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A review by darwin8u
The Sweet Cheat Gone: The Fugitive by Marcel Proust
5.0
“I could no longer desire physically without feeling a need for her, without suffering from her absence.”
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive
I start reading Proust and it feels like I've submerged into a slow-moving prose river. The water is clean, with gradual bends, but sometimes filled with small boiling eddies, swirls, and reverses. Time and memory move in one direction, but the current of Proustian memory contains an involuntary universe of vortexes and wakes. We fall in and out of love. Our memory of our love becomes bent and refracted as we move away from those we once loved.
Seriously, every time I read Proust I finish thinking he could write a whole novel about one small spot on a random river. An exposed rock or boulder that cuts the flow of the river into two halves could occupy 100 pages as Proust described the nuance of the water around and against the rock. He would obviously need to describe the varying temperature of the water and the way the light moves through the textured leaves of the green forest's canopy. How evening's light danced its crepuscular silhouettes against the reflections of dusk on the churning ripples of a slowly moving river.
That being said: I'm really glad that Albertine's gone. It all sorta reminds me of that Saturday Night Live skit with Eddie Murphy as Mr. Robinson: 'I'm so glad the Bitch (Albertine) is gone.' Yes, neighbor, I really do think Eddie Murphy's Mr. Robinson was the late 20th Century's answer to Marcel Proust's early 20th century question of what exactly happens when a man lays next to a woman and gives her 20 francs.
― Marcel Proust, The Fugitive
I start reading Proust and it feels like I've submerged into a slow-moving prose river. The water is clean, with gradual bends, but sometimes filled with small boiling eddies, swirls, and reverses. Time and memory move in one direction, but the current of Proustian memory contains an involuntary universe of vortexes and wakes. We fall in and out of love. Our memory of our love becomes bent and refracted as we move away from those we once loved.
Seriously, every time I read Proust I finish thinking he could write a whole novel about one small spot on a random river. An exposed rock or boulder that cuts the flow of the river into two halves could occupy 100 pages as Proust described the nuance of the water around and against the rock. He would obviously need to describe the varying temperature of the water and the way the light moves through the textured leaves of the green forest's canopy. How evening's light danced its crepuscular silhouettes against the reflections of dusk on the churning ripples of a slowly moving river.
That being said: