My beginning and ending dates aren't accurate because I chose to read the two novels herein separately. The dates given are only for the Fugitive; I just can't recall when exactly I read The Prisoner - except that it was earlier this year.

Review proper:
Treating the two books here as separate novels, I have to make the awkward comparison of Proust novels to Star Trek movies. I just really enjoy the even numbered ones remarkable more than the odd numbered ones. I only have the last one left - which in my counting is number 7. My favorites - so far - would be "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower", followed by "Sodom and Gomorrah", then "Swann's Way", then "The Fugitive", "The Prisoner", and finally "Guermantes Way". So that's: 2, 4, 1, 6, 5, 3.

Anyway, I found The Prisoner to be frustratingly repetitive at times. He loves her because he can't completely have her. He seems to completely have her, so he doesn't care for her any longer, but wait, he doesn't really have her after all, so he loves her again. etc. Obviously, there is a great deal that is still really exceptional here, but it was somewhat tedious. It has been several months since I finished The Prisoner so I am hard pressed to come up with a more detailed review than that. Reading some other reviews reminds me of the section concerning Morel and Charlus. I did find that section to be quite good. Charlus - until now such a pompous though somehow likeable character - just seems so sad and pathetic after the treatment he receives from Morel.

I found The Fugitive to be much more rewarding. In particular his description of the loss of Albertine and his eventual recovery was just astonishing. The parts concerning Saint-Loup were great. The descriptions of Venice were great. I loved his reunion with Gilberte. I loved his awkward relationship with Andree.

It's frustrating trying to write a review of something so beautiful, and your writing comes out so ugly. ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1019231.ht...

This is Volume Five of the Penguin Proust, but actually includes two originally separate novels, called (not very surprisingly) The Prisoner and The Fugitive. The prisoner, overtly at least, is the narrator’s girlfriend Albertine, who moves in with him at the start of the book and (spoiler alert!) moves out at the end of The Prisoner, and then suddenly dies a few pages into The Fugitive. The translator says in her foreword that she thinks it entirely unrealistic to portray a young single upper-class woman cohabiting with a man she isn’t married to at the time period in question, even under the very secretive circumstances described in the novel (hence Albertine being described as a “prisoner”). I am not so sure. There was an awful lot going on under the radar screen in real life – indeed Proust is full of illicit and secretive love affairs, both gay and straight – and in a world where he thinks she is being sought after by every woman they meet, her secretly shacking up with him is not especially implausible.

There are some wobbly bits (again, the translator notes that Bergotte, a minor character, dies dramatically at one point but is being talked about as if still alive a few dozen pages later), but some great bits of description. That goes even more for the second part of the volume, The Fugitive, where the identity of the titular fugitive is much less immediately apparent, and the book starts off with loads of vicariously reported hot girl-on-girl action, and then spins out into a detailed and honest examination of the psychology of loss, with some very good sentences that almost qualify as one-liners. (But not quite. This is Proust, after all.)

Maybe I’m only now really getting into it, but it seemed to me that this was the most approachable volume yet of the five I’ve read, and I think I would actually recommend that someone wondering if Proust is for them should start here rather than with the first volume. It’s not as if the narrative is all that linear anyway. ( )

"Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth." Graham Greene.

In The Captive, Proust's narrator describes living with his lover, Albertine, in his mother's Paris apartment. He finds himself, by turns, falling out of love with Albertine and obsessing about whom she may or may not love. Rich with irony, the story inspires meditations on desire, sexual love, music, and the art of introspection. Graham Greene wrote, "For those who began to write at the end of the twenties or the beginning of the thirties, there were two great inescapable influences: Proust and Freud, who are mutually complementary."

(spoilers) The fifth book in "In Search of Lost Time". The focus this time is on the narrator (who actually gets called ‘Marcel’ twice) and his relationship with Albertine, although there are the usual detours into society and homosexuality.

Almost no one writes as well as Proust, which is good because the entire In Search of Lost Time series is enormous. Would be much harder to read with subpar or even just acceptable writing style. It’s true that he can write paragraph length sentences that are laden with clauses - often have to go back and read over a couple times to fully get what he’s saying. Not as easy as a thriller or chicklit, but much more interesting, challenging and rewarding. Like the Mann quote – only the exhaustive is truly interesting. And he is exhaustive, especially about love, loss and jealousy.

The narrator is living with Albertine at the beginning of the novel, still jealously worried about her lesbian behavior. Unfortunately, their relationship is the sorriest kind – he admits that he’s tired of her and bored but can’t leave her because of the pain of her being with someone else. She couldn’t make him happy anymore – could only make him suffer. Always the invalid/procrastinator, the narrator generally spends his days in his Paris apartment while trying to keep Albertine amused (so she won’t go looking for girls) by buying her things and sending her out on trips with her friend Andree.

Because Marcel is narrating from the present (or future, compared to events in the novel) he often knows the truth of seemingly unimportant events during their time together. On one hand, Proust gives the immediacy of the narrator’s tumultuous emotions while also providing a cool analysis of what ‘really’ happened. Morel and M. Charlus are also having problems which gives the narrator the chance to further discuss one-sided love.

His love for Albertine is a repetition of other obsessions – first with his mother, then Gilberte, then the Duchess. This time, it’s much more intense since she’s living with him. As in the relationship with his mother, Albertine’s kiss before leaving him for the night is necessary. Still, other than that and a few far between moments, life with her is dull. One of the reasons he wanted her at Balbec was her constant motion, riding everywhere on her bicycle, always off with the little band, known by everyone. Here, he always knows where she is (or thinks he does) which detracts from her attractiveness. The narrator strikes up a deal with her chauffeur, who tells him everywhere they went. But there appear small inconsistencies – symptomatic of much larger lies. But, as is exhaustively noted, those in love, as in anything, can usually delude themselves or make justifications or minimize problems. Even imagining the worst can never actually prepare someone for learning it in an undeniable way. One thing that the narrator learns to do with a liar is to pretend he’s already aware of her lies and has been for a while. It’s not true, but she’ll try to justify them.

To gain the upper hand, Marcel pretends that he wants to separate. However, he is devastated when she actually leaves in "The Fugitive". He notes the difference between this relationship and the one with Gilberte – he’d been able to control the obsession then and gradually became indifferent to her. But now, he actually tries to manipulate Albertine into coming back. Shortly after, he learns that Albertine has died in a riding accident. At several points in the relationship (also with Swann and Odette) he’d wished she would die so he would never worry again. But death is much more painful that he thought possible. His only hope, expressed in a depressing but beautiful passage, is that he will forget – just like with Gilberte, Mme de Guermantes and his grandmother. But this thought only made him realize that soon he would be indifferent to everything he loved, and that everything about Albertine that was important would soon be meaningless. Double edged sword.

Some of Proust’s best writing is on the narrator’s meditation on loss. How, like many people in love, he thought he’d die before he forgot Albertine – but various selves dying all the time. Even though she’s dead, her behavior while alive still torments him. Although the narrator is devastated, he is still jealous and realizes that if it wasn’t Albertine, it could have been someone else. Forgetting distorts the true memory of their relationship and also shows its impermanence. One comfort – that the dead know everything, are watching over us – worries the narrator, not all of this thoughts are ones he’d want her to hear. There are a few attempts with other girls, often similar to Albertine, but nothing serious. Memories, inherently fragile, can’t last forever without some distortion. Finally, the narrator is no longer in love with Albertine.

Sometime later, he learns about Gilberte's new life in high society. ( )