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Loading... Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1 (edition 2006)by Marcel Proust, C. K. Scott Moncrieff (Translator), Ingrid Wassenaar (Introduction)
Work InformationSwann's Way & Within A Budding Grove by Marcel Proust
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Hard to explain why Proust is so mesmerizing, as he drills down deeper into every way our minds consider every experience, place, person. Amazingly, the longer and more protracted it gets, the more you get drawn in. I can already foresee the day that I finish the final volume, and wish there were more. The smell of varnish, or the taste of a madeleine tea-cake, Mama's kiss at bedtime: each holds within it pages of memories for the narrator. I read some in French in a room where both the poet Elizabeth Bishop and the novelist Mary McCarthy stayed, including the hostess in her The Group. While not a spoiler, Bishop's sexuality changes Odette for Swan late in the novel. Proust illustrates Plato: I used to say in Humanities surveys how the Real Chair is the Chair in the mind...others fall apart, spindles and seat. Proust returns every couple pages to his Platonism early on, "Even the simple act of 'seeing someone we know', is, to some extent, an intellectual process"(25). Swann objects to journalism, with its "fresh trivialities...Suppose that every morning we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, and we were to find inside--oh! I don't know, say Pascal's Pensées?"(35). The real in the mind sometimes fades, "He could not explore the idea further, for a sudden access of that mental lethargy which was, with him, congenital, intermittent, and providential--happened, at that moment, to extinguish every particle of light in his brain, as instantaneously as in a later period with electric lighting, it became possible to cut off the supply of light by fingering a switch"(386). I'm not sure the same mental permanence can be said for Americans with our Cheerios of chilldhood, our memories of new car smell. And our newspapers, our TV fresh trivialities. Maybe. Proust evokes the sensibility--with an emphasis on "senses"--, he evokes the richness of the mind in a new way. The senses lock on memories tied to sight and sound, such as early songs--for me, some late 50s Rock and Roll, Little Richard, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino. Most everybody can recall when they heard a specific song, "Oh, Don-an-na," or "I found my thrill/ On Blueberry Hil...." An aside, how much this may lose to be classed as "gay lit," though the author was certainly gay. Read in Modern Library hardback, 1956. I have not read volume II. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to SeriesIn Search of Lost Time (1-2) Belongs to Publisher SeriesPenguin Clothbound Classics (2016) ContainsCombray by Marcel Proust (indirect) Swann In Love by Marcel Proust (indirect) Swann's Way: Part 2 by Marcel Proust (indirect) In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: Part 1 by Marcel Proust (indirect) In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: Part 2 by Marcel Proust (indirect)
On the eve of his marriage, the Counselor makes a risky decision to dealve into the cocaine trade along the Texas-Mexico border. His hope is that this one-time deal will set him and his fiancée on a path to financial freedom, but instead he ends up in a brutal game that threatens to destroy everything and everyone he loves. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)843.912Literature French French fiction Modern Period 20th Century 1900-1945LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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In retrospect, this book was especially unlikely to appeal to me, as it is French and I have had my struggles with French literature in the past (apart from [b:Les Miserables|36377471|Les Miserables|Victor Hugo|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1509394980l/36377471._SY75_.jpg|3208463], which I remember enjoying).
It's also very hard to read. The numerous, and seemingly endless, run- , or even ramble-, on sentences just make it hard to read. I often found a verb following a comma and had to comb back through the sentence to figure out what it referred to. That's annoying, but to make it worse, I mostly wished I hadn't bothered. There certainly wasn't enough profundity to justify all that obfuscation and complexity, although the book was occasionally quite funny. But I just couldn't find the right way to read it. I tried powering through and not minding if I missed some of the nuance, but that made it boring. So I slowed right down and carefully read every sentence so I could appreciate it as it arrived. But that was also boring.
In fact, on reflection, I think high Modernism might represent the limits of my tolerance for experimental fiction. I have never had much time for books like [b:Gravity's Rainbow|415|Gravity's Rainbow|Thomas Pynchon|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1657594227l/415._SY75_.jpg|866393], so I guess I'm quite traditional when it comes to novels.
Anyway, just in case I want to pick it up again in the future, I'll have to remember that I got up the bit where the narrator had another feeling. ( )