Yes!!!

3.5*

I was heading to a 4* rating until the final chapter. Marcel baffled me in it with his abrupt volte face with regard to Albertine. Despite this, this 4th volume of the In Search of Lost Time series was much more enjoyable to me than the previous books. Or perhaps I am just getting habituated to Proust's style so that it doesn't annoy or bore me as much as it originally did... ( )

All of the usual suspects are back in volume seven of Remembrance of Things Past. Swann, Guermantes, Gilberte, and Albertine are alive and well. Proust delves deeper into human emotions and behaviors in Cities of the Plain. This time he explores sexual deception in the form of homosexuality as a pact sealed with Gomorrah. A great deal of the action takes place at Guermantes' party. The narrator is not even sure he wants to go to the shindig, but he's also not sure he has been invited. A certain snobbery permeates the narration. Words like scandal, society, position, connexion (sp), privilege, exclusivity, eminence, aristocracy, class, glamour, regal, and influence pepper the pages.
As an aside, I am growing weary of Proust's long-winded-ness. The man can go on and on. Here is just one example, "It is with these professional organisations that the mind contrasts the taste of the solitaries and in one respect without straining the points of difference, since it is doing no more than copy the solitaries themselves who imagine that nothing differs more widely from organised vice than what appears to them to be a misunderstood love, but with some strain nevertheless, for these different classes correspond, no less than to diverse physiological types, to successive stages, in a pathological or merely social evolution" (p 27).
His obsession with sleep and memory continues. I do adore the illustrations by Philippe Jullian ( )

The least engaging volume so far, but (curiously) the quickest read.

In the narrator's close study of homosexuality, a topic Proust was intimately familiar with, the approach is something like Lorne Greene's New Wilderness: an independent observer dispassionately noting the social habits and interactions among the species. It's a sad portrait of a culture forced underground, aware of and sensitive to its own secret signals and signs. The narrator takes a preoccupied standpoint, elaborating on the topic with the same thoroughness and degree of knowledge he has displayed for everything else.

This theme dominates the volume, but I was more attuned to the developing relationship between the narrator and his love Albertine. The narrator's degree of intimacy with Albertine caught me off guard and I realized belatedly, it's been going on for some time - possibly back to the third volume - but was stated so politely that I didn't catch on until it became obvious. Similarly the narrator is more in focus and his narration more grounded than in the last volume; now we only hear what he hears, and when he adds extraneous information he explains how he learned it. That enabled me to be a firmer judge of his character. I'll forgive his social snobbishness - that's his passion, after all, and he's good at it - but I'm less forgiving when it's turned on the lower classes despite his belief he's above that, and especially of his attitude toward Albertine whom he expects to keep at his beck and call, never mind that's she says she's happy to do it. He's not above getting whiny about it: "You prefer this lady and her friends to me since ... you prefer to leave me here alone, sick and wretched?" I wanted her to tell him off, and I can't imagine what she sees in him, if it is not merely his money (as he fears.)

The narrator feels an abhorrent degree of jealousy, controlling Albertine in every manner than he can, fantasizing of taking it still further: "I would have endured every possible torment, and if that proved insufficient, would have inflicted torments on her, would have isolated her, kept her under lock and key, would have taken from her the little money that she had so that it should be physically impossible for her to make the journey." And not ten pages earlier he was off-handedly contemplating breaking things off with her, deciding marriage to her would be impossible. He lies outrageously to her multiple times in order to manipulate her, restricts who she can be in the company of and when, and is as liable to be jealous of her in the company of women as of men. There's a measure of self-study about where this stems from - his lack of self-confidence, his uncertainty of her feelings for him, maybe some of his wariness stemming from Swann's story - but there's not nearly the degree of self-castigation over his jealousy that's called for.

Given a few hints that have been dropped, and the reputation of Proust and this work, I have to assume a tragedy is being prepared and this villainy won't go unanswered. Swann conducts a self-assessment of his own jealously which made me wish for a clearer memory of the first volume, since I think he's selling short his capacity. But I appreciated his comment about the uniqueness of one's memory for experience. Even if you can share memories of an experience with someone else, your emotional response to that experience is uniquely your own, and over time you accumulate a collection of these lonely memories of feeling that are unshared by anyone. I also liked the (unrelated) insight about how the young can throw social standing to the wind in a flagrant display of rebellion, but will face a tough uphill battle if they ever wish to restore themselves. ( )

Kind of a tough read, but good. I want to read the series from the start. ( )