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m___p 's review for:
Swann's Way
by Marcel Proust
Read this off and on, with a couple aborted starts. When I finally came back to it a third time, planning just to kill time and not intending to finish it any time soon, I finally ‘got’ it. When you give it time, it’s one of the most pleasant books I’ve ever read. The prose is beautiful and even the most challenging sentences reward your decoding like a kind of easy crossword clue. But when I tried to rush it, it just didn’t work. You’re supposed to read to enjoy yourself and relax, it seems to argue with its form, not to arrive at the end. (This makes some sense re: his thematic aim, as memories of an unreachable past are best in the middle of the act of remembering, there is no tangible, satisfying past to return to, and once the remembering is done, you're left empty.) Given the childhood baggage about reading slowly that, frankly, motivated me to tackle a 4,000+ page multi-volume novel like a rehabilitated amputee running a marathon, it was sometimes hard not to want it over with so I could collect my trophy.
On the first read, the structure’s pretty odd, and though I’m under the impression that derailing the narrative halfway through for a novella-sized digression about the love affair of the titular side character was done for some purpose that will become clear later on, it’s a weird choice nonetheless and comes right after my favorite part of the novel (the indulgent sensory meditations on detail at the end of Combray II). I did wish I felt Swann's pain more in this section. Given the subject matter, you'd think it would be ripe for dredging the readers emotions up, but I felt largely detached through this section until the incredible passage at the Guermantes's party as Swann listens to the music one final time.
Davis’s translation is the way to go as far as I’m concerned, and it sucks that after her, within the Penguin route, the next translator is Grieve, who couldn’t have a more different approach as a translator (one that I think is pretty ill-advised), so you're basically forced to go back to the MKE translation for the remaining volumes.
On the first read, the structure’s pretty odd, and though I’m under the impression that derailing the narrative halfway through for a novella-sized digression about the love affair of the titular side character was done for some purpose that will become clear later on, it’s a weird choice nonetheless and comes right after my favorite part of the novel (the indulgent sensory meditations on detail at the end of Combray II). I did wish I felt Swann's pain more in this section. Given the subject matter, you'd think it would be ripe for dredging the readers emotions up, but I felt largely detached through this section until the incredible passage at the Guermantes's party as Swann listens to the music one final time.
Davis’s translation is the way to go as far as I’m concerned, and it sucks that after her, within the Penguin route, the next translator is Grieve, who couldn’t have a more different approach as a translator (one that I think is pretty ill-advised), so you're basically forced to go back to the MKE translation for the remaining volumes.