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kimthomp 's review for:
Swann's Way
by Marcel Proust
This book is more like an experience you go through than just a book you read. I'm still not sure how to rate it. It is harder to read if your attention is at all fragmented, like mine is - the sentences are so long that I kept losing track of what was being talked about. It's just so dense, but not heavy-dense, more ethereal, as insubstantial as a cloud, pages and pages about this or that flower garden, or what that famous cookie dipped in tea conjured up in the narrator's brain. It's mainly about how we remember things, how we reconstruct them in our minds and the difference between the memory and the reality. And it's also about how astonishingly delusional people in love are. I think.
But it's also incredibly funny in places. Here's my favourite sentence from the overwrought narrator: "This day which I had so dreaded was, as it happened, one of the few on which I was not unduly wretched."
Still figuring out how I feel about the book, but it was an enjoyable experience and kept me going for the full 606 pages. The translation seems a good one, and there is a very useful chapter summary at the end, in case you're wondering what it was you just read. I think I will actually take a stab at the next volume , just to see where it's all going. And to exercise my ability to concentrate for long distances.
But it's also incredibly funny in places. Here's my favourite sentence from the overwrought narrator: "This day which I had so dreaded was, as it happened, one of the few on which I was not unduly wretched."
Still figuring out how I feel about the book, but it was an enjoyable experience and kept me going for the full 606 pages. The translation seems a good one, and there is a very useful chapter summary at the end, in case you're wondering what it was you just read. I think I will actually take a stab at the next volume , just to see where it's all going. And to exercise my ability to concentrate for long distances.