In Search of Lost Time - Volume V & VI: The Captive & The Fugitive

Volume V & VI - The Captive/The Prisoner & The Fugitive/The Sweet Cheat Gone/Albertine Gone - Marcel Proust




So 2 volumes for the price of one this time round. Others may be doing this differently, but my love of symmetry means that I will be trying to get through these 2 volumes (conveniently bundled together by Vintage) in the next 2 months.

I haven't quite decided whether I'll read both back to back, or take a break between the 2.

Looking at the alternative titles to the 6th volume suggest that we might be seeing even more of Albertine!

I'm 50 pages in and I'm already getting wound up by the way our humble narrator treats Albertine!

yeah... you just want to give him a slap or two eh?

I've finished volume 5 so am going to save volume 6 for October. My thoughts, as posted on my 50 book challenge, are as follows:

I'm cheating a little bit here, as I'm reading the vintage edition which includes this volume along with the sixth in a single book...but I fancied a break so am going to treat the 2 volumes as separate books!

I think this one might be vying with the opening volume as my favourite yet. It's funny how my reading habits have changed over the years, because what I liked most about this volume was that there was much less going on and much more time was spent inside the narrators head. We were back to Proust's sublime dissections of human nature. What is so incredible about his writing is that he manages to make eye wateringly detailed deconstructions of thoughts and feelings still read beautifully. Virigina Woolf is quoted as saying, of Proust, "Oh if I could write like that."

I have never kept notes while I'm reading, as I know some people like to do, but I have seriously considered taking up the practice while reading Proust, because I find it so hard to keep track of the highlights! Whether it is a beautiful descriptive passage, a particularly profound insight or just a perfectly concise idea the gems come too thick and fast to recall later. With that in mind, off the top of my head personal highlights of this volume were some excellent descriptions of music and some really intriguing thoughts on dreaming and waking and the transition between the two. I was also interested in the parallel relationships of Marcel/Albertine and Charlus/Morel and the narrators seeming ignorance of the similarities.

If there had to be a criticism, it's hard to ignore the increasing number of inconsistencies in the plot (mainly because they are helpfully pointed out in the notes!) But somehow because of the scale and historic significance of the work, these feel more like interesting little curiosities much like mis-prints and printing errors that are coveted by rare book collectors.

I'm going to have a break from Proust until the end of the month but am very much looking forward to the next one.