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A review by duffypratt
The Past Recaptured by Marcel Proust
4.0
I checked back on my review of Albertine Disparu, and its been almost 8 years since I finished that one. Overall, if you take this series as a single novel, as I think you should, it is easily the book that has taken me the most time to finish. I figure that its been somewhere around 39 years. The extraordinary thing about that is that I haven't lost my impressions of many of the characters that are central to understanding this book, from Gilberte, to Saint-Loup, or Baron Charlus, or Mme Verdurin, etc... I think that says something about the power of Proust's characterizations. The more incredible thing, to me, is that having finally finished this monster, I am seriously tempted to start re-reading it. I have already re-read the first two books, in French. And I retook French in college, after having almost failed in it in Jr. High, mostly because I wanted to be able to read Proust in the original. Now that would be a project.
As a standalone novel, this book is probably pretty awful. There is one really startling thing in the book, involving Charlus, who does the most in these books to shock people. And this time is no exception, but I won't spoil it -- its so deliciously creepy. Other than that, this book reflects on everything that comes before, as Marcel finally realizes how he can proceed with the great work of his life, which is, of course, to write this book. On top of that, there are some reflections on war, on the destruction of towns and villages, and quite a bit on aging and death.
I'm still left with the uneasy feeling that Marcel is something of a monster. His monstrousness comes from a couple of sources: he absolutely elevates intelligence over feeling; he takes an almost solipsistic view of the world; his obsession with lost time, with his own past, makes him view the present moment as nothing more than a means to get at the past -- or perhaps more precisely, to step outside of time entirely. And he seems to genuinely feel that his insights are universal -- that everything he says that he feels will be immediately apparent to any of his readers of intelligence, so that we will be reading ourselves in his book.
That last point is the one that troubles me the most, largely because for much of the early books, that was exactly how I felt about much of his books. I was completely with him. And so now I wonder, did he lose me because I started to recognize him as a monster? Or did he lose me because I didn't want to recognize those same monstrous aspects in myself? And that's not a question that I can answer. But this last book makes me think that its more likely the former. I found his thoughts about aging to be repellent, and not sentiments that I tend to share at all.
But that's just quibbling. This is a truly great book, all 4000 plus pages of it. And I would have liked to read it in a different edition. I bought the books I have from a great little bookshop in Huntington on Long Island, called Oscars, way back in 1978. This books have impossibly small print that take up entire pages, and this volume comes in at about 270 pages, when a reasonable printing would put it at probably over 800 pages. I've also heard that Moncrief's translation makes Proust even more wordy and opaque than he already was, which is rather easy to believe. So it might be interesting to find another translation. Or I could just try the impossible, and start it in French again. "Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure." and away we go...
As a standalone novel, this book is probably pretty awful. There is one really startling thing in the book, involving Charlus, who does the most in these books to shock people. And this time is no exception, but I won't spoil it -- its so deliciously creepy. Other than that, this book reflects on everything that comes before, as Marcel finally realizes how he can proceed with the great work of his life, which is, of course, to write this book. On top of that, there are some reflections on war, on the destruction of towns and villages, and quite a bit on aging and death.
I'm still left with the uneasy feeling that Marcel is something of a monster. His monstrousness comes from a couple of sources: he absolutely elevates intelligence over feeling; he takes an almost solipsistic view of the world; his obsession with lost time, with his own past, makes him view the present moment as nothing more than a means to get at the past -- or perhaps more precisely, to step outside of time entirely. And he seems to genuinely feel that his insights are universal -- that everything he says that he feels will be immediately apparent to any of his readers of intelligence, so that we will be reading ourselves in his book.
That last point is the one that troubles me the most, largely because for much of the early books, that was exactly how I felt about much of his books. I was completely with him. And so now I wonder, did he lose me because I started to recognize him as a monster? Or did he lose me because I didn't want to recognize those same monstrous aspects in myself? And that's not a question that I can answer. But this last book makes me think that its more likely the former. I found his thoughts about aging to be repellent, and not sentiments that I tend to share at all.
But that's just quibbling. This is a truly great book, all 4000 plus pages of it. And I would have liked to read it in a different edition. I bought the books I have from a great little bookshop in Huntington on Long Island, called Oscars, way back in 1978. This books have impossibly small print that take up entire pages, and this volume comes in at about 270 pages, when a reasonable printing would put it at probably over 800 pages. I've also heard that Moncrief's translation makes Proust even more wordy and opaque than he already was, which is rather easy to believe. So it might be interesting to find another translation. Or I could just try the impossible, and start it in French again. "Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure." and away we go...