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4.06 AVERAGE
4.06 AVERAGE
it's so refreshing to feel something complicated again, after months of unilateral emotion filled with dread of the unknown and hyper-awareness of one's own mortality or whatever.
without a doubt i loved part 1: Combray. it's so lush and Romantic, filled with vivid scenes that i adore. most (if not at all) the references that i have heard of regarding Search are made in the first part so i feel like that ticked a box from my literary bingo that vaguely exists for my reading life. Combray had delectable lines, i made a lot of notes, underlined a ton (because a sentence can take up to half the page so like... kinda hard to gauge when the thought ends).
some of my favourite notes:
p. 181: "...since it's only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them." this is about M. Legrandin being against snobs, not aware that he is one. and i thought it was interesting how sometimes a person can hate another because they see something of themselves in that person that they hate and refuse to acknowledge in themselves. Proust the psychologist, everyone.
p. 194: hawthorns symbolize a union of love; lives for 400 years (this is because Marcel [the narrator, not the author] waxed poetic about breathing in the scent of hawthorns for two pages). this also led me to want to plant a hawthorn tree in my backyard.
p. 250: "And at once I fell in love with her, for if it is sometimes enough to make us love a woman that she should look on us with contempt, as I supposed Mlle Swann to have done, and that we should think that she can never be ours, sometimes, too, it is enough that she should look on us kindly, as Mme de Guermantes was doing, and that we should think of her as almost ours already." this is REPRESENTATION.
Swann in Love, H O W E V E R.
like, okay, i get it. my frustration stems heavily from the fact that Swann is ridiculous in his love and affection for Odette (see: his jealousy stunts, etc.) and if that's not a critique of bourgeois mentality, i don't know what is. i feel sorry for Swann's servants because of his shenanigans.
and then, unfortunately, Place-Names•The Name, was so coloured by the lethargy that overtook my soul, body, and mind from life AND the experience of reading Swann in Love that it dissolved my passion. don't get me wrong, i enjoyed the experience of reading Swann's Way as a whole and it's cool that i get to say that "I READ IT!" but Swann in Love was just the worst that I finished a lot of books between now and since i started reading Swann's Way because of Swann in Love being such a drag.
i mean. i'm going to not read Within a Budding Grove right after. i have library holds to read, after all. but i will continue to read Search because i DO like it. i just got annoyed by Swann.
also: i wish i read the Lydia Davis translation, but a lot of the essays and criticisms reference this Moncrieff translation, so i'm not too sad about it.
without a doubt i loved part 1: Combray. it's so lush and Romantic, filled with vivid scenes that i adore. most (if not at all) the references that i have heard of regarding Search are made in the first part so i feel like that ticked a box from my literary bingo that vaguely exists for my reading life. Combray had delectable lines, i made a lot of notes, underlined a ton (because a sentence can take up to half the page so like... kinda hard to gauge when the thought ends).
some of my favourite notes:
p. 181: "...since it's only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them." this is about M. Legrandin being against snobs, not aware that he is one. and i thought it was interesting how sometimes a person can hate another because they see something of themselves in that person that they hate and refuse to acknowledge in themselves. Proust the psychologist, everyone.
p. 194: hawthorns symbolize a union of love; lives for 400 years (this is because Marcel [the narrator, not the author] waxed poetic about breathing in the scent of hawthorns for two pages). this also led me to want to plant a hawthorn tree in my backyard.
p. 250: "And at once I fell in love with her, for if it is sometimes enough to make us love a woman that she should look on us with contempt, as I supposed Mlle Swann to have done, and that we should think that she can never be ours, sometimes, too, it is enough that she should look on us kindly, as Mme de Guermantes was doing, and that we should think of her as almost ours already." this is REPRESENTATION.
Swann in Love, H O W E V E R.
like, okay, i get it. my frustration stems heavily from the fact that Swann is ridiculous in his love and affection for Odette (see: his jealousy stunts, etc.) and if that's not a critique of bourgeois mentality, i don't know what is. i feel sorry for Swann's servants because of his shenanigans.
and then, unfortunately, Place-Names•The Name, was so coloured by the lethargy that overtook my soul, body, and mind from life AND the experience of reading Swann in Love that it dissolved my passion. don't get me wrong, i enjoyed the experience of reading Swann's Way as a whole and it's cool that i get to say that "I READ IT!" but Swann in Love was just the worst that I finished a lot of books between now and since i started reading Swann's Way because of Swann in Love being such a drag.
i mean. i'm going to not read Within a Budding Grove right after. i have library holds to read, after all. but i will continue to read Search because i DO like it. i just got annoyed by Swann.
also: i wish i read the Lydia Davis translation, but a lot of the essays and criticisms reference this Moncrieff translation, so i'm not too sad about it.
Finishing this book truly felt like finishing a marathon. It is incredibly dense and flowery. I would say the tangible plot is pretty easy to follow, but the author consistently went on looonnnggg tangents dissecting the various themes and philosophies in the book or the various emotions expressed by the characters that were sometimes hard to follow.
REGARDLESS, this was a very stimulating and challenging read! It tackled many themes including nostalgia, memory, beauty, art, romance, and jealousy, to name a few. Some parts at the end especially verged into “old man yells at cloud” territory, but overall I liked it! I really had to slow down and even reread some of the denser passages, but it was very rewarding. There’s so much that could be said about this book I haven’t even scratched the surface.
REGARDLESS, this was a very stimulating and challenging read! It tackled many themes including nostalgia, memory, beauty, art, romance, and jealousy, to name a few. Some parts at the end especially verged into “old man yells at cloud” territory, but overall I liked it! I really had to slow down and even reread some of the denser passages, but it was very rewarding. There’s so much that could be said about this book I haven’t even scratched the surface.
It is through this accessible translation that I finally understand what all the fuss is about Proust. My soul feels transformed; he's deliriously rich and nuanced, even when he's being petty. And I hope somebody says that about my ad blogs someday.
4.0 /5
Such completely beautiful writing and the slowest pacing I've ever read. That isn't entirely to its detriment, but I rarely picked up this book because I was excited about where the story was going to go (it barely went anywhere and maybe that's fine?).
Undoubtedly I will read the other 6 volumes at some point but not anytime soon.
Such completely beautiful writing and the slowest pacing I've ever read. That isn't entirely to its detriment, but I rarely picked up this book because I was excited about where the story was going to go (it barely went anywhere and maybe that's fine?).
Undoubtedly I will read the other 6 volumes at some point but not anytime soon.
105th book of 2020.
I first attempted to read Proust in Paris, December last year, 2019. On the Eurostar, feeling sick and giddy from the early morning rise, I read it slowly. There had been some problem with the seating; my father, mother, brother and I found a young man sat in one of the four seats we had booked around a table. When we suggested he was in the wrong seat he denied it, assured us it was the seat marked on his ticket, but did not show his ticket. I offered to sit down the carriage in a vacant seat on a table of four with a woman and her son and daughter. They were American. The only thing I remember about them is that the daughter had a University of Boston phone case. That is all. And despite wandering out of Gard du Nord and spending the successive days wandering along the Seine, trying grappa as Hemingway once did, buying a copy of ‘The Outsider’ in French, I could not urge myself to continue with Proust. I was bored. The language didn’t interest me, or impress me. Instead, I read [b:Satori In Paris|247998|Satori In Paris|Jack Kerouac|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1173116642l/247998._SY75_.jpg|240291], and by the final day, had moved onto [b:The War of the Worlds|8909|The War of the Worlds|H.G. Wells|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320391644l/8909._SY75_.jpg|3194841], which I started on a stool in a café not far from the Eiffel Tower.
It is now June, six months later. For less reason than anyone does anything, I took Proust off my bookcase and continued reading where I had left off. I hadn’t got far, I remembered what had happened, which frankly, wasn’t a lot. Swann mentions something about the “hierarchy of the arts,” which is an interesting concept, so I write it down as a potential quote to use in my coming dissertation. From then, I keep reading, and I find that in six months something had changed in Proust, or something had changed in me. It is the latter, of course. But what, I don’t know.
Because now I am enchanted. Reading Proust has become like finding a pool of water in a cave, which one imagines isn’t very deep, but once submerged, one realises the pool tunnels endlessly downwards. I am submerged; and, as I propel myself deeper, deeper still, it occurs to me that the water is becoming thicker, and by that, the water I have already passed through above me is weighing down on me too. Still, there is no bottom to speak of.
Recently I have become more irritated by noise. The solace and quiet of Proust, descending the silent pool of water, makes reality too noisy, too shallow. The characters’ thoughts lap against my mind, as if soothing it. Half way through I think that Proust tells us how to live, that Swann’s Way is a book on how to live. I later discover that I was wrong – Proust does not teach us how to live, Proust illuminates how we live. He dissects living, all living; the memories of the narrator, the jealousy and love Swann feels, they are all things we have felt ourselves. And Proust’s tender voice turns a light to them, no brighter than moonlight and no louder than an evening’s waves, to show us.
I have written down on one page, “The steeples of Martinville allow me to picture the spire of Chichester Cathedral once more, it allows me to be younger. Happier, maybe.” I have noticed recently that when one is sad, one looks into the past at happier times, which in turn, makes one believe that they are only ever happier in the past. Nowadays, I spend my time pondering the past and aching, for I am tired of being happier then. I wish to be happier now. Proust has prompted me to explode, to look for beauty, in the ordinary. The way the moonlight lights the raindrops left on my bedroom windows. The perfect globe of shadow on my bed. I imagine Proust has made me question the familiar – that the brain closes its eyes to the familiar. That every night I lie in bed and forget that the moonlight cradles the raindrops above me as if a baby’s head. That the sounds of cats and foxes, the rattling windows, are all signs that the world is greater, that the world continues to exist, even when I am not conscious of it. The only world that no longer exists is the world of memory – it has died, and one remembers it, the same way one remembers the dead.
The streets are currently like memories. There are no cars on the road when I walk to the bakery; it is silent, save the birds, and occasionally the wailing of the level crossing, which has often found itself echoing in my dreams. Lockdown has settled on the town like slumber. When I am home again I sit with a cup of tea and continue to read, to circle deeper into the lives of the narrator, or Swann. I even admit to myself that Proust is boring by the common sense of the word, that nothing happens, but I cannot find myself from reading more, from falling in love with the endless reams of thought, of remembering, as if I need the narrator to remember his own life so I can remember my own.
The final pages of Combray make me want to weep. And later, everything Swann has felt I have felt before in damaged love. Some of the feelings and the dialogue so startlingly real, that I feel as if, sometimes, I am not reading, but looking into some sort of mirror. Proust slowly stuns one into silence, into melancholy and into reflection. The most real reflection comes from silence, maybe. I have identified one of the plants in our house as some ordinary fragment which I will hold onto in my memory. On certain occasions I find it sat in the bathtub, its giant stalk trailing out over the rim and onto the floor, like a giant twisting knot of hair. I find the green of its leaves against the white of the bathtub oddly pleasing to look at. It is not only the plant though, it is how the plant finds itself in the bathtub. I never see it moved from the top of the cupboard (where its leaves hang down like rope) to the bathtub. It is a testament to my mother’s invisible work around the house, keeping it running, clean, watered, alive. It is also lonely in the bathtub. The pot sat in an ether of white, waiting to be lifted back to its home.
Sundays, for me, balance on the precipice which falls one of two ways: the first, forwards into Monday, and the week of work and responsibility; the second, simply in the moment: peaceful, rainy (Sundays, in my mind’s eye are always rainy) and thoughtful. It is apt that on this Sunday I finish Swann’s Way. It is not raining, no, but my windows continue to blow down whenever I open them. I have a lot more to say, but not the words in which to say them. The final lines of Swann’s Way I will hold to my chest, and re-enter the world after lockdown with some new-found knowledge, maybe, or understanding, at least, with new-found beauty.
I first attempted to read Proust in Paris, December last year, 2019. On the Eurostar, feeling sick and giddy from the early morning rise, I read it slowly. There had been some problem with the seating; my father, mother, brother and I found a young man sat in one of the four seats we had booked around a table. When we suggested he was in the wrong seat he denied it, assured us it was the seat marked on his ticket, but did not show his ticket. I offered to sit down the carriage in a vacant seat on a table of four with a woman and her son and daughter. They were American. The only thing I remember about them is that the daughter had a University of Boston phone case. That is all. And despite wandering out of Gard du Nord and spending the successive days wandering along the Seine, trying grappa as Hemingway once did, buying a copy of ‘The Outsider’ in French, I could not urge myself to continue with Proust. I was bored. The language didn’t interest me, or impress me. Instead, I read [b:Satori In Paris|247998|Satori In Paris|Jack Kerouac|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1173116642l/247998._SY75_.jpg|240291], and by the final day, had moved onto [b:The War of the Worlds|8909|The War of the Worlds|H.G. Wells|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320391644l/8909._SY75_.jpg|3194841], which I started on a stool in a café not far from the Eiffel Tower.
It is now June, six months later. For less reason than anyone does anything, I took Proust off my bookcase and continued reading where I had left off. I hadn’t got far, I remembered what had happened, which frankly, wasn’t a lot. Swann mentions something about the “hierarchy of the arts,” which is an interesting concept, so I write it down as a potential quote to use in my coming dissertation. From then, I keep reading, and I find that in six months something had changed in Proust, or something had changed in me. It is the latter, of course. But what, I don’t know.
Because now I am enchanted. Reading Proust has become like finding a pool of water in a cave, which one imagines isn’t very deep, but once submerged, one realises the pool tunnels endlessly downwards. I am submerged; and, as I propel myself deeper, deeper still, it occurs to me that the water is becoming thicker, and by that, the water I have already passed through above me is weighing down on me too. Still, there is no bottom to speak of.
Recently I have become more irritated by noise. The solace and quiet of Proust, descending the silent pool of water, makes reality too noisy, too shallow. The characters’ thoughts lap against my mind, as if soothing it. Half way through I think that Proust tells us how to live, that Swann’s Way is a book on how to live. I later discover that I was wrong – Proust does not teach us how to live, Proust illuminates how we live. He dissects living, all living; the memories of the narrator, the jealousy and love Swann feels, they are all things we have felt ourselves. And Proust’s tender voice turns a light to them, no brighter than moonlight and no louder than an evening’s waves, to show us.
I have written down on one page, “The steeples of Martinville allow me to picture the spire of Chichester Cathedral once more, it allows me to be younger. Happier, maybe.” I have noticed recently that when one is sad, one looks into the past at happier times, which in turn, makes one believe that they are only ever happier in the past. Nowadays, I spend my time pondering the past and aching, for I am tired of being happier then. I wish to be happier now. Proust has prompted me to explode, to look for beauty, in the ordinary. The way the moonlight lights the raindrops left on my bedroom windows. The perfect globe of shadow on my bed. I imagine Proust has made me question the familiar – that the brain closes its eyes to the familiar. That every night I lie in bed and forget that the moonlight cradles the raindrops above me as if a baby’s head. That the sounds of cats and foxes, the rattling windows, are all signs that the world is greater, that the world continues to exist, even when I am not conscious of it. The only world that no longer exists is the world of memory – it has died, and one remembers it, the same way one remembers the dead.
The streets are currently like memories. There are no cars on the road when I walk to the bakery; it is silent, save the birds, and occasionally the wailing of the level crossing, which has often found itself echoing in my dreams. Lockdown has settled on the town like slumber. When I am home again I sit with a cup of tea and continue to read, to circle deeper into the lives of the narrator, or Swann. I even admit to myself that Proust is boring by the common sense of the word, that nothing happens, but I cannot find myself from reading more, from falling in love with the endless reams of thought, of remembering, as if I need the narrator to remember his own life so I can remember my own.
The final pages of Combray make me want to weep. And later, everything Swann has felt I have felt before in damaged love. Some of the feelings and the dialogue so startlingly real, that I feel as if, sometimes, I am not reading, but looking into some sort of mirror. Proust slowly stuns one into silence, into melancholy and into reflection. The most real reflection comes from silence, maybe. I have identified one of the plants in our house as some ordinary fragment which I will hold onto in my memory. On certain occasions I find it sat in the bathtub, its giant stalk trailing out over the rim and onto the floor, like a giant twisting knot of hair. I find the green of its leaves against the white of the bathtub oddly pleasing to look at. It is not only the plant though, it is how the plant finds itself in the bathtub. I never see it moved from the top of the cupboard (where its leaves hang down like rope) to the bathtub. It is a testament to my mother’s invisible work around the house, keeping it running, clean, watered, alive. It is also lonely in the bathtub. The pot sat in an ether of white, waiting to be lifted back to its home.
Sundays, for me, balance on the precipice which falls one of two ways: the first, forwards into Monday, and the week of work and responsibility; the second, simply in the moment: peaceful, rainy (Sundays, in my mind’s eye are always rainy) and thoughtful. It is apt that on this Sunday I finish Swann’s Way. It is not raining, no, but my windows continue to blow down whenever I open them. I have a lot more to say, but not the words in which to say them. The final lines of Swann’s Way I will hold to my chest, and re-enter the world after lockdown with some new-found knowledge, maybe, or understanding, at least, with new-found beauty.
"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.
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.
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.
Trivia
An 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 [b:Mrs. Dalloway|14942|Mrs. Dalloway|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1479336522l/14942._SY75_.jpg|841320] by [a:Virginia Woolf|6765|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1419596619p2/6765.jpg]: ""'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.
Trivia
An 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 [b:Mrs. Dalloway|14942|Mrs. Dalloway|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1479336522l/14942._SY75_.jpg|841320] by [a:Virginia Woolf|6765|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1419596619p2/6765.jpg]: ""'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.
I had a lot of conflicting reactions to this book, which is both brilliant and frustrating. I wrote a long blog post that sorts through most of these issues that can be found here: http://ahabsquest.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/following-swanns-way-an-interview-with-me/
i waded all the way through this to get to the last page, which was a revelation to me, at the time:
"...how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses."
i'm not sure i had thought about that, consciously, before. that end-of-ru-non-sentence was so worth the wading.
"...how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses."
i'm not sure i had thought about that, consciously, before. that end-of-ru-non-sentence was so worth the wading.