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A review by tomleetang
Remembrance of Things Past: v. 1 by Marcel Proust
4.0
It's taken just over four years for me to read the first three books of Proust's magnum opus (i.e. get about halfway). Perhaps one of the few silver linings of Covid 2020 has been that it gave me the opportunity to really sink my teeth into this sprawling novel.
I should say up front that I found this a challenging book to read, mainly because it requires such extreme concentration. You have to sit down and properly devote yourself to reading Proust without any distractions for extended periods of time. There are no easily digestible chapters and very few obvious places to stop. The sentences often meander into four or five subordinate clauses, sometimes extending over a few pages of tightly packed words; these sentences are so superficially innocuous, so smoothly readable and without any obvious difficulty, that even a small slip of focus can mean you end up a few pages later having taken in absolutely nothing. If you were reading Beckett or Nabokov or Pynchon, you would be drawn up short by jarring absurdity or lexical complexity or a bizarre occurrence, but almost everything in Proust is such smooth sailing that it facilitates automatic reading, to the extent that the words drift in at your eyes and out the back of your head.
When I got used to the style and really settled in, however, I began to appreciate how the seemingly elegant sentences are actually more like armed invaders, battering ferociously at the gates of the mind, hoping by sheer numbers to force open its secrets. Proust may not be precise in the sense that he tries to distil what he wants to say into a single perfect sentence, but he is precise in that he is determined to pinpoint exactly what lies behind an emotion or an attitude or a memory, no matter the number of sentences it takes.
I realise I've babbled on about the stylistic elements while ignoring what actually happens in the book (or, rather, the first three volumes). Essentially, a mawkish child grows into a neurotic man-child who engages in predatory behaviour towards women he is sexually attracted to while weeping if his beloved grandmother does not say goodnight to him. Okay, so I'm being a bit cruel and reductive, but the narrator is fairly unsympathetic; what makes him worthwhile is his hypersensitivity, which enables him to deliver detailed, forensic examinations of the way humans feel and why; the contradictions inherent in perception, memory and just general living.
Everything takes place in upper-crust French society at the beginning of the 20th century. This makes the novel not only a fascinating historical curio, but also allows Proust to make one of the most poignant arguments ever made against elitism: the author (as an upper class insider himself) is so expert at pointing out all the contradictions and absurdities of manners and social mores, contrasting the fashionable set with the respectable set with the intellectual set. People snipe at one another for misuse of grammar, outmoded expressions, aesthetic opinions, political standpoints - essentially all the things that cause people to screech at one another on Twitter today, but involving princes, duchesses and other fashionable members of the aristocracy (though who is fashionable and who is not is, of course, debated by the people that inhabit this gilded world). The fact that the society is so rarified may seem to make Proust's points seem rather distant, but actually most (if not all) of the disconnect between meaning and speech, pretence and ingenuousness, is entirely relatable.
There are also innumerable cultural references, ranging from Victor Hugo to Ingres, Napoleonic generals to ladies of letters. The way these are collected and synthesised to provide fresh food for thought reminded me a bit of Montaigne. It's a formidable amount of knowledge that the characters sling about with ease, and you could spend ages delving into the real-world personages upon which many of the novel's characters are based in this roman-a-clef.
As I said at the start, it's taken just over four years for me to read the first three books of Proust's magnum opus, and while I've found it immensely stimulating, I think I'll save the final four books for another decade. After all, you can have too much of a good thing!
I should say up front that I found this a challenging book to read, mainly because it requires such extreme concentration. You have to sit down and properly devote yourself to reading Proust without any distractions for extended periods of time. There are no easily digestible chapters and very few obvious places to stop. The sentences often meander into four or five subordinate clauses, sometimes extending over a few pages of tightly packed words; these sentences are so superficially innocuous, so smoothly readable and without any obvious difficulty, that even a small slip of focus can mean you end up a few pages later having taken in absolutely nothing. If you were reading Beckett or Nabokov or Pynchon, you would be drawn up short by jarring absurdity or lexical complexity or a bizarre occurrence, but almost everything in Proust is such smooth sailing that it facilitates automatic reading, to the extent that the words drift in at your eyes and out the back of your head.
When I got used to the style and really settled in, however, I began to appreciate how the seemingly elegant sentences are actually more like armed invaders, battering ferociously at the gates of the mind, hoping by sheer numbers to force open its secrets. Proust may not be precise in the sense that he tries to distil what he wants to say into a single perfect sentence, but he is precise in that he is determined to pinpoint exactly what lies behind an emotion or an attitude or a memory, no matter the number of sentences it takes.
I realise I've babbled on about the stylistic elements while ignoring what actually happens in the book (or, rather, the first three volumes). Essentially, a mawkish child grows into a neurotic man-child who engages in predatory behaviour towards women he is sexually attracted to while weeping if his beloved grandmother does not say goodnight to him. Okay, so I'm being a bit cruel and reductive, but the narrator is fairly unsympathetic; what makes him worthwhile is his hypersensitivity, which enables him to deliver detailed, forensic examinations of the way humans feel and why; the contradictions inherent in perception, memory and just general living.
Everything takes place in upper-crust French society at the beginning of the 20th century. This makes the novel not only a fascinating historical curio, but also allows Proust to make one of the most poignant arguments ever made against elitism: the author (as an upper class insider himself) is so expert at pointing out all the contradictions and absurdities of manners and social mores, contrasting the fashionable set with the respectable set with the intellectual set. People snipe at one another for misuse of grammar, outmoded expressions, aesthetic opinions, political standpoints - essentially all the things that cause people to screech at one another on Twitter today, but involving princes, duchesses and other fashionable members of the aristocracy (though who is fashionable and who is not is, of course, debated by the people that inhabit this gilded world). The fact that the society is so rarified may seem to make Proust's points seem rather distant, but actually most (if not all) of the disconnect between meaning and speech, pretence and ingenuousness, is entirely relatable.
There are also innumerable cultural references, ranging from Victor Hugo to Ingres, Napoleonic generals to ladies of letters. The way these are collected and synthesised to provide fresh food for thought reminded me a bit of Montaigne. It's a formidable amount of knowledge that the characters sling about with ease, and you could spend ages delving into the real-world personages upon which many of the novel's characters are based in this roman-a-clef.
As I said at the start, it's taken just over four years for me to read the first three books of Proust's magnum opus, and while I've found it immensely stimulating, I think I'll save the final four books for another decade. After all, you can have too much of a good thing!