Take a photo of a barcode or cover
karenmichele 's review for:
Swann's Way
by Marcel Proust
At long last, I have read Proust! I finished Swann's Way this afternoon occasionally gazing out at the Japanese maple outside my window and reading beautiful descriptions of autumn feeling as if I was in Paris:
...at a place where the trees were still covered in all their green leaves, one alone, small, squat, lopped, obstinate, shook in the wind a homely head of red hair...Here, it thickened the leaves of the chestnut trees like bricks and, like a piece of yellow Persian masonry patterned in blue, crudely cemented them against the sky, there on the contrary detached them from it as they clutched at it with their fingers of gold.( p. 439, Lydia Davis translation)
I was captured by the language much earlier in the book, though, by the musical descriptions (I taught elementary music for 25 years before becoming a librarian) like "...if a piece heard only on the piano appears to us later clothed in the colors of the orchestra...(p. 142, Lydia Davis translation). I really don't know what I was afraid of and why, with my love of Paris and other things French and my fair knowledge of the language, I have never taken on In Search of Lost Time. It was not a simple book with a plot to keep you turning the pages, but neither did I find it difficult to read. I have been reading it in chunks over the course of the last month, but that had more to do with the lack of a "hard to put down" plot than with the books complexity. It isn't a book for everyone. You must enjoy detailed and lengthy descriptions and a long wait for something to really happen and resolve. I plan to continue In Search of Lost Time, but I will be stretching it out among lots of other kinds of reading to get the most out of it for my reading style.
...at a place where the trees were still covered in all their green leaves, one alone, small, squat, lopped, obstinate, shook in the wind a homely head of red hair...Here, it thickened the leaves of the chestnut trees like bricks and, like a piece of yellow Persian masonry patterned in blue, crudely cemented them against the sky, there on the contrary detached them from it as they clutched at it with their fingers of gold.( p. 439, Lydia Davis translation)
I was captured by the language much earlier in the book, though, by the musical descriptions (I taught elementary music for 25 years before becoming a librarian) like "...if a piece heard only on the piano appears to us later clothed in the colors of the orchestra...(p. 142, Lydia Davis translation). I really don't know what I was afraid of and why, with my love of Paris and other things French and my fair knowledge of the language, I have never taken on In Search of Lost Time. It was not a simple book with a plot to keep you turning the pages, but neither did I find it difficult to read. I have been reading it in chunks over the course of the last month, but that had more to do with the lack of a "hard to put down" plot than with the books complexity. It isn't a book for everyone. You must enjoy detailed and lengthy descriptions and a long wait for something to really happen and resolve. I plan to continue In Search of Lost Time, but I will be stretching it out among lots of other kinds of reading to get the most out of it for my reading style.