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4.25 AVERAGE
4.25 AVERAGE
What a long, strange trip this has been. In Search of Lost Time essentially the life story of its narrator, whom I will call Marcel, at various points in his timeline. Swann's Way covers Marcel's childhood at Combray, when an older Marcel remembers it after tasting a madeleine. He recalls how into nature and art he was - seeing certain flowers or churches would send him into many page paroxysms of joy when describing it in (excruciating) detail. Young Marcel also has a penchant for spying on other people, sometimes by accident, other times on purpose. In a Budding Grove finds the narrator in his adolescence where he goes to Balbec after M. Swann told him about the churches there. He finds a group of girls on the beach and immediately starts trying to fall in love with them. The Guermantes Way moves the setting from Combray to Paris, where Marcel seems to be in his mid twenties and just getting a start in society and as a career. While he wants to be an author, he seems to lack the necessary perseverance to produce pages (unlike his real life counterpart apparently). Sodom and Gomorrah seems to take place not too much later and its main topic is homosexuality. Marcel identifies as straight, unlike Proust who was gay, so it offers a unique insight into how it was viewed at the time along with the expected outing of who is an who is not. The Captive/The Fugitive mainly deals with the principal relationship in Marcel's life and what happens afterward. Time Regained starts in a war torn Paris of 1916 and reveals the effects of that conflict on the nation as a whole and the characters previously encountered in the other books. The penultimate section though takes place some years after the war's end where Marcel has been away at a sanatorium for a number of years, and he attends (yet another) dinner party, but at this much older age (the age when he tasted that madeleine?) he ruminates on art, aristocratic society, old age and death. (Now I know how futile summarizing Proust in 10 seconds is.)
Proust has a very unique writing style where clauses and other connectives can cause sentences to stretch out for pages. To the point where you have to re-read it to remember what the original idea was and where it started. That said, he (Proust) is an absolute master of analogy and metaphor - many was the time I was amazed by how he connected two seemingly unrelated ideas in such a way that it was obvious. He can also be quite funny at times, but those instances are spread pretty thinly throughout the book in my opinion. But there are many other times, where the story seems to just stop (for many pages) and it is a slog to get to the good stuff again.
I can't say that I understood the whole thing, but I did lay eyeprints on all of the words, and that is good enough for me.
Proust has a very unique writing style where clauses and other connectives can cause sentences to stretch out for pages. To the point where you have to re-read it to remember what the original idea was and where it started. That said, he (Proust) is an absolute master of analogy and metaphor - many was the time I was amazed by how he connected two seemingly unrelated ideas in such a way that it was obvious. He can also be quite funny at times, but those instances are spread pretty thinly throughout the book in my opinion. But there are many other times, where the story seems to just stop (for many pages) and it is a slog to get to the good stuff again.
I can't say that I understood the whole thing, but I did lay eyeprints on all of the words, and that is good enough for me.
lighthearted
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
beautiful and funny in equal measure for the first ~3800 pages as he paints the past as this sort of paradise. towards the end of #7 he drops "the only true paradises are the paradises we have lost", and deconstructs the illusion into the book's end. the most perfect little (BIG !) thing ever made, and i don't know what to do with myself now.
reflective
slow-paced
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
challenging
inspiring
relaxing
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
Haré una mega-reseña de toda la saga. Cuando asimile todo. Cielo santo.
El último volumen de En busca del tiempo perdido, en él el narrador luego de haber pasado tiempo en un sanatorio vuelve a ver a Gilberta, con quien conversa sobre el tiempo pasado -y el amor que él un día le tuvo, para descubrir que ella también estuvo enamorada-. Cuenta su experiencia en el París de la guerra, con el avance de los alemanes sobre territorio francés y cómo algunos jóvenes rehuyen integrarse a ella (al llegar a un hotel propiedad de Charlus y que regenta Jupien y que es el lugar donde se dan encuentros entre los hombres del gran mundo y jóvenes de clase baja), ahí es la última vez que ve a Roberto Saint-Loup, quien muere en la guerra. El narrador dice dejar París para ir a su sanatorio y al volver al París de 1918 es invitado a una fiesta de la princesa Guermantes (madame de Verdurin ha conseguido su ascenso social) y ahí, al pisar una losa irregular comienza a tener una serie de revelaciones de la memoria sensible que le dan la clave del método para la composición de su obra; mientras que en la fiesta, la constatación del paso del tiempo en los rostros de personas que conoce por más de veinte años añade dimensiones a su consideración sobre el paso del tiempo y la necesidad que tiene de plantearla en su obra, esa recuperación del tiempo a la que alude el título, la búsqueda del tiempo perdido de toda la obra.