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rosecarlyle 's review for:
Swann's Way
by Marcel Proust
I set myself the challenge this year of reading the million-word novel known as Remembrance of Things Past, In Search of Lost Time, or À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
I suspect most modern readers would hate this book with its astonishingly long sentences (up to 600 words) and its tendency to obsess for many pages on end on small matters such as whether the main character's mother will kiss him goodnight (80 pages) or whether the sun will come out so that the narrator can go and play in the Champs-Elysées and therefore see the girl he loves. However, it is all written so beautifully and with such a lovely ironic sense of the frivolity of these concerns that I found it very absorbing. Also, I laughed out loud half a dozen times, and not many books have that effect on me, so for that alone, it was worth it.
The author's descriptive passages are so lovely that I didn't mind how long they were. It almost feels as though nothing happens in the whole novel (and that is kind of the point, because the two main characters — the narrator and his neighbour Charles Swann — cannot ever do anything decisive) but when I looked back at the end, I realised there was quite an engaging plot.
Another reason for reading this book is that it is simply so different from everything else I have ever read, even though I have read a lot of novels from this era. It is truly impossible to describe, and you will either love it or hate it—I can't predict which.
I suspect most modern readers would hate this book with its astonishingly long sentences (up to 600 words) and its tendency to obsess for many pages on end on small matters such as whether the main character's mother will kiss him goodnight (80 pages) or whether the sun will come out so that the narrator can go and play in the Champs-Elysées and therefore see the girl he loves. However, it is all written so beautifully and with such a lovely ironic sense of the frivolity of these concerns that I found it very absorbing. Also, I laughed out loud half a dozen times, and not many books have that effect on me, so for that alone, it was worth it.
The author's descriptive passages are so lovely that I didn't mind how long they were. It almost feels as though nothing happens in the whole novel (and that is kind of the point, because the two main characters — the narrator and his neighbour Charles Swann — cannot ever do anything decisive) but when I looked back at the end, I realised there was quite an engaging plot.
Another reason for reading this book is that it is simply so different from everything else I have ever read, even though I have read a lot of novels from this era. It is truly impossible to describe, and you will either love it or hate it—I can't predict which.