Spoilers throughout

The title A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs is translated various ways. Moncrief’s Within a Budding Grove sucks. Seriously, where are the girls and the play of light? I prefer Nabokov’s more natural In the Shade of the Blooming Young Girls. My doubts about whether I am reading what the author actually wrote normally steer me away from reading translations---but I make an exception for this vast, supremely intelligent novel.

On the surface this part of the Recherche covers the beautiful, rich, stylish, asthmatic, and batty Narrator’s youthful loves: Gilberte and her mother in Paris; the faces and voices of Albertine and the rest of the little band in Balbec; and Charlus (although the Narrator naively did not comprehend what was going on). They all end badly, Gilberte gets tired of him, Albertine calls for help to thwart his advances and Charlus even administers a salutary douche.

I think the Narrator’s love for Odette is the most profound of them all; it is her fragrance that intoxicates, her housecoats that delight, her chrysanthemums that have special significance. She is observed down to the lining of her jacket. The mauve vision of Odette in her slow procession through the Bois is for me the most enchanting part of the novel. Accompanied by her entourage who are awed by her beauty and wealth, saluted by Princes, she is more aristocratic than the aristocrats and singularly sums up the belle epoque. And Odette is important to Proust, for, despite her mediocre intelligence, she has invented “a physiognomy of her own”---that is, she has invented herself.

Proust is a subtle and penetrating psychologist and has superhuman powers of analogy. He has created images that impress themselves on my mind: the sea reflected in Balbec hotel's bookcases, the green dining room, Berma with her arm extended, the hawthorne, and of course the mauve image of Odette. As if it were an Elstir painting, Proust’s novel has the feel of a mirage in a tinted haze; just so, the bit about the letters with Gilberte is recalled by me now as perhaps letters that the Narrator dreamed he wrote to Gilberte, or maybe wrote them and didnt send them, or maybe sent them and imagined her reply, or maybe he did receive an actual response. I cant tell. Very nice effect.

The other thing that keeps me coming back to Proust is the brilliant observations that appear on virtually every page. To give but two instances: he dumps on Norpois “...to repeat what everybody else was thinking was, in politics, the mark not of an inferior but of a superior mind”; and reflects on Bergotte’s genius, “...the men who produce works of genius are not those that live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those that have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in the reflecting power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.” There is simply a lot to chew on.

I wont talk of Proust’s larger themes (Time, Art, Memory, Self-Deception, Life’s Irony, etc.) but I do want to recommend some criticism that I found enlightening: Pippin’s essay Becoming who one is (and failing) and Landy’s excellent Philosophy as Fiction.

There are a couple things that continue to puzzle me: what is the actual relationship between Bloch and Odette? is Bergotte a homosexual? Perhaps the reader might leave me a message to help me out. ( )

Great writing, packed full of psychological insight and pretty diction. But there's so little at stake; only the main character and his emotions and even those are diluted through the retrospective form, which tries to explain everything and distances the reader from the present moment. ( )

Not as knock-out beautiful, and Marcel does get a bit whiny when he goes on and on about Gilberte, but it's still pretty amazing. ( )

This second volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past is comprised of At Mme Swann’s and Place-Names: The Place.

After completing the first volume and well into this second, I still had a difficult time resolving the story’s point-of-view. Are we hearing from a very mature boy or is this a man reminiscing of the past? A few references in Place-Names:The Places to future events indicates that it’s actually the later. Upon recognizing this, another story came to mind. The literati will hang me for likening a work of Proust to something so base, but I started thinking of Jean Shepherd. More correctly, his narration of the 1983 movie A Christmas Story. I began imagining the same “adult remembering his childhood thinking like an adult” voice within Proust’s work and everything clicked into place for me.

In the first book, we finally reach the conclusion of the narrator’s “love affair” with Gilberte Swann. Typical of youthful relationships, he destroys any last hope of being with Gilberte by “playing games.” After a small understanding, he and Gilberte have an argument and stop seeing each other. Instead of mending fences, he adopts the belief that snubbing Gilberte will make her long for him more and she will eventually come running back to him. However, the picture that has been painted of our protagonist is one of a relatively weak, sickly and immature child. In actuality, he doesn’t have much to offer Gilberte and she readily replaces him with someone else.

During this period of trying to make Gilberte more interested by staying away, he does maintain a somewhat unnaturally close relationship with Gilberte’s mother, Odette Swann. Knowing Odette’s possibly tawdry past, one wonders if she isn’t actually interested in Gilberte’s “playmate.” The book ends innocently enough however with his departure to Balbec.

Once finally in Balbec, the reader is treated to more descriptive scenes of painstaking minutia. These can be a treat for today’s reader through the enjoyment of studying Proust’s use of language, but it does make progressing through the story challenging.

The narrator’s time in Balbec is once again centered around the incongruous workings of the young mind. He befriends Marquis de Saint-Loup-en-Bray. At first, he sees him as “uppity” but really wants to be his friend. Once the friendship is established, we learn that Saint-Loup may be the first truly “stand up” character we’ve encountered in Proust’s cast.

Finally, the narrator discovers the “little group of girls.” He repeats past mistakes by going after one to make another jealous, getting “dumped” by that one, chasing someone else and all the while missing out that another is actually interested in him. He ignores all of his other friends while pursuing the girls and eventually tarnishes the one good friendship he had with Saint-Loup.

The language and time differences aside, every reader will probably recognize similar mistakes they’ve made (or continue to make) in their dealings with others. This ability to relate to the story makes In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower more approachable than the first volume, Swann’s Way. ( )

I am unsure, having just finished this, as to whether or not I enjoyed reading it more than Swann's Way. Either way, this is quite a different book, though different in it's focus of narrative, rather than in the quality of the narrative, which is much the same.
This book concentrates on Proust himself, rather than Swann, with his thoughts and actions being described in every bit as much detail, if not more. This book is a bit longer than the first, and though it is perhaps a bit more pedestrian in its ambitions, it does not miss out any of the things which made the reading first one as good as it was. Perhaps if this book had been too similar to the first one it would have felt somewhat tedious to read straight afterwards, but as this book is written from the point of a young Proust, in contrast to the older Swann of much of the first book, it is refreshing to notice the change of perspective. Swann is always so sure of his ideas, his wants, and his enjoyments, whereas young Proust here shows a certain indecision, a mind not yet completely made up about things, which does not come across in most of the reflections in the first book. Some of the things that recur in this book include the importance of art and sensibility, and the characters preoccupation with love, which I am guessing will run throughout the remaining volumes.
I don't know whether or not it is appropriate to recommend this book, as I normally would at the end of a review, as it would be more sensible to read Swann's Way first, and then read this too, if you enjoyed the first one. But, what I can say is that if you did read and enjoy Swann's Way, then there is not much that you are likely to dislike about this book, and you may like me even possibly prefer it. ( )