In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5 : The Captive, The Fugitive (Modern Library)

Rating:
Summary: Uncomfortable masterpiece, full of ugly, brutal insights.
Review: Four-fifths of this novel takes place inside a madman's head. I don't just mean that he is a first-person narrator looking back over his life; he stays in his room, literally agonising over his lover, the captive of the title, wondering where she is, who she's with, unable to sift any kind of truth from a welter of lies, misinterpretations, suspicions, half-clues. Above all, he's terrified she's a lesbian, and sees willing accomplices everywhere. So there's more than one captive in this novel.

this cramped, interior, labyrinthine novel doesn't just range on jealousy - the narrator muses on time, art, place. The governing motif is music, and there are some beautiful sections on the sounds of the street as an orchestra, the epiphanical premiere of a septet at a soiree, or Albertine playing on the pianola.

For relief there is a 100-page escape from the house (and the narrator's obsessiveness), at the soiree, where we meet all our old friends, the Verdurins, Brichot, Morel, and the incomparable Charlus, heading for a terrible fall. The move from interior psychologising to observational social comedy is literally fresh air - the whole sequence is beautifully modulated between comedy and melancholy.

And yet it all comes back to this madman and a woman he doesn't even really love, becuse the freedom that made him love her in the first place has been stifled by him.

Rating:
Summary: Through a Glass Darkly
Review: Having just gotten my B.A. a couple of years ago I must have been in an ambitious mood or something, because I decided to read the whole of In Search of Lost Time, cover to cover, pausing only for food and sleep. It's the sort of work that looks more like Mount Everest than a regular ol' novel when you first start reading it, but it turned out to be one of the best companions I could have asked for over the past few years. Proust was a mmaster of the cooly detatched but almost unbelievably sensitive description of human motivation, and his perspective on the harmless, but decadent latter-day French aristocracy whose attitudes and practices provie most of the material for the seven books in the series, is deeply selfish and amoral, but also inexhaustibly curious and sympathetic. This constrast comes out most noticeably in The Captive and The Fugitive, which basically consist of several hundred pages of reflection upon Proust's love affair with a young girl named Albertine. The pair of novels are full of long, sustained reflections on the nature of love, and upon the deep mysteries that attend upon trying to understand what makes other people tick. There is an especially lovely passage in which Proust describes the feelings he undergoes while watching Albertine sleep. By the time of the end of the novel, though, the reader finds himself left with the curious sense that one doesn't actually know anything at all concrete about the "Fugitive" Albertine. Nobody was better than Proust at dissecting the motives and the mores of other people without ever gining in to the novelist's illusion that he understood them better than they did themselves. I recommend these novels to anyone who is up for a bit of a challenge (even Scott Moncrieff's lovely translation of the French could never make Proust an "easy read"), and who is prepared to be enlightened by the reading of a novel even if it doesn't issue in the usual "payoff" of a sense of superior understanding in relation to the charatcters depicted there.

Rating:
Summary: Captivating masterpiece
Review: Modern Library's Volume V deals with the relationship between Marcel and Albertine. It is a complex, psychological relationship to say the least. In the Captive, Albertine lives with Marcel in his apartment in Paris and in The Fugitive one wonders who is, in fact, more captive -- Albertine or Marcel. It would seem to be Albertine for whom Marcel possesses an obsessive love and concurrent fear of her sapphic penchant. But it is also Marcel who will sacrifice experience if he makes a commitment to her. Who is more free, the captive or the fugitive? Proust raises questions about how to serve best the artist's quest for beauty. In fact, how does one really ever "capture" the beauty of life in art or music or literature? Even in a masterpiece, is it not beauty the fugitive that usually dwells just beyond one's capture? Or like Vinteuil's septet or the music of Wagner or the painting of Rembrandt, is the best for which one can hope of fugitive beauty only a brief fleeting experience? Are the vast tracts of time spent to understand the beauty and meaning of life worth it? As a writer does he not habitually surrender life in order to capture it? Or is the pursuit of the capture of the beauty of life in fact where one realizes its most sublime value? One sees in Proust toward the end of The Fugitive a member of society who respects it but chooses by reasons of health not to position himself so visibly within it. Despite his family name and vast but dwindling fortune inherited from his beloved grandmother, he seems to become somewhat ultimately disenchanted with the intricacies of Faubourg-St. Germain society to which he devotes so much of his writing. He recognises society's shallow obsession with materialism and rampant snobbery but his own place in society is captured by its complex history and tacit rules and Marcel is inescapably a captive of his own culture. When Albertine is lost to him toward the end of the volume, as in the prior volumes, the story line's serial intrigue advances most. Characters from prior volumes reappear, reminiscent of Balzac, whom Proust adored, but like him they change,too, and usually for the worse over time. The great tapestry of the characters of Proust -- Albertine, Gilberte, Swann, Brichot, Bloch, Charlus, Morel, Saint-Loup -- ultimately surprise and usually disappoint him. As to nagging questions about Proust's own orientation, "Personally I found it absolutely immaterial from a moral standpoint whether one took one's pleasure with a man or a woman, and only too natural and human that one should take it where one could find it." I found myself wishing that Proust had written more about Bloch and Saint-Loup and Gilberte, and less about Albertine. But she was, like his work, the one obsession, the endeavor of which understanding he could never escape and never quite marry -- she was his beauty and his art. She was the breath of life itself from his pen and from his experience of life as seen through the eyes of a true genius.

Rating:
Summary: What sex is Albertine?
Review: The Albertine episodes make more sense if we assume this is a homosexual ralationship. Albertine's independence, and her being allowed to live in a young man's apartment, and other aspects of her social life do not seem likely for a young woman in the nineteen hundreds. Marcel's (and incidentally this is the only volume where he refers to himself as Marcel) suspicions then become the gay lover's fears that his lover prefers heterosexuality. Albertine is the only female in the Recherche who never gets married.
Apart from these external clues there is quality about the the affection Marcel feels that suggests a gay rather than a straight relationship.
This volume marks a turning point in the narrator's fascination with the aristocracy. From here on disenchantment sets in, and the references to homosexuality become almost homophobic.

Rating:
Summary: From obsession to oblivion.
Review: This volume contains parts five and six of Proust's huge novel; additionally, these two parts represent the first posthumous releases from A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. If there was any doubt in my mind that these parts, published without the author's oversight, could not continue the excellence of the preceding parts, this fear was quickly dispelled. The Captive and The Fugitive contain some of the most beautiful of Proust's prose, as well as insights into Parisian society, art and the inner thoughts of the narrator not contained elsewhere in the novel.

The Captive, originally published in 1923, tells the story of Marcel and Albertine, now kept by the narrator in his Paris home. This co-habitation is not based on love, nor even lust, but on the obsessive jealousy of Marcel based on his almost psycopathic fear of Albertine's lesbian proclivities. By this point in the novel, Marcel has removed himself from society and is content to remain for the most part in his room. Albertine, living in an adjoining room, is allowed out of the house only with a chaperon and to destinations decided in advance by Marcel. It is the ironic twist that Proust puts on the idea of imprisonment that forms the backbone of this part of the novel. Not only is Albertine kept prisoner by Marcel, but Marcel is no less the prisoner of his own obsession.

It can arguably be stated that each of the parts of the novel corresponds to one of the senses. If this is the case, the Captive surely corresponds to the sense of hearing. It is while listening to Vinteuil's septet that Marcel realizes that art is more than the mechanical manipulation of ideas by color, words or music. Just as Vinteuil has created a complex musical form out of the "catchy" phrase so admired by Swann and Mme Verdurin's little group, Marcel awakens to the limitless possibilities of artistic expression. This epiphanic moment awakens in the narrator a desire to commit himself to the life of a writer. In order to accomplish this wish, he decides that he must end his affair with Albertine. Marcel's decision to part with Albertine on his own terms is thwarted when he learns that it is she who has made the final break and has left his apartment.

Thus begins The Fugitive (originally translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, with a freight train full of poetic license, as The Sweet Cheat Gone). The Fugitive represents the most introspective part of a very introspective novel, and in it Proust's zeal for self-examination is pursued with un-relentless fervor as layer upon layer of the author's persona in exposed to the reader.

Marcel's world is turned up side down when he learns that Albertine has died in a riding accident. His obsession, so debilitating when his mistress was alive, continues unabated after her death and the narrator continues with his scrutiny of Albertine's private life as if she was still alive. He finally realizes that obsession cannot be eliminated by death and that relief can only come with the passsing of time and the ensuing state of oblivion. Although Albertine's memory has not been totally erased, the torment that she has caused Marcel diminishes greatly and he is able to resume his life and work.

However, it is a different world into which Marcel emerges after his long period of grief. Just as Marcel's personal life was changed by a freak accident, the social life in which he has emersed himself is going through social changes just as fundamental. The old aristocracy, becoming more and more deperate for cash, is falling prey to the easy lure of mariages of convenience in which aristocratic titles are exchanged for hefty dowries. His two friends, Gilberte Swann and Robert de Saint-Loup, are married to each other thus accomplishing what Charles Swann could never do - have his daughter received by the Duchess de Guermantes. Even more revolutionary, a simple seamstress (Jupien's niece) marries into the aristocracy forever destroying any romantic impressions that Marcel might still hold of the Guermantes and Meseglise Ways. Clearly Marcel's world is changing, but it is the change in his friend, Robert de Saint-Loup, that causes him the greatest pain as he realizes that even friendships are all too often broken by the passage of time.

Rating:
Summary: From obsession to oblivion.
Review: This volume contains parts five and six of Proust's huge novel; additionally, these two parts represent the first posthumous releases from A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. If there was any doubt in my mind that these parts, published without the author's oversight, could not continue the excellence of the preceding parts, this fear was quickly dispelled. The Captive and The Fugitive contain some of the most beautiful of Proust's prose, as well as insights into Parisian society, art and the inner thoughts of the narrator not contained elsewhere in the novel.

The Captive, originally published in 1923, tells the story of Marcel and Albertine, now kept by the narrator in his Paris home. This co-habitation is not based on love, nor even lust, but on the obsessive jealousy of Marcel based on his almost psycopathic fear of Albertine's lesbian proclivities. By this point in the novel, Marcel has removed himself from society and is content to remain for the most part in his room. Albertine, living in an adjoining room, is allowed out of the house only with a chaperon and to destinations decided in advance by Marcel. It is the ironic twist that Proust puts on the idea of imprisonment that forms the backbone of this part of the novel. Not only is Albertine kept prisoner by Marcel, but Marcel is no less the prisoner of his own obsession.

It can arguably be stated that each of the parts of the novel corresponds to one of the senses. If this is the case, the Captive surely corresponds to the sense of hearing. It is while listening to Vinteuil's septet that Marcel realizes that art is more than the mechanical manipulation of ideas by color, words or music. Just as Vinteuil has created a complex musical form out of the "catchy" phrase so admired by Swann and Mme Verdurin's little group, Marcel awakens to the limitless possibilities of artistic expression. This epiphanic moment awakens in the narrator a desire to commit himself to the life of a writer. In order to accomplish this wish, he decides that he must end his affair with Albertine. Marcel's decision to part with Albertine on his own terms is thwarted when he learns that it is she who has made the final break and has left his apartment.

Thus begins The Fugitive (originally translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, with a freight train full of poetic license, as The Sweet Cheat Gone). The Fugitive represents the most introspective part of a very introspective novel, and in it Proust's zeal for self-examination is pursued with un-relentless fervor as layer upon layer of the author's persona in exposed to the reader.

Marcel's world is turned up side down when he learns that Albertine has died in a riding accident. His obsession, so debilitating when his mistress was alive, continues unabated after her death and the narrator continues with his scrutiny of Albertine's private life as if she was still alive. He finally realizes that obsession cannot be eliminated by death and that relief can only come with the passsing of time and the ensuing state of oblivion. Although Albertine's memory has not been totally erased, the torment that she has caused Marcel diminishes greatly and he is able to resume his life and work.

However, it is a different world into which Marcel emerges after his long period of grief. Just as Marcel's personal life was changed by a freak accident, the social life in which he has emersed himself is going through social changes just as fundamental. The old aristocracy, becoming more and more deperate for cash, is falling prey to the easy lure of mariages of convenience in which aristocratic titles are exchanged for hefty dowries. His two friends, Gilberte Swann and Robert de Saint-Loup, are married to each other thus accomplishing what Charles Swann could never do - have his daughter received by the Duchess de Guermantes. Even more revolutionary, a simple seamstress (Jupien's niece) marries into the aristocracy forever destroying any romantic impressions that Marcel might still hold of the Guermantes and Meseglise Ways. Clearly Marcel's world is changing, but it is the change in his friend, Robert de Saint-Loup, that causes him the greatest pain as he realizes that even friendships are all too often broken by the passage of time.