Initially published in French between 1913 and 1927, Marcel Proust’s seven-part work In Search of Lost Time (also called Remembrance of Things Past) hInitially published in French between 1913 and 1927, Marcel Proust’s seven-part work In Search of Lost Time (also called Remembrance of Things Past) has undergone a befuddling series of translations. The “Moncrieff–Kilmartin–Enright” version, made available for this Modern Library publication, is essentially the original C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation with further revisions by Terence Kilmartin in 1984 (based on the 1954 definitive French text) and D. J. Enright in 1992.
As I finish each volume, I will rate and review it individually. All seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time can be found on my À-la-recherche-du-temps-perdu shelf. They are also listed here:
________________________________________ In Search of Lost Time 1. Swann’s Way – my review (★★★★★) 2. Within a Budding Grove – my review (★★★★☆) 3. The Guermantes Way – my review (currently reading) 4. Sodom and Gomorrah – my review (☆☆☆☆☆) 5. The Captive¹ – my review (☆☆☆☆☆) 6. The Fugitive¹ – my review (☆☆☆☆☆) 7. Time Regained² – my review (☆☆☆☆☆) ________________________________________
¹In the Modern Library edition, The Captive and The Fugitive are combined into a single volume, but I will rate/review them separately.
²The Kilmartin–Enright revision of Time Regained is based on an English translation by Andreas Mayor, as Scott Moncrieff died in 1930....more
I like to read books about people’s fucked up relationships more than I like to read about how lovely the flowers smell along the French seaside (unleI like to read books about people’s fucked up relationships more than I like to read about how lovely the flowers smell along the French seaside (unless of course the flowers are a blatant euphemism for something else), so I did not end up rating Within a Budding Grove quite as highly as I rated Swann’s Way.
The first half of the book was great and made true my prediction that the narrator would experience a “Swann–Odette” type of relationship with Gilberte, replete with its ups and downs and its ins and outs. Here the narrator expounds on what his love for Gilberte feels like to him:
When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other’s feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.
Much of this section reiterates what the narrator talked a lot about in the first book, which is how the happiness we attain for ourselves is based more in the exhilaration of wanting something than it does in actually possessing it in the end.
The second half of this book finds the narrator on summer vacation with his grandmother in the fictional coastal town of Balbec, which I think is probably in Normandy or something. Until the end where things start getting interesting again with Albertine, a lot of this was flyover country for me. It isn’t that I don’t like reading about rich kids and their grandmother’s snobby friends but none of it had the bite of a good old-fashioned Mme. Verdurin parlor gathering, if you catch my drift.
But then Albertine and her band of friends do enter the picture during the final third of this novel and Proust soars anew, demonstrating his eminence at describing the concept of memory, flirting with our own understanding of it, and putting into words an experience we’ve all had recalling the facial features of a person no longer in our line of sight. Essentially, our memory of the particulars of a person’s face is known to be transient. We begin “forgetting” details the moment we can no longer see the person, our memory of them immediately undergoing distortion, after which only as the person reenters our presence does that memory once again assimilate into the “real thing.”
The same is true, in many ways, for other details which we accumulate by way of the senses. The taste of an orange, for example, is a taste that—for an orange lover—is known to be delicious, and one can be reminded of the fact that the orange is delicious but the actual taste of the orange eludes us until the moment at which we once again bite into one. Before that, and then again immediately after the flavor of it has left our palate, we are able only to rely on our untrustworthy memory of it which we know to morph and elude, and which supplies us with a superficial impression of deliciousness but without the details necessary to constitute what that deliciousness might taste like. With human beings, this cycle, repeating itself as it does, is further confounded by the idea that while our memory of a person fluctuates against the tide of reality, the reality itself is changing. A person in her late teenage years is no longer the same person we see before us in her twenties, and this additional dimension of change complicates our impression of a person to the extent that we have perhaps to admit that we can never really know a person.
Proust also excels with comedy. And I mention this because I think it’s funny to imagine someone finding Proust funny. I don’t know too many people who read Marcel Proust for his comic moments, and I certainly don’t read Marcel Proust for his comic moments, but those moments nevertheless are there. There is a passage in which the narrator is playing a game with Albertine similar to Monkey in the Middle, and he is so preoccupied with the idea of Albertine’s hands touching his that when they suddenly do touch his, he becomes over the moon with excitement and disbelief that this glorious moment is happening to him. Not even a beat later, however, the girl shatters his reveries with a comment like, “Dude, I’ve been trying to give you the ball. Why are you not taking it? Guys, we can’t invite this guy to play with us anymore. He’s a complete tool who doesn’t know how to take the ball when it is handed to him. Seriously, what is wrong with him?”
Reading this book took me a bit longer than I expected, and I will probably not start on Volume III until I have cleared enough time out of my schedule to enjoy it as much as I hope to. Until then, while I know I may begin forgetting the specifics of what I’ve enjoyed so far in In Search of Lost Time, I’m confident I’ll retain at least the impression of the enjoyment it has made on me, which—whether we like to believe so or not—has to be enough.
Memory is a slippery little sucker. It constitutes an elusive, transient cache of data, the reliability of which decreases in reverse proportion to thMemory is a slippery little sucker. It constitutes an elusive, transient cache of data, the reliability of which decreases in reverse proportion to the length of time it has been stored. It can even be a blatant liar! How often have we found ourselves convinced of the details a particular memory only to have those details called into question by some testimony or other of which we have been made newly aware? It is almost frightening how quickly and naturally the bytes of our mind can be removed and supplanted by ones more convenient, ones designed to soothe our psyche, thereby allowing us to live at peace with ourselves.
Marcel Proust was not a psychologist, but he may as well have been, what with his ridiculous understanding (the kids are using the word “ridiculous” to mean like, way amazing, these days) of the fluidity of memory, and more specifically, of involuntary memory, which may or may not be any more reliable than that which is conjured consciously. Though we believe a person or a place from our past remains stationary in our idea of them while its true-life counterpart adapts and progresses, Proust shows us how memory can have a life of its own, as well. And yet when his narrator bites into that famous piece of sponge cake and transports us back to the days of his French childhood, we go willingly, not hesitating to question the accuracy or the validity of his musings. Because it doesn’t matter. When in Proust’s world, it is the remarks on human nature and memory and social customs and relationships and whatever else comes with that trip that makes it so worthwhile.
The best part of Swann’s Way, by far, is the intricate portrayal, from beginning to end ((view spoiler)[but evidently not really the end (hide spoiler)]), of the relationship between Swann and Odette. Their relationship is doomed from the start, being based on superficialities at its onset and becoming increasingly toxic as it progresses, yet by no means does its toxicity ever invalidate the love Swann has for Odette. That part of it is wholeheartedly genuine. For anyone who has ever been in such a relationship, it is kind of wild how realistically it is depicted. For anyone who has ever witnessed objectively a friend in such a relationship, it is kind of wild how recognizable the signs are of its toxicity, and how it seems to tap us on the shoulder, reminding us of the ease with which we must at the time have said, “I wonder why he doesn’t just leave her and move on with his life?”
This book really blew me away. For all the difficulties I anticipated reading Marcel Proust, I have to admit how pleased I was by its readability. I think what I enjoyed most, besides its perfectly constructed sentences, was that if I had been able to track the number of times I would encounter a passage that so exquisitely peels away the complicated layers of the human condition, exposing its unadulterated innards, I...well, I suppose I’d have reached a pretty high number. Having embarked on In Search of Lost Time in full ignorance, I have no idea what to expect next, but part of me wonders if “Swann in Love” isn’t meant to foreshadow the budding of a similar relationship between the narrator and Gilberte. I suppose we’ll find out.
Loading...
