rponzo 's review for:

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

4.0

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Proust, along with jigsaw puzzles and podcasts about Mormons, was a pandemic hobby.

I'd get up early, drink coffee, smoke a few puffs, and read ten or twenty pages of this literary masterpiece. Translated from French, its winding sentences and lack of action make me keep notes as I read, to track what was or was not happening. It helped me focus. After a few weeks, the sun finally rose on Marblehead (me), and I discovered there was a very concise synopsis at the end of the book doing the exact same thing. The footnotes were 60 percent useless.

I am still pretty ignorant, but enjoyed reading this, or at least enjoyed it enough to persevere through pages of descriptions of trees, rain, flowers, dinner parties, sunsets and young women's faces. Sometimes lyrical, other times tedious. French aristocracy. I can't make heads or tails of it. I found the narrator a neurotic snob, but, stuck with it....He was just a nerdy kid....

There are many people much smarter than I who can speak about this elusive work. I think there are a dozen volumes, which deflates me.



P.S. On a rare excursion, We took the Cape Ferry to Provincetown in July, wearing masks, etc... I went into a book store on the main drag. I bought the next volume, called "In the shadow of Young Girls with flowers"