Just starting out, though it does promise the prospect of Marcel trampling a sleazy man's top-hat into the ground.

The third part of the Search for Lost time, and also the longest, I didn't enjoy this as much as the first two. It perhaps lacks some of the excitement that the first two have in their storyline, and when this is combined with certain scenes that seem to go on for ever, it is just a bit harder to get into. What can still be appreciated though is the humour, and the same quality of writing as the first two, but I think many readers will find some sections of this book boring. However, in a work four thousand pages long, it would be surprising if a uniform and outstanding quality were to be maintained throughout, I am just hoping that the remaining volumes return to brilliance. ( )

Volume III of Proust’s extraordinary series leads the reader up the exclusive social ladder of French society to mingle with Duchesses, Princesses, and Dukes.

Proust, as an intellectually superior narrator with highly sensitive observation and acute analytical skills, tells his story from the eyes of an idealistic, vulnerable, emotional young man. Some may say he is a conniving opportunist, while others may say he is just a naive young man looking for adventure and romance. In any case, with each new experience, each time he falls in love, each rung up the social ladder he climbs, he modestly feels he is striving for the unattainable. He is obsessive and relentless. And when he finally has his goal within reach, he shifts his focus to a bigger prize, a better love, a new goal.

In “Swans Way”, Proust makes the simple intellectual declaration “our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people.” In “Guermantes Way”, he comes to the realization that a person does not “stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions…….but is a shadow which we can never penetrate……..a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.”

As Proust navigates his way up the slippery rungs of the social ladder, he finds that social etiquette requires superficial behavior; a continuous display of glamour and wealth, impeccable manners, and strict adherence to social rules. Scratch the surface and you find a lot of narcissistic, narrow-minded, hypocritical people. There appears to be very little real friendship, loyalty, love and devotion. Even marriages are mutually arranged for convenience.

A variety of new characters are introduced in Guermantes Way, and again, some of them are modeled after Proust’s many friends and acquaintances. The fictitious Duchess de Guermantes took on the personality of the Countess Laure de Chevigne, and the colorful naughty prostitute Rachel who insincerely connived to get possession of Robert de Saint-Loups’ precious heirloom necklace was a character shaped from the grand French courtesan Emilienne Andre’ d’Alencon.

Volume II, Within A Budding Grove, won the French Goncourt Prize and Guermantes Way is every bit as good....actually, even better. ( )

My least favourite volume so far, which is not to distract from how good some of it is. The writing at its finest moments is breathtaking (it would give things away to mention what they are), but I did lose some interest during the most drawn out dinner parties. The book is very cynical about the society it studies, but is doubtless justified in being so. I assume that the journey from worship to scorn of high society mirrors Proust's own - and he makes a thoroughly convincing case. ( )

Quotation from page 123.

'Was it, however solely the voice that, because it was alone, gave me this new impression which tore my heart? Not at all; It was rather that this isolation of the voice was like a symbol, an evocation, a direct consequence of another isolation, that of my grandmother, for the first time separated from me. The commands or prohibitions which she constantly addressed to me in the ordinary course of life, the tedium of obedience or the fire of rebellion which neutralised the affection that I felt for her, were at this moment eliminated and indeed might be eliminated for ever (since my grandmother, no longer insisting on having me with her under her control, was in the act of expressing her hope that I would stay at Dancieeres altogether, or would at any rate extend my visit for as long as possible, since both my health and my work might benefit from the change); and so, what I held compressed in this little bell at my ear was our mutual affection, freed from the conflicting pressures which had daily counteracted it, and henceforth irresistible, upligting me entirely. My grandmother, by telling me to stay, filled me with an anxious, an insensate longing to retun. This freedom which she was granting me henceforward, and to which I had never dreamed that she would consent, appeared to me suddenly as sad as my freedon of action might be after her death (when I should still love her and she would for ever have abondoned me). "Granny!" I cried to her, "Granny!", and I longed to kiss her, but I had beside me only the voice, a phantom as impalpable as the one that would perhaps come back to visit me when my grandmother was dead. "Speak to me!". But then, suddenly, I ceased to hear the voice, and was left even more alone. My grandmother could no longer hear; she was no longer in communication with me; we had ceased to be close to each other, to be audible to each other; I continued to call her, groping the empty darkness, feeling that calls from her must also be going astray, I quivered with the same anguish which I had felt once before in the distant past, when, as a little child, I had lost her in a cowd, an anguish due less to my not finding her than to the thought that she must be searching for me, must be saying to herself that I was searching for her, an anguish not unlike that which I was later to feel, on the day when we speak to those who longer reply and when we long for them at least hear all the things we never said to them, and our assurance that we are not unhappy. It seemed to me as though it was already a beloved ghost that I had allowed to lose herself in the ghostly world, and, standing alone befere the instrument, I went on vainly repeating: "Granny! Granny!", as Orpheus, left alone, repeats the name of this dead wife...' ( )