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A review by whats_margaret_reading
In Search of Lost Time: Time Regained by Marcel Proust
5.0
Time Regained finishes up In Search of Lost Time, and it's an incredible power house description of and reflection on memory. Our narrator is in war-time Paris, and things have changed. Gone are the usual landscapes and usual social maneuvering (though there is of course still some because it's Paris high society), but the Narrator's memories and Françoise still remain.
Enough time has passed that what used to be the social norm is gone, and the fashionable set have even mostly forgotten Swann, with not insignificant help from both his widow and daughter marrying and erasing his surname. Time, not only bringing bombs and Germans to France, is also erasing the past history of the Narrator's world.
Time has even altered Mme de Guermantes and the pursuit of intellect, literature, and art that has motivated the Narrator since the beginning has spread to her as well. The Narrator has trouble recognizing Saint-Loup's old flame, Rachel, when she finally reappears, having completely reinvented herself since she was a girl in a brothel to a well respected actress. People have changed dramatically, and the Narrator is somehow having to keep up with all of this in addition to somewhat hinted ill health.
Well, the joke is on the Narrator: not all men must accept that in a hundred years their books will be gone, since on hundred years since the first publication of Swann's Way, we are still reading his work. All the work that Françoise has put into fixing up the Narrator's manuscript has paid off because this contemplation of memory, change, and the past still is in print and still is incredibly powerful and poignant.
There have been a lot of small bumps along the way, including more than a little worry about social standing and Albertine's sexual orientation, but Time Regained is worth it all. As creeped out as I was by the Narrator's obsession with Albertine, I feel the same connection to the Narrator's entire feeling of time moving on while memories remain the same. 4,000 pages later, having finished Time Regained was not just an accomplishment but also a wonderful conclusion to reading In Search of Lost Time.
And indeed this ignorance of people's true social position which every ten years causes the new fashionable elect to arise in all the glory of the moment as though the past had never existed, which makes it impossible for an American woman just landed in Europe to see that in an age when Bloch was nobody M. de Charlus was socially supreme in Paris and that Swann, who put himself out to please M. Bontemps, had himself been treated with every mark of friendship by the Prince of Wales, this ignorance, which exists not only in new arrivals but also in those who have always frequented adjacent but distinct regions of society, is itself also invariably an effect--but an effect operative not so much upon a whole social stratum as within individuals--of Time. (403)
Enough time has passed that what used to be the social norm is gone, and the fashionable set have even mostly forgotten Swann, with not insignificant help from both his widow and daughter marrying and erasing his surname. Time, not only bringing bombs and Germans to France, is also erasing the past history of the Narrator's world.
As her life drew to its close, Mme de Guermantes had felt the quickening within her of new curiosities....Her tired mind required a new form of food, and in order to get to know theatrical and literary people she now made herself pleasant to women whom formerly she would have refused to exchange cards but who, in the hope of getting the Duchess to come to their parties, could boast to her of their great friendship with the editor of some review. (465)
Time has even altered Mme de Guermantes and the pursuit of intellect, literature, and art that has motivated the Narrator since the beginning has spread to her as well. The Narrator has trouble recognizing Saint-Loup's old flame, Rachel, when she finally reappears, having completely reinvented herself since she was a girl in a brothel to a well respected actress. People have changed dramatically, and the Narrator is somehow having to keep up with all of this in addition to somewhat hinted ill health.
No doubt my books too, like my fleshy being, would in the end one day die. But death is a thing that we must resign ourselves to. We accept the thought that in ten years we ourselves, in a hundred years our books, will have ceased to exist. Eternal duration is promised no more to men's works than to men. (524)
Well, the joke is on the Narrator: not all men must accept that in a hundred years their books will be gone, since on hundred years since the first publication of Swann's Way, we are still reading his work. All the work that Françoise has put into fixing up the Narrator's manuscript has paid off because this contemplation of memory, change, and the past still is in print and still is incredibly powerful and poignant.
There have been a lot of small bumps along the way, including more than a little worry about social standing and Albertine's sexual orientation, but Time Regained is worth it all. As creeped out as I was by the Narrator's obsession with Albertine, I feel the same connection to the Narrator's entire feeling of time moving on while memories remain the same. 4,000 pages later, having finished Time Regained was not just an accomplishment but also a wonderful conclusion to reading In Search of Lost Time.