Swann's Way

"Swann's Way," the first book in Marcel Proust's epic "In Search of Lost Time" is definitely a challenging read. But I got so much out of it and enjoyed it so thoroughly, I really didn't mind.Plotwise, there are essentially two different stories here. Our faithful narrator famously dips a cake known as a madeliene into tea and is flooded with memories from his childhood. Branching off into a tangential story about a figure from the narrator's childhood, the book also tells the story of Swann and his love affair with the unworthy and promiscuous Odette. The book's prose is just astoundingly beautiful and filled with eye-opening ideas and philosophical points. This is definitely a book that I would get more out of reading it again.Looking forward to reading the remaining six volumes of this series as the year progresses.

This is the battered copy I struggled with in 1971. Proust or his narrator may have been unable to sleep waiting for his mother's kiss. I lay awake trying to unravel the long sentences and wanting to call for help.

A wonder of lyrical introspection; an enthralling guide to the labyrinths of the mind.

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.

Five stars. Review to come. This volume alone, of course, could inspire multiple volumes of reactions and analysis, but it would only be fair to add my meager offerings after I close Volume VII.

Not going to lie, this was a challenge to read and it took me 4 months. "A Love of Swann's" was the biggest chore as it was just energy draining to read about Swann's fanatical jealousy of Odette's imagined (or not) other lovers for two hundred pages. For a few weeks I only managed a page a day. The comparative lightness of the introductory "Combray" and the charm of the childhood crush in the concluding "Place-names: The Name" sections were a relief in comparison.TriviaAn observation from mid-read:I'm very keen on ASMR* these days, so re-reading the madeleine passage now, it seems very ASMRish to me: "I carried to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had let soften a piece of madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake-crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening in me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause. It had immediately made the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not in me, it was me." - pg. 49 in the Lydia Davis translation.Previously the only literature that has had any ASMR association is a passage from Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf: ""'K . . . R . . .' said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say “Kay Arr” close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper’s, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. A marvellous discovery indeed—that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life!"*Autonomic Sensory Meridian Response = a pleasurable tingling sensation in the head that radiates down the spine and sometimes further throughout the body. Very few people have this and the apocryphal story is that those who have it will never physically meet any other person that does have it (I can personally vouch for this). With the advent of the internet, experiencers have made connections esp. through cult videos on YouTube where ASMRtists speak softly and perform friction sounds which are the most likely to trigger the response. Painting videos by Bob Ross are also well known to trigger the response due to his gentle, pleasant manner of speaking.

The opening book of In Search of Lost Time is Swann's Way. It in turn is divided into three sections, the first being Combray. We enter the world of the narrator as a young boy when he is trying to sleep while being interrupted by his thoughts. It is these thoughts, described as "reflections on what I had just read" that engage us on the first page of this first section of the first of many volumes. The young boy gradually returns to sleep only to find himself dreaming of the origins of woman from the rib of the first man. It may be that this is one way to view the beginnings of Proust's long tale as the origin of the story of one man's life from the imagination of our narrator as he remembers the events of his life as a young boy at the village of Combray in the house of his Aunt Leonie with his parents. Why is it that reading generates in the imagination of the young boy such strong reflections that they interrupt his sleep? One way to answer this is to look first at the mind from which the imagination emanates. It is a mind described thusly,"And wasn't my mind also like another crib in the depths of which I felt I remained ensconced . . . When I saw an external object, my awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, lining it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever directly touching its substance; it would volatize in some way before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought near a wet object never touches its moisture because it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation." (p 85)Marcel's mind (for Marcel is his name) is invigorated by his reading "from inside to outside, toward the discovery of the truth," reading that aroused his emotions as he experienced the dramatic events in the book. It is these emotions that bring with them an intensity that makes Marcel feel more alive than any other activity. He relates,"And once the novelist has put us in that state, in which, as in all purely internal states, every emotion is multiplied tenfold, in which his book will disturb us as might a dream but a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer, then see how he provokes us within one hour all possible happiness and all possible unhappiness just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them" (p 87)It is not only reading that defines young Marcel, but also his relationships with people around him, not only his mother and aunt, but others including the faithful servant Francoise, the wealthy Jewish neighbor Swann, also Legrandin and Bloch who are introduced to him at Combray. Bloch is interesting in part because he introduces Marcel to the writing of Bergotte. It is Bergotte who above all others entrances the young boy."In the first few days, like a melody with which one will become infatuated but which one cannot yet make out, what I was to love so much in his style was not apparent to me. I could no put down the novel of his that I was reading, but thought I was interested only in the subject, as during that first period of love when you go to meet a woman every day at some gathering, some entertainment, thinking you are drawn to it by its pleasures. Then I noticed the rare, almost archaic expressions he liked to use at certain moments, when a hidden wave of harmony, an inner prelude, would heighten his style; and it was also at theses moments that he would speak of the "vain dream of life," the "inexhaustible torrent of beautiful appearance," the "moving effigies that forever ennoble the venerable and charming facades of our cathedrals," that he expressed an entire philosophy, new to me, through marvelous images" (pp 95-96)Reading Bergotte yields a "joy" within Marcel that allowed him to experience "a deeper, vaster, more unified region" of himself. It is through such experiences of reading and the resulting flights of imagination that the reader is introduced to the book that to be read and understood must yield similar emotions for the reader. Yet it is not only reading that thrills Marcel in Proust's story but also, as can be seen from the description of Bergotte's novel, music and its even stronger impact on his imagination.

amazing writing...

I’m on a life raft floating across a sea of words, pulled into swirling tidal pools to observe the rich, vibrant forms spawning like phantasmagoric aliens (forms that once appeared mundane but only because, previously, no one had observed them as closely), pulled deep down by the undertow—note the hilarious mating habits in-situ of the foolish Parrot Fish—pulled out across hyaline waters sparkling like blue diamonds to drift peacefully in the doldrums before being abruptly dashed over great cataclysms of horror and despair; I’m a fool, a madman, an obsessive-compulsive; I’m fragile like a porcelain flower, a mother whose son was taken from her before it could breast-feed; I’m a laser, a microscope, a telescope, a catalog, a representation of the inner life of an artist much deeper than any Portrait of. I am going Swann’s Way.

If one were a close observer of both (in)humanity and other (in)organic states with an addiction to the documentation of one’s thoughts, one might spend a lifetime writing a never-ending story in an inevitable (and eternally recurring in its inevitability because words can never capture the entirety of reality) failed attempt to capture all of life in a mad swoop. Much of literature (if not all) is an attempt to capture at least some corner of this life (whether it be outer or inner), but for Proust that corner bursts out tesseract to encompass the very existence of a man from childhood until elderhood through the prism of memory (and not just anyone’s memory, but clearly the memory of an autistic savant who can conjure up the texture of a grain of sand in the crease of the toe of a boot worn on the day a particular slant of light reached through a window that was normally closed but on this particular day was opened due to some certain random but explicable convergence of events). The unfurling of these thoughts is as delicate as the dance of a sea anemone in a gentle undersea breeze, if a breeze that occasionally rips the limbs off the anemone and taunts you with the inner juices dripping from the dismembered tentacle. At times, I could not take this torture, the agony and horror of Swann’s idiotic, naïve love (and, perhaps, even more so, the horror of seeing my own reflection in Swann’s way); and knowing how he ends up if not knowing how he gets to ending up that way (because I have not yet read the subsequent books of In Search of Lost Time), made it all the more painful. Thank Proust for the slapstick hypochondria of Auntie Leonie and the aristocratic wit and folly to brighten the murder of love.

Softly flowing linguistic slitherings mingle with crisp literary devices, even mundane ones—such as cliffhangers—profoundly philosophical musings that achieve near Zen-states of enlightenment, and an unparalleled grasp of language induces me to declare Swann’s Way to be the work of a schizophrenic witch, and the greatest work of literature ever written…and this is only book one. But nothing I’ve ever read, certainly, compares to it. Which isn’t to say I haven’t received a greater degree of pleasure from other works, but pleasure is not the only measure of success. In fact, as Buddhism would ask you to consider, pleasure is ephemeral and disappointing. One doesn’t read Proust for “fun.” One reads Proust to become lost, amazed, and weakened, to learn, struggle, and grow, and, in the end, to admire what it is possible to create with dedication and passion and skill.

On a final mundane note, I do highly recommend this edition. Although I have not read the Moncrieff version, based upon the quality of Lydia Davis’ gorgeous translation, and the notes in the preface regarding the errors and personal emendations made by Moncrieff to Proust’s writing, I would hazard that this is a superior version. Welcome to a peculiar world.

More than a commentary on Swann’s jealousy or M. Charlus’s homosexuality or the frivolity of the Guermantes’ sorties, Marcel Proust’s monumental work In Search of Lost Time paints the unsuccessful reconstruction of a forgone world and a lost existence from fickle memories, which like morning mists would fade with the rising sun. The narrator Marcel, longing for a past that didn’t exist but must be created, sought to experience Bergson’s continuous time rather than the fragmented and still-framed instantaneous moments by attempting to blur the boundaries between Cambray and Paris, childhood and adolescence, and Swann and himself and integrate here and there, before and after, and him and me through memory fragments of previous objects, people and sensations. As in a neural network or a mind-map, the madeleine linked his aunt to his mother, who in turn was linked to Albertine through jealousy, which also connected Marcel with Saint Loop and Swann, who, as with his (Marcel’s) grandmother, linked his childhood and adolescence. And through recollection, Marcel would try to relive the buried years and resurrect his grandmother and Albertine.But even during the narrative, Marcel realized memory’s willfulness and the variation in hues, shapes, pitch and timbre between the actual object and its mental reconstruction. When he encountered an old friend, the facial features were so different from his recollection and reconstruction, for better or for worse pregnant with all the emotions, preoccupation, biases, that he could not match face with voice.Because recollected sensation can never equate with the actual experience and time, like a patient thief, steals memories a morsel at a time until one day the owner would realize he was ruined, Marcel ultimately would fail to recapture and assemble stolen sensations and decayed seconds and in the end, must create new moments, new sensations and ultimately a new biography, through the synergy between past experiences and creative imagination. From those deceased hours and decayed memories sprouted In Search of Lost Time, not only Proust’s novel but also that of the narrator. Whether we savor Marcel’s frailness, Swann’s infatuation, Charlus’s pompousness, Franscoise’s independent-mindedness, the sorties’ frivolousness or the social revelation of the Dreyfuss Affair, we can enjoy Proust’s classic without resorting to Marxist or Freudian or Feminist critique. And the sentences, like the serpentine Amazon, seemed to flow unceasingly into the distant horizon carrying with it the sparkling sunlight. Although ascending the novel’s three thousand pages appears precipitous, the effort will be well worth the while and, at the end of the adventure, the reader can rest on the crisp apex and savor time’s transience and memory’s playfulness as if they were alpine zephyrs.

My summer of re-reading Proust got off to a great start; it turns out that I hadn't forgotten everything about Swann's Way (which I read about 10 years ago), but that I was also much better equipped to deal with it now. It's really not that hard, it's a lot funnier than I'd realized as an undergrad, and I no longer feel the need to take all the essayistic interludes as gospel truth. This translation is beautiful, whatever it demerits when it comes to literal meaning; Proust really is an extraordinary observer of mental habits, and this volume has enough variation that you won't get bored slogging through too much of the same sort of stuff.

But that variation comes at a price: there is no obvious reason for 'Swann in Love,' which is the central third of the novel (and, let's be honest, a free standing novel), to be there at all. The narrator can't possibly know much more of the story than 'Swann fell in love with a hussy, and eventually married her,' but the tale itself is narrated by an omniscient observer. It's great, and I'd much rather read it a third or fourth time than tackle the Albertine novels (Fugitive/Prisoner) again. But it makes Swann's Way very disjointed. Yes, Swann in Love raises many of the issues that A la Recherche will tackle for the next however many thousand pages (jealousy and homosexuality as types of the difficulty of knowing others from their actions, or the difficulty of properly predicting our own behavior or that of others etc etc...). But I can't help thinking it would have made more sense to publish it separately, and then mix the rest of Swann's Way (including the famous cake and tea scene) into the next volume. That said, I am not Proust, and what the hell do I know? I know that this is well worth reading, and re-read. And I can't wait to get onto 'Within a Budding Grove.'

Sentimental, vivid, and intricate in its management of interior memory / external plot. Finally getting to Proust after all these years.

The last time I read this was in the early 1980s and so it is with a nearly empty set of preconceptions that I am returning to it now to begin this centennial Year of Reading Proust. I do remember the sensation of the words just washing over me, not being quite sure what they were describing (now I can see that the book has virtually no plot and just enough action to keep the prose stirred up a little), and no clear impression of where the rest of the series would go, except certainly later in the life of the Narrator. Proust writes as if he can divide up perception into its constituent atoms and chart the way their paths evolve over time, assembling these bits into a portrait fixed at a particular time and place only if it suits his purposes of depicting a certain character or spotlighting some aspect of his theme. Thus, it is very easy to get disoriented, especially a century after it came out.

I'm boosting my rating a star now over what I had previously. Swann's Way really does belong among the first rank of novels ever written.

It is fascinating to see how certain motifs are woven in and out: music, flowers, social convention, and the advent of the modern world. I am looking forward to watching how these develop over the remaining volumes. If the effect of reading this work is really as life-changing as some have claimed, I am still uncertain, or rather I cannot tell whether it is more so than any other monumental work of literature to which one has been exposed.

A very special age in my life - when I discovered Proust; tasteful enough, I could anytime read again the Swann series.. This one gave me the feeling, for the first time - that I wasn't reading to recall anything when I grew old - but to FEEL it all, then - while reading. A unique flavor of 'time going by'...

There are already many reviews of this book, and I don't want to repeat what has already been written quite well by others. What I would like to add is what a pleasure it is to read this particular translation of Swann's Way by Lydia Davis. Davis and Proust are an odd pair. He is best known for labyrinthine sentences that meander through time and space, while fusing similes and metaphors and myth. The description of the scent of a particular flower or the taste of a particular food could stretch for pages. One party scene is hundreds of pages long. Davis, on the other hand, is known for whole stories that are only a page long, sometimes only a few sentences. She would seem a poor choice to translate Proust, but the tension that arises from their very different writing styles makes for an excellent read. The text is lively and well-paced--I can't believe I'm writing this either, but it's true--once you allow yourself to sink into Proust's world. It is infinitely more readable than the Moncrieff translation.

I finally finished this after I made myself avoid other more entertaining books and buckled down for the ride.

Proust is not easy reading, and to this day I'm only marginally aware of what actually happened in this book. That said, there is a plot to it if you can pay attention and make it through the stream-of-consciousness meanderings. The way he plays with words makes it worth the price of entry, mind you; but this is not for plot and action junkies. In fact I'm not even sure you'll care much for the characters. Near as I can tell, it's about a kid remembering a rich guy he knew as a kid, who fell in love with a slutty chick and married her despite not liking her, and then the kid falls for the rich guy's daughter.

The worst part? I kinda miss the style and voice, and feel compelled to keep reading the remaining five books in the series. Help me.

Swann’s Way (Volume 1 of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past) is not a novel in today’s traditional sense of the word. Instead, it’s a collection of vignettes and observations of one young man’s life. This first volume includes three works: Combray, Swann in Love and Place-Names: The Name.In Combray, Proust’s protagonist rambles on detailed descriptions of his family structure, the social hierarchy of turn-of-the-century France and a number of pastoral settings. It may be trite, but it can easily be said that modern authors simply “don’t write like that anymore.” In Combray, Proust takes a number of pages to describe one garden and several paragraphs to detail the illumination of one leaf. The beauty of the language and the level of detail ensures the readers can develop a complete image of the setting.Swann in Love is a detailed account of Charles Swann’s courting of his beloved Odette. The personal pain he experiences during his love affair will be familiar to many. Swann is hopelessly in love with Odette who manipulates him and generally treats him poorly. The social constructs of the time play a great deal of importance in his ability to win and keep her. Ultimately, social pressures force Odette to detach herself from Swann- even though it is our understanding that Swann is of a superior social class to Odette and her friends.Places-names allows our narrator to tell of his first love, which ironically parallels Swann’s. We learn that his playmate, Gilberte, is actually Swann’s daughter. Her mother is briefly identified as Odette which tells us that the relationship that ended must have been later renewed.My initial impression of Proust is that he isn’t an author you read for plot but for the shear enjoyment of his use of language and the development of his characters. I’m looking forward to starting the second volume, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.

Walter Benjamin, writing on Proust’s In Search of Lost Time series, mentions in passing that it is partly a work resulting from ‘the absorption of a mystic’.Proust is not a mystic, in my view, but a realist - a realist of a certain, unusual type. For Proust understands certain arcane facts about the functioning of our universe. He believes that the universe is too complex to be fully understood or mastered, but at the same time, by concentrating on what we can know, the ways of human-kind, and the animate and inanimate kingdoms*, we can delve in some degree of detail into the idiosyncracies and half-known truths of our world. It is a path related to the ancient wisdoms that is being followed here I believe, followed implicitly in all but name.As such, Proust contributes a certain fecundity to the undergrowth at the far limits of our understanding. In this he joins certain other authors and thinkers, amongst these ranks I include Balzac, Burns (1), Tolstoy (2), Kafka (3), Camus (4), Atget and Schwitters.Ultimately, these (amongst others who share the same implicit understanding) have in common the view that everything is subjective, a projection by each individual of the world, which can neither be proven nor disproven by any outside, objective agency. The default position, once one understands that one cannot master the world, nor share a common platform with others to achieve such mastery, is to dig deeper into the richness, the complexity, the contradictions of the world. It is like looking at a shattered mirror, with only a few shards of reflective glass left intact, attempting to reconstruct the reflection - an ultimately futile task - but being distracted by the colours, textures and patterns which you can see in the shards, and drawing solace and a certain richness of understanding from this part-world.The best passage to illustrate P’s view, that meaning can be attached to all things, and that this allows a rich, idiosyncratic understanding of the world around us, if we do but look, is not the famous madeleines, but a short extract on the beginning of the route when taking the Guermantes way. When taking this route the family would exit through the garden and into the Rue des Perchamps, “…narrow and bent at a sharp angle, dotted with clumps of grass among which two or three wasps would spend the day botanising, a street as quaint as its name, from which, I felt, its odd characteristics and cantankerous personality derived…” The street had long since been demolished (echoes here of Atget’s photographs of condemned Parisian buildings with the demolishers already evident working on the surrounding buildings), and Proust rebuilds the street through memory, preserving its existence, through the remembered image - “…perhaps the last surviving in the world today, and soon to follow the rest into oblivion…” This illustrates ‘lesser’ animates, wasps, equally participating in everyday existence, and the inanimate, the street itself, deriving a personality from its name and individual, slightly eccentric shape. Furthermore, the whole excerpt, an evocation of time and place, relates to a time long gone, and furthermore, of things that no longer exist in place (although they do in time, at least as long as someone is there to remember them. Although what happens to them once that person dies?)Ultimately, this view of the world equates all 'things' as having equal importance, but infinite depth. This is what makes life worth living, an infinite web of relationships, meanings and obscure connections and reasons that cannot be explained, just understood for what they are.Notes:* We know that P. considered the inanimate world, from some early writings on the artist Chardin. Proust noted in this context how the artist was able to show “…the hidden life of the inanimate…”(1) I remember the phrase used in a review of at least 20 years ago, of Burns poem ‘To a mouse’, that stated that he understood ‘the inherent dignity of all living things’. Proust goes one step further in embracing the inanimate into this hierarchy of belief.(2) Isaiah Berlin notes that Tolstoy believed in observable facts rather than the abstract or supernatural: "History, only history, only the sum of the concrete events in time and space...this alone contained the truth...", but at the same time this meshed with the traditional peasant view that although events were too complex to predict, certain protocols and obscure methodologies needed to be heeded in order to receive good fortune.(3) Walter Benjamin argues that Kafka followed ancient wisdoms, articulating in his writing "... the rumour about the true things (a sort of theological whispered intelligence dealing with matters discredited and obsolete)."(4) Camus, speaking of the phenomenologists: they " reinstate the world in its diversity and deny the transcendent power of the reason. The spiritual universe becomes incalculably enriched through them. The rose petal, the milestone, or the human hand are as important as love, desire, or the laws of gravity. Thinking ceases to be unifying or making a semblance familiar in the guise of a major principle. Thinking is learning all over again to see, to be attentive, to focus consciousness; it is turning every idea and every image, in the manner of Proust, into a privileged moment."

To try to review a masterwork like this would be silly, so instead I will simply say (as I did for Crime and Punishment) that this novel is difficult for contemporary American readers--approach with lots of time on your hands. Where my note here differs from my note re: Crime and Punishment is that with this book I say "do approach!" There is a powerful, multi-generational story, here, and it's heartbreaking and lovely. WELL worth your time.

Swann's Way is an opening of this life work and serves to present all kinds of ideas, and all the characters, too. I must admit that I found the book to be much "smaller" and "larger" at the same time. Some passages lead into a great unknkown realm of new ideas and are very philosophical, too, wheras other seem to busy themselves with stuff one could consider to be gossip. It was difficult for me to decide what to think, really, because the ideas I liked were sometimes buried under the rambling of the society. I suppose this is exactly how Proust felt himself most of the time and just shows his genious, but it made reading somewhat laborious. As many readers before me, I also wished I were able to read it in French, because somehow I am not sure whether English does Proust justice. I also compared it with a German translation and I almost think this works better.

Wow! An incredible reading experience. I've hankered after reading Proust for over 40 years, I'm now 63 (retired) and have the time for big reading projects. To be read slowly and carefully so as not to miss the wonderfully descriptive pieces, whether about people, places, flowers, churches, the weather and so on. It makes me want to delve into books about French high society at that time, although what Proust has to say probably says it all. I promised myself to read one volume a year, but I already have an urge to take down volume 2 and begin it very soon.

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 read 300 pages of this before giving up the first time. Only recently did I pick it up and resolve to finish it... but starting again at page 1, as I had forgotten anything about it.This book is great for many reasons. I'll just list random thoughts as I have just finished the novel and cannot gather my thoughts coherently.The structure of the sentences, while it could be seen as unnecessarily serpentine, fits perfectly with the serpentine nature of memories that Proust is so interested in conveying.Proust cares almost EXCLUSIVELY about human perception rather than any kind of objective reality. He's fascinated by how the mind inflates and deflates reality based on perceptions, preconceptions, expectations, and a whole slew of other things that have nothing to do with what is ACTUAL. or maybe he'd say the states of the mind is more real than reality. I was struck by how plain funny a lot of this is. Especially his descriptions of people and their odd, often transparent behavior.I feel really close to Proust because I constantly feel left out of things. I think this book is very much about that feeling of being left out. I mean, the three main stories here have that as a main factor. SPOILERS FOLLOW: The narrator trying to get the attention of the mother, and feeling so desperate when he knows she is in the other room entertaining guests. Then the middle story, of Swann, especially when his relationship with Odette slips, is all about the scenarios (often hilarious) he convinces himself of when she is off doing something else without him. Then the last part about Gilbert was also very much in the same vein. I thought it was very wise that these three relationships that form the bulk of the book all seem to ricochet and reflect off of each other making each one more resonant and powerful, even though they are superficially unconnected.As a note, the first 50 pages are amazing. This is the part about the mother. Then the next 50 or so about Combray are really good too, but then it starts to get kinda unfocused and I was kinda bored towards the end of Part one, well at least until the lesbians woke me up. Part Two was mostly good the whole way through, I was surprised how many ways Proust can describe this relationship and still not seem repetitive, for his descriptions are always so much about internal states and always ring so true. Part Three was also really good. I thought it was wise of him to have gone back in time for Part Two and then to go forward in Part Three and we get to see that Mme Swann is Odette. And we get no explanation as to how they ended up together, but this gap is really effective, I think, because it let's the reader do most of the work in his mind.

I was shocked by how good this was. This first volume had a good pace to it and managed that (almost sublime) blend of plot development and poetic nostalgia. The parallels between Swann's life and the narrator's life were deftly handled and really added emotional punch to the final chapter.

I am looking forward to reading the second volume.

It's probably a rather banal thing to say, but what I really noticed when I picked up the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu again after a long Proust-free period was that I'd completely forgotten how good he is at getting his complicated ideas about art, society, nature and mind across. The story might be frustratingly slow in getting anywhere, but on just about every page there was a phrase that seemed exactly to capture something I could relate to my own experience and give it an extra dimension. One part of you wants to tell the narrator not to fret and reassure him that his mother is going to come up to say good night to him after all in about 500 pages from now, but at the same time you're surfing the ideas as they roll towards you with a reassuringly predictable rhythm that's modulated just enough to keep you alert and focussed as they come at you. The first-person sections are more immediately and obviously appealing than "Un amour de Swann", of course - I even caught myself checking "that most erotic of books, the railway timetable", to see whether I might be able to fit in a trip to Normandy next year to have a look at "Combray" and "Balbec" in real life. It's much easier to identify with the narrator-as-a-small-boy than with Swann the Parisian sophisticate falling for the courtesan Odette, but even so there is a remarkable amount in the development of his affection, need, jealousy and mistrust that strikes a chord. And the Duchess is magnificent!I don't think I could read all seven volumes straight through without a break - I need a bit of laughter and flippancy from time to time, and that's something Proust would dismiss as the unworthy province of the small-minded Verdurins. But now that I've started the re-read, I am in the mood again, and the other volumes are going to have to follow sooner or later. As a pastime, re-reading Proust certainly beats "strangling animals, golf and masturbating"...

Proust’s epic opens with what I can only describe as an extended prose-poem on the subject of memory which will continue as the most important theme of the novel. The action, such as it is, begins with the description of the childhood vacations the narrator (never named) spent in Combray surrounded by his rather eccentric family and neighbors. One senses that many of these characters will appear again as the novel progresses, but from the start it is clear that chief among them is a dilettante bourgeois, friend of the family - one M. Swann, whose chief failing is that he “married poorly.” Towards the end of the first section the narrator happens to see Gilberte, Swann’s daughter at a distance during a walk through M. Swann’s property. The memory of this first sighting sparks what might be considered the longest digression in literary history as the narrator proceeds to recount the story of M. Swann’s love affair with Odette de Crécy. The book closes, once again, with the narrator in Paris and his childhood friendship there with Gilberte. For such a long book, there is in fact very little plot. My Modern Library edition includes a synopsis which condenses the 600 pages of text into less than 5. But, after all, plot isn’t really the point. The characters and the actions are merely the starting point for Proust’s descriptive apostrophe on the human condition. Specifically, on the way in which our memory is not a simple record of past events, but is rather in a constant interplay with our emotions. And even in translation, Proust has created in these lush descriptions some of the most beautiful prose I have ever read. It is for the language, not the story that one reads Proust.So why give the novel less than a classic (5 star) rating? For all of the beauty of the writing, I found that I was simply unable to identify with the character of Swann. So throughout the soaring and crashing emotional journey of his affair with Odette I remained at a distance, and this detracted from my experience.

Wouldn't you love to walk the Mesiglisse Way, see and smell the blooming hawthornes in Swann's alley, watch the street scene in Combray with Aunt Leonie, eat a meal prepared by Francoise, and meet Swann, poor Swann with his tragic obsession with Odette. "To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love I have ever known has been a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style." And to experience young Marcel's first love, an obsession almost parallel to Swann's, his yearning for Swann's daughter Gilberte.I liked this much more the second time around. There's everything to love about the lush language of course, but I made a lot more connections on this reading, and picked up on many details I don't remember, or maybe didn't grasp the first time I read it.Highly recommended.5 stars

I read the first part, Combray, which was reasonably enjoyable. But then the part about Swanns love became more and more annoying and I gave up, restarting at the last part which unfortunately continued with the endless philosophies about love, this time as experienced by the young author. Reading the afterword in the Dutch translation tells you more or less what you may learn from the novel, but then in a few pages only! If you love the authors style, you may enjoy entire 500 pages. For me, the authors style doesn't really add to the content of the story. I prefer Flaubert.

One of the most amazing books written. This book will change your life. I think about this book on a weekly basis. The master of long sentences.

Volume 1 of Proust's door stopper In Search of Lost Time, which belongs in a genre of its own. Proust records, in great detail, his thoughts and emotions from the past (while not intended to be autobiographical, the detail clearly comes from his personal experiences). I find the result to be uneven. The first part covers reflections of childhood memories, including the famous "madeleine moment" where flavour and aroma triggers a strong and possibly involuntary response bringing a long forgotten memory to the surface. But, he does go on. And on. Then follows the even longer account of Swann's love affair with a courtesan - a bizarre, stunted relationship that has little to do with genuine romantic love (was this based on any of Proust's relationships?). While most of this (very) long section is given in reflective summary, toward the end Proust goes into gorgeous detail of one evening social event attended by Swann. It is wonderfully descriptive, but why the change of style and content? Who knows? The volume closes with a first person account of a juvenile love affair (with Swann's daughter) - perhaps intended as a counterpoint to Swann's affair, but the authenticity of the children's relationship made the adult affair of Swann even more odd by comparison. So, in summary, interesting self-reflection on memory and emotion, along with dubious adult relationships. I'm glad I have read this, but I didn't enjoy it much. Read November 2011.