View all 36 comments. Kenny Michael wrote: "I'm reading Book 5 now. I noticed, looking at GR numbers for Proust, that there is a huge drop-off in readership after Swann's Way.
Th Michael wrote: "I'm reading Book 5 now. The reality is that Proust cannot not be judged, assessed, on just the first volume. I have noticed the same thing, which is a shame.
You are in for a real treat with the final volume. Proust is probably the author I most pretend to love more than I do. In certain company to admit preferring dozens of other authors can feel like acknowledging some strain of mediocrity in one's intellect and critical faculties.
Joyce is the other one. Though I don't often make any pretence of loving Joyce, except his story The Dead and parts of Ulysses.
Proust and Joyce - the two sacred cows of 20th century literature. That said, Proust had a huge influence on two of my favourite writers - Wool Proust is probably the author I most pretend to love more than I do. That said, Proust had a huge influence on two of my favourite writers - Woolf and Nabokov - so I've never questioned his genius even if I couldn't always connect with it. So rereading Proust twenty years after my first experience of him felt, to some degree, as though I was putting my intellect to a test.
Pretty quickly I remembered the problems I had with him. Firstly the way he structures sentences, his dissonant syntax. For someone who loves music so much it's odd how eccentric his relationship with rhythm is. As happened the first time I read him I found myself losing the thread half way through one of his clunky estranging labyrinthine sentences.
Proust takes pleasure in snatching one thread from you mid-sentence and handing you another one. Then you find you're holding both and sometimes they've been beautifully embroidered together, sometimes they still seem raggedly disparate.
And he forces you to read more slowly than you're accustomed to. This, too, can be tiresome until he finally succeeds in subverting your rhythms to his more laborious discordant cadences. I also quickly learned to be wary of anything in parentheses. In essence I don't much like the way he writes, his style. And then of all the great writers Proust can be more boring than most. Tolstoy was boring at the end of War and Peace. But Proust is often boring in the midst of his brilliance.
With Proust you can get one of the best pages in the history of literature followed a few pages later by what I could only feel was purple prosed whimsy.
But then, one also has to acknowledge the human mind often works how Proust writes it. He captures some essence of the mind's mechanics in any given moment. Proust perhaps has more to say about the workings of consciousness, the timelessness of the human mind, than any other writer. No one has ever anatomised the swarm of sensibility active in each passing moment like him. He makes us aware of how time happens on many different levels. And how mutable and ongoing is all experience.
There are no full stops in the human mind. There is no final draft. And he also, through Swann, makes us realise how much of our time we waste on misguided pursuits. Swann is a brilliant depiction of the disparity between inner man and social persona. Something Woolf tried less successfully in Mrs Dalloway. No surprise she read Proust just before writing Mrs Dalloway.
He forces us to ask questions about authenticity, the notion of a true self. All Swann's diligently earned accomplishments to represent himself to the world as erudite, cultured, eloquent and dignified are torn to shreds by his slavish and rather pathetic obsession with the unworthy Odette. The sense of self he had constructed is revealed as a sham.
There's a great quote by Hilary Mantel about the authenticity of self in her book about her experience of surgery. Too much is claimed for authenticity. Painfully we learn to live in the world, and to be false. Then all our defences are knocked down in one sweep. In sickness we can't avoid knowing about our body and what it does, its animal aspect, its demands. We see things that never should be seen; our inside is outside, the body's sewer pipes and vaults exposed to view, as if in a woodcut of our own martyrdom.
The last few pages made me laugh where Proust as an old man is horrified by the vulgarity of the fashions now prevalent compared to the elegance of the aesthetic he remembers as a young man. If he thought that was bad - - heaven only knows what level of disgust he'd reach at how we choose to clothe ourselves nowadays.
It occurred to me then that for more than a century now you could argue fashion gets more garish and vulgar with every new decade. How we dress is an example of how, in the evolution of the species, practicality has almost completely eclipsed poetry as the touchstone.
I'm tempted to give this 4 stars because that would reflect my level of enjoyment but it's miles better than any other book I've given four stars to so it has to be five, despite the problems I encountered. View all 44 comments. Shelves: love-and-other-indoor-sports , leetle-boys , happyendings.
AFTER: Okay, well, I really screwed up my schedule this weekend, so now it's the latening am and nothing's happening for me in the sleep department.
Honestly I can't think of a more appropriate time to review this book, which begins with insomnia. This was great. It really was. Granted, it's not for everyone, but nor is it the rarified hothouse orchid cultured specifically and exclusively for an elite audience of fancy-pants dandies with endless supplies of Ritalin and time.
This book is fascinati AFTER: Okay, well, I really screwed up my schedule this weekend, so now it's the latening am and nothing's happening for me in the sleep department.
I adored it, though I'm a little worried about singing its praises too loudly, since my low expectations might've played a role in my love for it. There are two main parts to this book. The first half is the narrator's first-person reminiscences of being a sensitive little rich boy in the French countryside and, at the end, in Paris. This portion contained probably the most incredible writing on the subject of memory and nostalgia that I have ever read in my life. When I was a kid myself, I, like the boy in this book, read a lot.
This had the result that somewhere around first through third grade, I had an unending stream of first-person narrative running through my head at all times, describing all my actions and thoughts in the past tense, just as they happened: e. Not only could I never remember all the mundane details of my life and thoughts, but this book, were it somehow to be written, would be impossibly long!
What I thought while reading Swann's Way is that Marcel Proust probably had a similar experience of a novel in his head, only he was a far more interesting child than I was and, much more importantly, he actually did the impossible and managed to remember all this stuff, and then, somehow, to write it all down.
Proust's descriptions of the way he experienced and thought of the world as a boy are astonishing. He is not writing from a child's perspective, but from that of an adult remembering his childhood in spectacular detail, and the effect is incredible.
I don't know much about brain science, really, but the vague rumors I've heard on the street on how they're now saying memory works could not be more clearly or gorgeously illustrated than they are in this book. If you're not fascinated by the processes of memory, sensation, aesthetics, identity, social relationships, and desire, this book will bore you out of your skull, unless you're really interested in fancy Belle Epoque French people, in which case, my friend, you are in for a real treat.
The second part of the book recounts a love affair between the little boy's adult neighbor, M. Swann, and the woman of dubious reputation with whom Swann becomes infatuated.
Maybe there is nothing especially new here -- it's almost years old, what do you want? If you're not madly in love right now and are feeling any regrets about that, reading this book will clear that right up, and you'll feel the relief of a clean bill of health after testing for a particularly gruesome disease.
This "Swann in Love" portion of the book also is very immersive, in the sense I think Natalie meant in her comment below, in that if you've never had any idea what it might be like to wear a monocle and have a bazillion francs and footmen and a carriage with horses that takes you around to fashionable Parisian parties where you hang out with princesses and a bunch of other rich French guys also wearing monocles, this book will get you so much closer to that experience than you are likely ever to get, even if you do happen to be insanely wealthy and live in Paris, because as Proust observes -- I won't quote him here, ya gotta read it yourself -- the time described in this book is lost, and it is impossible now to return to it.
This book did strange things to me, actually. It made me crave what I didn't know I had the capacity to want; for example, it made me yearn to be outrageously wealthy, preferably in France.
And unlimited access to money. And suitors. And it would be good if it could be the nineteenth century, and I were super hot-looking. And helpful also if I could actually speak some French Anyway, a visit to the Frick, or the Met, or wherever I can look at some paintings of these ladies who never interested me so much until I heard what they were really up to, is definitely in order. But anyway, well, I'd say I'm digressing, but in discussing this particular book I suppose there is no such animal.
Were parts of this slow? Parts of this book were reminiscent of the principles of Buddhist mindfulness practice, which is to say, they could be pretty awesome but not necessarily lively, and at times a thoroughly painful bitch to slog through. Yes, I cannot tell a lie: there were times I'd realize I'd been stuck on the same paragraph for twenty minutes while my mind wandered off to something totally unrelated, and sometimes I'd have to set the thing down and come back to it later.
This book does require some patience, and it's not a cover-to-cover thrillfest, no, okay, fine, it isn't. I see plenty of valid reasons why someone would not get into this book, but if you have any interest in this type of stuff, don't be scared off by discouraging things you might've heard. Yeah, you might not like it, but you might also be pleasantly surprised. I sure was! I get bored very easily, and I have a hard time sticking with a lot of books, but this one sucked me right in, and was fascinating and satisfying on so many levels.
The salacious sensory-candy-munching Jessica who loves Valley of the Dolls had a lot to savor here, as did the slightly brainier one who enjoys thinking about the mechanics of time and memory, and there was besides those things more more more, enough going on here for many of my multiple warring and confused personalities.
I liked that. So yeah, in closing, I guess I should address the inevitable part-versus-whole question: Swann's Way is a satisfying novel by itself, only not really. It did have a very lovely ending and could stand up on its own, except for the fact that I'm hooked now, and want more. I'm not going to begin the next episode anytime soon, because I've got a bunch of other stuff I'd like to read and it can't just be Proust Proust Proust all the time, but I'm definitely planning to return to this famously overlong novel at some point in the not-too-distant future If anyone knows a hopelessly wealthy, balding Parisian gentleman who is easily led by boorish, uncouth, immoral women, please feel free to provide me with an introduction at your next salon!
I mean, I'd heard the name "Proust" and the word "madeleines," but I'd never thought too much about all that, and I think I'd always sort of gotten Proust mixed up with Borges different, different, yeah, I know as a guy I'd never read with a name I wasn't sure how to pronounce.
More recently, though this novel's acquired a kind of mystique in my mind based on people's reviews on here of it. Last night I noticed that my roommate happened to have a copy on her bookshelf, and out of some idly morbid curiosity picked it up, to see if it could possibly be half as dreadful as I imagined. But actually, so far it's incredible. Reading the first few pages was like doing yoga, except some kind of turn-of-the-last-century Frenchish kind of style, which of course is vastly preferable to the normal way.
Beginning this book is also like inhabiting somebody else's half-awakened mind. Ivan Turgenev. The Idiot. Exile and the Kingdom.
Albert Camus. The Castle. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Thomas Bernhard. A Parisian Affair and Other Stories.
Guy de Maupassant. The Double and The Gambler. The Red and the Black. Amerika: The Missing Person. The Annotated Lolita. Vladimir Nabokov. Crime and Punishment. The House of the Dead. Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Book of Disquiet. Indispensable… the crucial modernist work, overtopping the books of even such giants as Joyce and Mann.
Claire Messud, Newsday. Start earning points for buying books! Uplift Native American Stories. Add to Bookshelf. Read An Excerpt. Nov 30, ISBN Add to Cart. Buy from Other Retailers:. Paperback —. Also in In Search of Lost Time. Also by Marcel Proust. Product Details. Inspired by Your Browsing History. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. Marcel Proust. Notes from a Dead House. Why did I stop?
Time, ironically. It's the most beautiful thing I've read. Looking forward to getting through it all now that the Club is onto it. He wasn't the only one to struggle. JuliaC42 wrote:. It is now doing a good job of supporting my clock radio at the correct height. Sallycosstick adds:. When I started out on my Penguin edition, I even wondered how many people made it as far as the opening chapter.
The general editor Christopher Prendergast's preface starts off by quoting a New Yorker cartoon featuring a "peevish shopper saying to a salesman in a bookstore 'I want something to get even with him for that new translation of Proust he got me last year. Meanwhile, it isn't just the prose style, the long sentences, the great piles of subordinate clauses, the Mississippi-wide meanderings, the slow-flowing course of the narrative that might cause problems.
You could easily be forgiven for taking against the narrator himself. At first glance, he seems a tremendous egotist and snob. Who is he to imagine that every aspect of his life is so precious and important that he has to share it in such detail? Who is he to suggest that his family know so much about life well-lived? Who cares about his precious hawthorns? Why does he make so much of social niceties and conventions? Why does it matter to us who his relatives do and don't snub? Why should we care why?
If you ask yourself such questions, you aren't the first. On the subject of rejections, Proust also received a beauty from the publishing house Ollendorff, whose reader confided to Proust's brother: "My dear friend, perhaps I am dense, but I just don't understand why a man should take 30 pages to describe how he turns over in bed before he goes to sleep. It made my head swim.
Another rejection, which I have unable to source beyond a quote in Andre Bernad's Rotten Rejections but seems all too convincing, reads:. Console yourself with those judgments if you're also finding the book hard-going. But also, be warned. Proust eventually had the book published at his own expense with Eugene Grasset years ago, in just a few weeks time, as luck has it. Soon after it came out, Gide read the book properly.
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