In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way Vol 1 (original 1913; edition 1996)

I finally finished this after I made myself avoid other more entertaining books and buckled down for the ride.

Proust is not easy reading, and to this day I'm only marginally aware of what actually happened in this book. That said, there is a plot to it if you can pay attention and make it through the stream-of-consciousness meanderings. The way he plays with words makes it worth the price of entry, mind you; but this is not for plot and action junkies. In fact I'm not even sure you'll care much for the characters. Near as I can tell, it's about a kid remembering a rich guy he knew as a kid, who fell in love with a slutty chick and married her despite not liking her, and then the kid falls for the rich guy's daughter.

The worst part? I kinda miss the style and voice, and feel compelled to keep reading the remaining five books in the series. Help me. ( )

This is a very tough book for me to review since I don't feel like I have gotten the full experience of Proust's writing. After finishing the last page, I knew that this is a book to be read not only once but several times. There are many subtle references and connections I know I missed.

My strategy going in was to read it for the story and not to worry about interpretations or how the writing was constructed. For me, it was easier to read it on my Kindle so that I could highlight a word or phrase and then instantly Google it. Very handy.

I also have to confess that initially I was thinking 'what in the world is the big deal', but once I entered into the world of Swann and Odette I was hooked. The cadence of the story telling is lovely.

One thing is for sure, Proust's influence on writing cannot be underestimated; a great case in point is in the book I am currently reading [b:1Q84|10357575|1Q84 |Haruki Murakami|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1359439026s/10357575.jpg|18160093];the heroine of the book is working her way through Proust's work. Fun to watch someone else having the experience. ( )

After I first read Remembrance of Things Past twelve years ago, I liked to tell people that everything I had ever known or experienced or felt was like a tiny mote of dust in the vast universe of Proust's imagination. For a long time, any new fact or idea would prompt me to say, "That's just like in Proust, when..."

Rereading it now, I don't love Swann's Way the way I did once. At some point, I grew up and out and in a different direction. I'm not so dazzled by the glamour, I'm more disturbed by the ugliness. But there was a time when Proust swallowed me whole, and I still recognize myself in the pages. The mark it left on me was that deep.

But what is Swann's Way? A coming of age story, maybe. It starts when our narrator is a young boy trying to make sense of the adult world. He's observant, sickly, pained by his own powerlessness. His transition into adulthood is interrupted by a synopsis or overture, a foreshadowing of things to come, when the book shifts away from him to the story of Charles Swann's obsessive love for a courtesan, Odette de Crecy.

But like all great books, the story is just the crust for the pie, the plate for the steak. Swann's Way is a book of inversions and perversions. It's a book where every flower and tree is anthropomorphized; every petal is made of silk, every garden a ballroom ("Lilac time was nearly over; a few, still, poured forth in tall mauve chandeliers the delicate bubbles of their flowers"). The built world is so drenched in emotion that every building, chair, and lamp comes alive, as seasonal and mutable as the flowers and trees. The natural and artificial collapse.

Of course, Remembrance of Things Past is a book about memory. Everybody knows that. But it's not just a book where the narrator, as an adult, dips a bit of spongy madeleine cookie into a cup of tea and the taste recalls memories of his youth with a startling, impossible clarity. That does happen, and Swann's Way is explicitly about memory in a lot of ways. But it's a text conjured from memory, every character a "transparent envelope" stuffed with memories, every tree alive, the whole world palpably made of the same stuff, cut from the cloth of the narrator's imagination.

There is no objectivity, ever. Yet the characters suffer when they fail to recognize their own subjectivity. Swann cannot see that his great love for Odette is, for her, a burdensome business arrangement. While Odette, venal, stupid, and coarse as she is, always has a canny sense of what drives other people, and how to get what she wants from them.

It's not a coincidence that a prostitute, for all her faults, sees so clearly. There's an economy, a commerce, of esteem here -- the Swann family's bourgeois respectability has great value in Combray, none in Paris. The Verdurins' clannishness invalidates other forms of social currency, making Swann's most valuable assets -- his aristocratic friends and good taste -- worthless. And Odette, who might otherwise covet the introductions that Swann can make for her, loses interest in all the duchesses and princesses in France when she loses interest in Swann.

I spent a lot of time, as I read, despising the characters and cherishing Proust's psychological insight. The narrator's feeble, anxious need for his mother's kiss is creepy. Swann's possessiveness, which evolves into outright abuse, is horrifying. Odette's shamelessness is awful. Swann's Way is full of brief, vicious character sketches and there aren't many characters to like, at the end of the day.

But even if they can't be liked, they can be understood -- and Proust traces every action, every repellant personality trait, to its source. He shows us how decisions are made, how people can be blind to their own worst faults, how hard it is to see ourselves as others see us, how self-destructive behaviors persist even after we've recognized the harm they do.

It's astonishing that in a book that overflows with gorgeous, glittering imagery, the real subject matter is so base. Our flaws, our failures, our weaknesses. Proust is sympathetic and cruel by turns -- but always thorough. I don't see how anyone could read this book and not come out of it understanding themselves, or other people, a little better. ( )

Proust describes everything beautifully...and I do mean everything. When he's describing something that you care about - books, say, or love, or music - it's pretty great to read. When it's something else - flowers, medieval painters, more fucking flowers - it gets a little boring. So next time you hear people arguing about Proust, and one person says he's one of the most gorgeous writers ever, and the other person says he's fucking boring...they're both right. ( )

(There are no "spoilers," I promise.)

Combray
"A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the sequence of the hours, the order of the years and worlds" — bedrooms; "the immobility of things" — habit — the magic lantern — weather; barometers — "Bathilde! Come and stop your husband from drinking cognac!" — the consolation of Mama's goodnight kiss — M. Swann — "our social personality is a creation of the minds of others" — "like good poets forced by the tyranny of rhyme to find their most beautiful lines" — "Since we tear the band off the newspaper so feverishly ever morning, they ought to change things and put into the newspaper, oh, I don't know, perhaps ... Pascal's Pensées!" — Françoise's "imperious" code — "that gesture" of Swann's "so like his father" — photographs and the "mechanical mode of representation" — George Sand — the Celtic belief of lost souls — the madeleine and tisane: "the truth I am seeking is not in the drink, but in me" — "the immense edifice of memory" — "a sort of twilight of flowers" — where everybody knows your name — "What, Françoise, more asparagus! Why, you've got a regular mania for asparagus this year." — the church at Combray — "it was always to the steeple that we had to return, always the steeple that dominated everything" — M. Legrandin, "the epitome of the superior man" — "in which Art allowed me a presentment of what it was," or actors' names — the lady in pink — Giotto's Virtues and Vices — the "different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read" — Bloch, barometers, Berma, and Bergotte's "mirrors of truth which were his books" — the etymological corruption of saints' names — Léonine's "little routine" — M. Vinteuil — "It was in the Month of Mary that I remember beginning to be fond of hawthorns" — "theatre in bed" — asparagus and chamber pots — Françoise's paradoxical pity — alter egos — the Méséglise way (the way by Swann's) and the Guermantes way — "blushing bodies undone by breath" — Gilberte among the pink hawthorns — "There's certainly a lot of music-making going on in that establishment" — the weather — Françoise's loyalty — "Zut, Zut, Zut, Zut" — landscapes; desire — sadism; voyeurism — the Vivonne — water lilies; neurasthenics — names; colors — "these dreams warned me that since I wanted to be a writer someday, it was time to find out what I was meant to write about" — Mme. de Guermantes — the depths of impressions — the two steeples of Martinville joined by Vieuxvicq's — "the smell of invisible, enduring lilacs"

Swann in Love
Mme. Verdurin's salon — Odette — "the bouquet of artificial pansies" — Dr. Cottard — "It's precisely the andante that completely paralyzes me" — the bronzes on the Beauvais couch — Vinteuil's "phrase or harmony ... that had opened his soul so much wider" — "a pure work of music contains none of the logical relationships whose alteration in language reveals madness" — Swann's connections — "a last chrysanthemum" — tea; cigarette cases; hearts — love and aesthetics — "searching for Eurydice" — straightening the cattleyas — "the little phrase had the power to open up within him the space it needed" — fashionable society — the Comte de Forcheville and Brichot — Cottard's "puns" — Dumas's Francillon and a Japanese salas — the effect of forbidden names on the little clan — "sonata-snake" — les cadeaux — "a painful need to master her entirely" — the bedroom light is on — "this strange phase of love" — jealousy; knowledge; letters — walking through the Bois imagining Chatou — "the Faubourg Saint-Germain's Noli me tangere" — the romance of railway timetables and the consolation of maps — Odette makes orangeade — Wagner — "the need to hear, and to understand, music" — preparations for absence — "his love was no longer operable" — M. de Charlus — influence — "Delightful—I'm turning into a real neurotic" — "We do not tremble except for ourselves, except for those we love" — Balzac's tigers — the staircase at the Marquise de Saint-Euverte's and "an empty milk can on a doormat" — men's monocles — the Princess des Laumes — "the phrases of Chopin with their sinuous and excessively long necks" — love; cholera — La Pérouse and the rue de La Pérouse — violins; "this body of sound" — an anonymous letter; suspicions — Théodore Barrière's Les Filles de Marbre — "Reality is therefore something that has no relation to possibilities, any more than the stab of a knife in our body has any relation to the gradual motions of the clouds overhead" — on the island in the Bois — "For what we believe to be our love, or our jealousy, is not one single passion, continuous and indivisible. They are composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, which are ephemeral but by their uninterrupted multitude give the impression of continuity..." — brothel banter — Machard's portrait — Napoleon III and Forcheville "in the twilight of a dream" — retrospective presages

Place-Names: The Name
the bedroom at Balbec's Grand-Hôtel de la Plage — "the beauty of landscapes" — Gothic steeples and sea storms — place-names: "proper names like the names people have" — "the countries we long for occupy a far larger place in our actual life ... than the country in which we happen to be" — Gilberte in the Champs-Élysées — "we no longer love anyone else when we are in love" — imaginary letters — Bergotte on Racine — the name Swann — Mme. Blatin and Les Débats — the beauties in the allée des Acacias — Mme. Swann — "a veritable fever for the dead leaves" of the Bois de Boulogne — automobiles; changes in fashion; the passing of time — "The reality I had known no longer existed" ( )