Swann's Way (1913)

Second time around, I have no idea why I was so focused on Proust's weird bougieness the first time. He's lovely, and this book is lovely, and I found it the most comforting thing I could imagine. ( )

I've been listening to this book on and off for quite a while. I've listened to some parts over again. It's beautifully written, with lyrical, lush depictions of people and places and the feelings of the narrator and other characters.

I still have no idea how to describe this book. I totally, though, want to read or listen to the next two volumes. ( )

OMG. Sure, 'omg' is a very modern slang word, but it applies to this novel. Swann is a melodramatic dude who falls in love with a rather modern woman named Odette. Swann pursues her for years, being odiously possessive, dishonest, and manipulative with her all along, swearing he loves her and that his love is why he acts the way he does about her. He does end up married to her, but by the end of the account of his years 'courting' her, I was a bit surprised that she would accept him. For all the narrator's insistence that Odette was not intelligent, she seemed smart enough to see through Swann and find someone more trustworthy to marry. The narrator seems bipolar, throughout the book, though I was a bit confused as to who the narrator is from one section to the next. In the last chapter Swann is old, married to Odette, and has a daughter named Gilberte, who the narrator falls in love with, and the narrator in this section is a boy still living with his parents, so he can't be the same narrator as the one telling about Swann's romantic obsession. I was not really impressed with Proust's storytelling so far, with his narrators being so unsatisfactorily introduced, and so many pages devoted to drivel. ( )

I read Proust's masterpiece back in 1985. What did I know of life then? Nothing!

Having recently read a Smithsonian editorial that made fun of the novels, and remembering all too well one particular hilariously snippy Monty Python sketch (the Summarize Proust Competition), I too wanted to be able to rub elbows with the elite intellectuals who mocked Proust, so I picked up the first of three volumes (the weighty Moncrieff editions because I have no french whatsoever) and got started. The first few pages were tough going, but soon I became mesmerized, then I fell in love, and by the end of the summer I was tucking flowers into the plackets of my blouses and wearing bows in my hair.

Oh you kids. “Swann's Way” is the swiftest, plottiest volume in the monster, with “Un Amour de Swann” a little novel in itself, with a beginning, middle, end, and all that sort of thing. Originally drafted in a mere three volumes, the Recherche grew as Proust re-Proustified the later volumes while waiting for publication; many readers have wished that that long mini-book could be recovered. The pace picks up again in the last volume, which the author's death prevented him from reworking it, so that a dinner party—one of the greatest scenes in all literature, by the way—takes only a few hundred pages to describe, what with the jolts of consciousness with which Proust bracketed it, while the first half of the volume is impossibly brilliant about the first World War without ever leaving Paris. It's best to have time for such idleness, best to be so besotted with the possibilities of literature that you love rather than loathe the lengthiness; which is to say that you need to encounter Proust at the right time of your life and possibly even the right place, so that Proust's times and places become yours. I hope that luck will be yours; without it, the task may prove impossible. If you find yourself fatally at a loss to know what and why you're reading, check out Samuel Beckett's slim monograph; for all its showy intellectuality—it's a youthful work—it's still the best compass for getting across that ocean.

Read it twice in English - took me a year the first time and six years the second. I re-read it once again in English this time around, which is a whole new level of pleasure and I hope will take me many more years to come. After all I'm more mature and also wiser...I really recommend the Proust Screenplay by Harold Pinter, which accomplishes the amazing feat of boiling the whole thing down into a 90-minute screenplay without losing any of the flavour. When I felt lost at the beginning of my first reading, Pinter's work revealed the whole structure to me and enabled me to carry on.

So far, I've found reading Proust a strangely claustrophobic experience. I got the overwhelming impression of a man who observes, dissects and minutely describes life, but perhaps forgets to live it?

As a reader, I feel the novel takes me over. There is no room for separate interpretation or thought. The author leaves no margin for error. It's a bit like the difference between watching butterflies fluttering in a meadow and having them pinned and labelled, dead, on a board for inspection. Some books just have that effect on me. The great one, that is. ( )

I'm not sure what to make of this. At one level, nothing much happens - the first 20 odd pages are about him struggling to go to sleep and how is mind wanders when it does. It wanders back to his childhood and his relationship with his mother and father. this then moves on to where he spent childhood holidays, and the village. It introduces Swann, who is then the topic of the second section, which retells a love affair in his life. The third section is back with the narrator, and feels to be later than the first section.
In the book not a lot actually happens. It does, however, do not a lot it in very languid and descriptive prose. It almost seduces you. ( )