Swanns Way (Modern Classics)

Rating:
Summary: The pleasure of reading Proust (Volume I).
Review: Having just finished reading SWANN'S WAY for the fourth time, it remains at the top of my short list of favorite novels. Influenced by John Ruskin, Henri Bergson, Wagner and the fiction of Anatole France, Proust (1871-1922), in his "universality and deep awareness of human nature," is considered by Harold Bloom to be "as primordial as Tolstoy," and "as wise as Shakespeare" (Bloom, GENIUS, p. 218).

Most recently, I re-experienced SWANN'S WAY through the Modern Library's new, 2003 revision of the Montcrieff/Kilmartin translation of Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, Volumes I through VI. Through an illuminating series of what Walter Pater has called "privileged moments," or what James Joyce might call "epiphanies," the narrative in SWANN'S WAY tells a dual story of unrequited love. The taste of a madeleine pastry brings with it a flood of childhood memories from the narrator's youth spent in Combray and Paris, mostly relating to his infatuation with Charles Swann's daughter, Gilberte, and Swann's obsessive affair with a courtesan, Odette de Crecy. Although Swann realizes Odette is not his type (p. 543) and suspects she is a liar, his jealous love for her consumes him. Odette is unsophisticated, has lesbian tendencies, and is rumored to be a prostitute. Even after he acknowledges he has "wasted years of [his] life" on Odette (p. 543), Swann is nevertheless powerless to end their turbulent relationship. For Proust, human love becomes synonymous with suffering, failure, exhaustion, ruin, and despair (p. xviii) except, that is, for the love between a mother and son (symbolized in SWANN'S WAY by a memorable goodnight kiss, which leaves the young narrarator longing to tell his mother, "Kiss me just once more")(p. 15). SWANN'S WAY is not a feel-good novel, to be sure; for Proust, there are no limits to human suffering. He believed that any intrusion upon one's solitude is damaging, that we can only understand our pain if we approach it from a distance, and that friendship is somewhere on a scale between fatigue and ennui (Bloom, GENIUS, p. 218).

In the end, Volume I of Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME is about the lost and wasted years of human existence, and it prefaces things to come in subsequent volumes. There is a satisfying intellectual profit to be derived from the narrative of SWANN'S WAY. Proust reveals through his use of small illuminations that one may find rewards beyond the worldly ways of the human condition. Serious readers will find uncommon pleasure in the experience of reading SWANN'S WAY. For me, reading SWANN'S WAY is the best example of what it means to read "a good book."

G. Merritt

Rating:
Summary: Time Well Spent
Review: I approached this book with some trepidation. Did I really want to start a 6-volume project? Was it as inaccessible as some have said it is? Was I just being pretentious in wanting to read them? And which edition to read? So many to choose from. After much research, I decided to go for the Modern Library 6-volume paperback edition, translated by Moncrieff and Kilmartin with revisions by Enright. This is what the experts recommended, and the beautiful cover art is a bonus.

I started reading and immediately was captivated by the book. I enjoyed every bit of minutiae and every beautiful sentence. The scenes from Combray were wonderful, but I especially loved the love story between M. Swann and Odette. I could feel Swann's anguish, confusion, suspicioun, and obsession.

Do yourself a favor, make time for Proust.

Rating:
Summary: Proust's way
Review: I wish I hadn't waited so long to experience Proust, for now having read "Swann's Way," I see that his deeply sensitive prose is a reference point for almost all of the introspective literature of the twentieth century. As the story of a boy's adolescent conscience and aspirations to become a writer, the book's only artistic peer is James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."

The narrator is presumably the young Marcel Proust who divides his recollections between his boyhood at his family's country house at Combray and his parents' friend Charles Swann, an art connoisseur. In fact, the path that passes Swann's house, being one of two ways the narrator's family likes to take when they go for walks, gives the book its title. Proust uses the theme of unrequited love to draw a parallel between his young narrator's infatuation with Swann's red-haired daughter Gilberte and Swann's turbulent affair with a woman named Odette de Crecy.

Intense romantic obsessions are a Proustian forte. Swann falls for Odette even though she is unsophisticated and frivolous and does not appear to love him nearly as much as he loves her. He is desperate for her, always sending her gifts, giving her money when she needs it, and hoping she will become dependent on him. It comes as no surprise that he is consumed with jealousy when he notices her spending time with his romantic rival, the snobbish Comte de Forcheville, and he is shocked by her lesbian tendencies and rumors of her prostitution. He finally realizes with chagrin that he has wasted years of his life pursuing a woman who wasn't his "type" -- but even this resignation is not yet the conclusion of their relationship.

Proust's extraordinary sensitivity allows him to explore uncommon areas of poignancy, perversity, and the human condition. One example is the young narrator's childish insistence on getting a goodnight kiss from his mother at the cost of wresting her attention away from the visiting Swann. Another remarkable instance is the scene in which a girl's female lover spits on the photograph of the girl's deceased father in disrespectful defiance of his wishes for his daughter's decency. And I myself identified with Legrandin, the engineer whose passion for literature and art grants his professional career no advantages but makes him an excellent conversationalist.

Few writers can claim Proust's level of elegance and imagery. The long and convoluted sentences, with multiple subordinate clauses tangled together like tendrils of ivy, remind me of Henry James; but Proust is much warmer and more intimate although admittedly he is just as difficult to read. The narration of "Swann's Way" is a loosely connected flow of thoughts which go off on tangents to introduce new ideas and scenes; the effect is similar to wandering through a gallery of Impressionist paintings. And, as though channeling Monet literarily, Proust displays a very poetical understanding of and communication with nature, infusing his text with pastoral motifs and floral metaphors that suggest the world is always in bloom.

Rating:
Summary: Being devoid of inspiration, my title is "TITLE"
Review: Many things have been said about Marcel Proust to myself as the sarrounding adults gushed over the fact that a teenager was reading literature. That said, many of these people confessed they had never finished Proust all the way through; one went all the way to say he had found it too "subjective." If you are reading literature to read literture STAY AWAY FROM THIS BOOK! If you want to read an incredible novel, then go ahead; you will not desecrate Proust's grave.

Many times as I read this book, I found myself pausing, almost pained at the beauty of the language. I have read many authors, and have never read such beautiful words; his descriptions seem so divine, and yet he spends the first part of the book saying that he himself can't write! It's one of those moments where you want to shake the author with mental fists, but it's okay; it adds flavour.

Proust is probably among the greatest novelists of history (probably one down after Dostoevsky). The title of the series "In Search of Lost Time," immediately gives you the clue of what the theme shall be; moments of wasted time, moments of bliss that you wish to recapture, memories long gone that you wish you could recapture. But, that is the essense of life.