Reviews

Finding Time Again by Marcel Proust

kippenautomat's review against another edition

5.0

Now I belong to the exclusive club of the five-ish people that have actually read this thing to the end

thymussilvestris's review against another edition

I read that the novel could be started from any book, but I disagree. I need to read the other six first, but all are not yet translated to my language.

dngoldman's review

challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective relaxing sad medium-paced

5.0

The last volume (or chapter) of Proust’s novel is a brilliant conclusion to In Search of Lost Time (“ISOLT”). Time Regained does more than conclude the story, but also synthesizes the preceding six volumes into a unified whole. In line with the overall theme of the novel, Time Regained recasts the reader’s understanding of the earlier chapters. The reader understands that they have not been consuming seven standalone but related novels. Instead, they have read one work with long chapters. The novel is so full of ideas and so rich that taking notes seemed silly, indeed against the point of the novel. Note that Ellison, David. A Reader's Guide to Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time' Cambridge University Press was extremely useful in reading the entire series and helpful in writing these notes. 

 

Reading this final volume made reading the entire novel a more rich and rewarding experience. As I was reading, I constantly reflected on the themes of memory, time, the value of art, the nature of reading, the uses of emotion vs logic, and the nature of change in my own life. The experience of reading such a long novel - much to my wife’s dismay - led me to frequently raise Proust during conversations about many topics during a trip to Paris where I was obnoxiously carrying the book around wherever we went - was transformative. Almost having the effect of a self-help guide as art. I first read the Terence Kilmartin translation in 2020, where it seemed a fitting epigraph to 2020 Covid-19 lockdown. In 2024, reading the excellent new translation by Ian Patterson, the book opened up a hidden structure and exposed a psycho-social explanation for why people change political opinions. (I guess we always get the Proust we need). 

 

The novel starts with a reconciliation between himself and Gilberte and another party scene where Marcel concludes he’ll never be a great writer. Yet, this seeming continuation from the last chapters changes quickly as WWI begins. The reflection of St. Loup’s heroism and love for war is contrasted with Charles’ “perversion.” The Paris during the war scenes contain some of the most intimate descriptions of life during the siege, as well as a wicked satire of how people’s concerns for others center around what impacts them. Charles’ “prevision” is revealed in full. 

 

“Time Regained”  “for the only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost” 

As rich as they are, these scenes are a prelude to the next two-thirds - a long essay on memory, time, and the nature of art/reading. Years later, again in Paris, the Marcel goes to a party at the house of the Prince de Guermantes. On the way he sees Charlus, now a mere shell of his former self, being helped by Jupien. The paving stones at the Guermantes house inspire another incident of involuntary memory for the Marcel, quickly followed by two more. Inside And then followed by Marcel’s experience at the party - coming face to face literally with the masks people wear - their own ignorance of the way they’ve changed and how they are perceived.  Every person is a multitude depending on the time, location, and social millue. This hilarious section, following essentially a philosophical essay, creates a brilliant novel within a novel - and forms a complete picture of how Marcel will write the novel we are reading. Thus, Time Regained is a novel within a novel, an exposé on the type of novel it is. And the novel’s length, which likely requires years of reading by people, forces introspection, the recovery of memory, and yes, the recovery of time story, but also synthesizes the preceding 6 volumes into a unified whole. 

 

 

 

Memory is the grand theme of ISOLT and Time Regained. Much is made of Proust’s theory of involuntary memory. But Proust goes far beyond providing a novelist’s description of how memory work.  Memory becomes an organizing principle for how we organize reality. - Memory is not the facts or circumstances - it is the emotional content that comes with those facts. The memory of  the Madeline, the uneven pavement, and small events become emotional touchstones.   But these moments can’t be achieved through logic, reason or normal “remembering” They come, and meaning emerges, in its “pure  and disembodied” state, when we have been freed from the contingencies  of everyday reality and from the constraints of habit.. 

 

The reason these true memories impact us is that they take us out of time. We are once experience ourselves as we were but also as we are now. Instead of recalling facts,  these experience an “extra temporal” moment “something outside of time” Anxiety about death gone because we are “in a bit of time that is a pure state” “freed from the order of time” “situated outside of time”197-98 

 

The same experience underlies the power of art - and the certain type of novel. The only way to understand moments of transcendence “within myself”  Turing the memories to their “spiritual equivalent.” Writing a book “who's characters are forged within us rather than sketched by is the only book we have. Not that the ideas which reform ourselves may not be logically right, but that we do not know whether they are true.... I had already come to the conclusion that we have no freedom at all in the face of the work of art that we cannot shape it according to our wishes, but that it pre-exists us in both because it is necessary and hit it in because it is as it were a lot of nature, we have to discover it” 206-07 

 

The art is its form as well. The relationship between physical objects of art, and our experience of them “this is because things a book it's red binding like the rest. At the moment, we noticed them turned within us into something immaterial I can to the preoccupation with sensations we have any particular time….. Some name, read long ago in a book contains among its syllables, the strong wind and bright sunlight of the day when we were reading it. That's the sort of literature, which is content to describe things….. Is the furthest away from reality, the most impoverishing in depressing because it unceremoniously cut all communication between our present self, in the past the essence of which is retaining things in the future, where the things prompt us to enjoy.  211 

Each memory, like a sculpture of genius, makes countless statutes2121 I would have made the addition of which I had read it for the first time I would look for the original edition213 

 

The relationship between reality and time and art  "An hour is not just an hour. It is a vessel, full of perfumes sounds plans and atmosphere. What we call reality is a certain relationship between the sensations in the memories which surround us simultaneously a relationship, which is suppressed in a simple, cinema graphic vision, which actually moves further away from the truth, the more in professors to be confined by a unique relationship, which the writer hast to rediscover in order to bring it's two different terms together permanently in his sentence.216 

The writers task is “of a translator” of time. 

 

The nature of art mirrors the nature of reading as art. Need the process of creating and receiving the art are part of a whole. While there is “realistic” writing the just portrays facts.  There are two ways of experiencing. “Every impression comes in two parts, half of it contained within the object in the other, half which we alone will understand, extending to us” yet, we tend to dwell on this first aspect, because "it will not impose any strain on us. We find it too, demanding a task to try to perceive the little for all of the site of a Hawthorne, or of a church has made in us, but we play at symphony again, and again we go back to look at the church until in this flight from our own selves we don't have the courage to look at it, which people call their addition we know them well, in the same manner as the most knowledgeable student of music or archaeology. [those who don’t do the hard work]. These people are like a "celibate bachelor of art" or "victims of bulimia, which never lets them feel satisfied so they go to concert after concert to apply the same work, believing that by being there, they are filling a duty and obligation in a way, that other people feel it duty to attend board, meetings or funerals." 220.  Instead, the novel should create readers to create an experience of making "readers of their own selves. My book being nearly one of those magnifying glasses of the sort of the optician at chambray used to offer his customers, my book, but a Books thanks to which I could be providing them with a means of reading themselves, with a result, that I would not ask them to praise me, or denigrate me only to tell me if I was right if the words that they were reading in themselves were really the ones I had written…. 375 

 

Yet, the insight into memory, time, and art are not enough substance for great literature. Those insights must be applied to a plethora of individuals to see how the phoneme plays out in our lives. Entering the party, Marcel is shocked at the disguises old age has given to the people he knew, and at the changes in society.  Nearly the entire remainder of novel focus on Marcel, having had these insights, re-entering the world with his new perspective.  The hysterical (yes really, it’s funny) party scene where Proust. The inability of each character to recognize their own change, while noticing that of others shows the multiple selves that exist in a spectrum of time. Similarlary the views that were held so sincerely and vitally have flipped (e.g. Dreyfus). This change is less a sign of veniality than that memory - we simply forget as the our friends and social opinion change. 

 

Thus, we live in time, not space we are constantly taking threads within time in, weaving them into a psychological space. 

 

‘it would not be possible to recount our relationship even with a person we hardly knew without re-creating a succession of the most diverse settings of our lives…. A sort of psychology in space.  and at a new beauty to the resurrections, which had taken place in my memory.  It would not be possible to recount our relationship even with a person we hardly knew, without re-creating succession of the most diverse settings of our lives.”373 

 

But it is precisely this sort of thing that means that a person is a number of different people, depending on who is judging him, quite apart from differences of judgment themselves. … And his flavor, to which others attested, was unknown to me” (Blochs reversal on the war). 

 

And even if I did not have the leisure to repair the hundred masks, which aren't properly to be attached to a single face, it's only because of all the eyes that see it in the different meanings they read into its features, as well as for the same eyes the effect of hope in fear, or on the contrary of love and habit, which for 30 years can conceal the changes”389 

 

Even as we together these bits of memory into a “unity,” “ provinces remain within it, or at least that time creates provinces, the names of which change, and which are no longer comprehensible to those who arrive there only when the pattern has altered.” 349.  “this is how the pattern of things changes in this world has the focus of empires registers of well entitled to social positions. Everything that seemed permanent is perpetually recast in the eyes of a man may over the course of a lifetime contemplate the most complete change precisely in those places where it had appeared most impossible." 360. 

 

It was this notion of embodied time of past, not being separated from us that it was now my intention to make such a prominent feature in my work[remembering the bell witch signaled swan, leaving, and his mother, finally coming to greet him as a child} I was frightened to think that the bell could still be ringing in me without my being able to do anything to alter the shrillness of its tinkle. I had to try to block out the sound of the conversation which the masks were holding all around I was forced to go back down into myself. It must therefore be that this tinkling was always there…. 390.  “when the bell tinkled, I already existed in for me still to be able to hear the tinkling there must have been no break in continuity I must not have ceased for a moment, not taking a rest from existing from thinking from being conscious of myself, because this moment from long ago, still struck me, so that I could still find it again still go back to it, simply by going more deeply back into myself." 391 

 

In the end, we and remembered lives are such fragile thing. 

 

For after death time leaves the body in the memories, so we different so pale, now, or faced from her no longer exist. And soon it will be from him, who at present, they still torture by in whom they will eventually die. When they desire of a living body is no longer there to support them, the depths of Albertine, who I saw sleeping, and who was dead. 391.

grayjay's review against another edition

2.0

I found this one a little more boring than the others. Maybe I should revisit it when I'm at an age when I need to reminisce about the past.

matthewkeating's review

challenging emotional informative reflective slow-paced

5.0

sarah_bopp's review against another edition

reflective slow-paced

5.0

casparb's review against another edition

I feel like i've landed somewhere. i'll do a more sweeping sense of this series in the review here for the single book.

a lot of the time when I read a book I think will be worthwhile, I note down page numbers I think will be useful in the front cover. My edition includes the last three volumes of À La Recherche, but I think my pages are telling:
92, 197, 345, 388, 606, 638, 863, 899, 903, 905, 908, 910, 926, 960, 969, 971, 978, 1088, 1094, 1103, 1105, 1107.
Volume 6 begins at page 425. This volume begins at 709. Things expand, rapidly

In this final installment, it's made clear very soon that the first world war has taken over. Proust even describes a blackout during a bombing raid - "I thought of that day when, on my way to la Raspelière, I had met an aeroplane and my horse had reared as at the apparition of a god. Now, I thought, it would be a different meeting -- with the god of evil, who would kill me." which reminded me of Eliot's description of warplanes, twenty years later over london in Little Gidding as 'the dark dove with the flickering tongue'.

I'm going to suggest that this is the most aphoristic & effectively so , in most ways the most beautiful. Also the most serious in terms of, appropriately, confronting Time. It's remarkably Einsteinian, as I'm sure everybody says.

I don't want to give this one too much away. I encourage you to try for it though - you don't have to believe me but it's worth the effort. genius is a really unhelpful term, it makes a pedestal. I don't want to use it, though I understand why people do. .. maybe marcel convinced me too much on page 1089, I thought more modestly of my book and it would be inaccurate to say that I thought of those who would read it as "my" readers. For it seemed to me that they would not be "my" readers but the readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician at Combray used to offer his customers -- it would be my book, but with its help I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves

maybe if ur jaded that sounds a little Life Is A Journey .. . but how else do you use your time

chicokc's review against another edition

4.0

La vida ha pasado por los personajes, 20 años desde el comienzo y de que nuestro personaje principal fuera introducido a la sociedad de alta alcurnia.

zjanda's review

challenging emotional inspiring mysterious reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

poetry of the incomprehensible

A stirring, thoughtful, and poetic experience. At times transcendent and dull. Very grateful to have read these books . I wish I could remember what I thought they were about before I started. It has been completely unique experience.

ibm's review against another edition

reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? N/A
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5