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In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
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Published October 28, 2003
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About the author
Marcel Proust
2,167 books7,557 followersMarcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.
Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51.
Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.
Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51.
Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 6, 2026
“like the translucent wings of an azure butterfly, one caught the glow of the eyes, in which flesh becomes mirror and gives us the illusion that through them, more than through any other part of the body, we come closest to the soul.”
a densely populated work of total solitude. could truly only work as a novel. proust understands fully that reading is an act that shuts one away from the world and brings them totally into themself, and lets that isolation charge the unreality behind all the descriptions. its both a work of subjective mastery - where every other character isnt really a person but some segment of the narrator in disguise - and utter disorientation. the feeling of going back too deep into a memory and excavating the ugliness of what’s been discarded. what were those trees on the road, where have they gone?? thought so much of elstir’s paintings where the sky and the sea look indistinguishable from each other and how apt that is as a description of this book. where is the line between the water he can touch and the air that he cannot?
took me the exact length of one semester to read this (give or take three days), im sad to let it go. im excited to see odette again (her and elstir are geniunely the only characters id actually want to hang out with tbh) and happy to get far far away from balbec. that proust can spend about a third of this book slogging through the overstimulating minutiae of vacation and still emerge with a masterpiece is quite the feat. cant wait to keep going, or rather, to go farther back.
“the countryside round Balbec shifted and faltered, and I had to ask myself whether this whole outing was not just some figment, Balbec merely a place where I might once have been in my imagination, Mme de Villeparisis someone out of a novel, and the three old trees nothing but the solid reality that meets the eye of a reader who glances up from a book, his mind still held by the spell of a fictional setting.”
a densely populated work of total solitude. could truly only work as a novel. proust understands fully that reading is an act that shuts one away from the world and brings them totally into themself, and lets that isolation charge the unreality behind all the descriptions. its both a work of subjective mastery - where every other character isnt really a person but some segment of the narrator in disguise - and utter disorientation. the feeling of going back too deep into a memory and excavating the ugliness of what’s been discarded. what were those trees on the road, where have they gone?? thought so much of elstir’s paintings where the sky and the sea look indistinguishable from each other and how apt that is as a description of this book. where is the line between the water he can touch and the air that he cannot?
took me the exact length of one semester to read this (give or take three days), im sad to let it go. im excited to see odette again (her and elstir are geniunely the only characters id actually want to hang out with tbh) and happy to get far far away from balbec. that proust can spend about a third of this book slogging through the overstimulating minutiae of vacation and still emerge with a masterpiece is quite the feat. cant wait to keep going, or rather, to go farther back.
“the countryside round Balbec shifted and faltered, and I had to ask myself whether this whole outing was not just some figment, Balbec merely a place where I might once have been in my imagination, Mme de Villeparisis someone out of a novel, and the three old trees nothing but the solid reality that meets the eye of a reader who glances up from a book, his mind still held by the spell of a fictional setting.”
January 25, 2026
last threefour pages spanned two whole hours because this has been my baby for six whole months. much of balbec was unfortunately an exceptional bore but jesus did i need this as my nightshelf backbone throughout late fall and early winter. that supreme discomfort our narrator feels in arriving at this new place after growing attached to another is one i couldn't quite shake off even after meeting the gang of girls. i miss odette de crecy and i miss paris and combray. i'm nevertheless blessed to have met such fascinating creatures and still surprised by such accurate names arising from the most incidental encounters. i can imagine proust ruminating over each syllable of the name si - mo - net (with one n): his mouth contracting at mo, slithering at si, his neck jerking back at net... what a name! it has the sound of a flat pebble that's thrown parallel to the surface of a pond which cant help but dip and bounce across many points of the water's surface to cause ripples that boomerang back to the thrower's feet. si - mo - net. return trip to paris!!
December 16, 2024
As noted by the Editor of The Way by Swann's, the translation of "A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs" to "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower" is not the choice of that volume’s original translator. Moncrieff chose "Within a Budding Grove" as the translated title which misses the mark almost completely. The coyness of the budding grove always makes me smile. And yet coming up with an alternative that isn't a literal translation is difficult.
This volume of In Search of Lost Time is translated by James Grieve. In it we discover the details of Swann's marriage to Odette, and witness our narrator as he discovers love and friendship (and his first sexual encounters) with Swann's daughter Gilberte and others. We hear discussions about what it means to be inside or outside the circle.
There's an interesting discussion about art and how truly great works can only be seen posthumously, from a perspective of years. That it takes time to understand the greatness contained therein. And the inability to see past works as innovative, as they form a sort of mass of past works, whereas contemporary works are jarring and vastly different in nature. However, each new iteration of art will have been just as jarring and novel to preceding generations. We read with shock that things we see or hear as not terribly different to other works of the time were banned or not popular or hidden away as they were too revolutionary. Or that understanding is plastic and too easily influenced by the words of others. One can like or dislike, find other meanings in something when it is critiqued by someone else. This is all in a small few paragraphs of the whole and shows how much is in these works. Our own confirmation bias will find certain passages interesting and others banal. The difference between the two passages is in ourselves, not necessarily in the writers ability. No two readers will read the same book.
Similarly there is a passage about how our narrator's impressions of M. Bergotte, taken solely from his books, collapses on meeting the fellow. How his very opinion of his works changes due to coming to know the writer's appearance or manner of voice, so different is it from his writing style. All this is succinctly and beautifully observed. It made me wonder about writers meeting their fans. A writer having spent so long working on a piece, but by the time it is distributed and read, they are distant memories for the writer, already having moved on to the next work. An artist always having one foot in the past and one in the future.
This collapsing of probabilities and potentialities is a recurring theme in the overall work - the impermanence and ever changing nature of reality and memory. How we rewrite our experience of situations over and over again until the original perceptions are erased and replaced by richer and different experiences. The idea of something or someone, the image created in ones mind is subtracted the more they knows the place or person, to be replaced by the actuality (or at least the reality of their perception).
Then there are obvservations about life that ring true no matter the syntax or difference in society or historical context. Take this example (forgive the length of the quote, but then Proust's paragraphs are really quite long) in which our narrator discusses and justifies his lack of progress in writing. As clear a description of the self-justifications of procrastination as any!
"Meanwhile, my parents would have preferred it if the intelligence which had so impressed Bergotte could have been made manifest in some achievement. As long as I had been excluded from the Swanns’ acquaintance, I was convinced that my inability to get down to work was caused by the state of emotional disturbance to which I was reduced by the impossibility of seeing Gilberte as and when I wished to. But then, once I had free access to their house, I could hardly sit down at my desk before I had to jump up again and be off there to visit them. And when I had left the Swanns’ and gone back home, it was only in appearance that I sat alone; my own thoughts could not withstand the torrent of words on which for hours past I had let myself be carried along: I went on turning out words and sentences which might have impressed the Swanns; to make the game more enjoyable, I even played the parts of the absent others, asking myself fictitious questions so designed that, in answering them, I could show off the brilliance of my banter. Silent as it was, this exercise was a real conversation and not a form of reflection; my solitude was a mental drawing-room scene, in which imaginary interlocutors and not myself were in charge of my speech, in which by producing not ideas which I believed to be true, but ideas that came to me without trouble, without any action of the outer world on the inner, I enjoyed the same sort of pleasure as is enjoyed, in utter passivity, by the person who has nothing better to do after dinner but sit quietly, lulled into a dull somnolence by poor digestion. If I had not been so determined to set seriously to work, I might have made an effort to start at once. But given that my resolve was unbreakable, given that within twenty-four hours, inside the empty frame of tomorrow where everything fitted so perfectly because it was not today, my best intentions would easily take material shape, it was really preferable not to think of beginning things on an evening when I was not quite ready – and of course the following days were to be no better suited to beginning things. However, I was a reasonable person. When one has waited for years, it would be childish not to tolerate a delay of a couple of days. In the knowledge that by the day after tomorrow I would have several pages written, I said no more about my decision to the family: much better to wait for a few hours, then once I had a piece of work in progress to show, my grandmother would be consoled and convinced. Unfortunately, tomorrow turned out not to be that broad, bright, outward-looking day that I had feverishly looked forward to. When it had ended, my idleness and hard struggle against my inner obstacles had just lasted for another twenty-four hours. After a few days, when my projects had still not come to anything, when some of my hope that they would very soon come to something had faded, and with it some of the courage I required in order to subordinate everything to my coming achievement, I went back to staying up late, as I now also lacked my incentive (the certain knowledge that the great work would be begun by the following morning) to go to bed early on any given evening. Before regaining my impetus, I was in need of a respite of several days; and on the only occasion when my grandmother hazarded a reproach in a tone of mild disenchantment – ‘So is anything happening about this writing?’ – I was aggrieved at her, and I concluded that, by her inability to see the staunchness of my purpose, by the anguish which her gross unfairness caused me, an utterly unsuitable state of mind in which to undertake such a work as mine, she had just succeeded in putting off once again (and possibly for a long time!) the moment when its accomplishing would be begun. She sensed that her sceptical air had offended an unsuspected but genuine resolve. She apologized with a kiss: ‘I’m sorry. I won’t say another word about it.’ So that I would not lose heart, she added her assurance that a day would come when I would feel well again, and that, of its own accord, my work would then start to flow smoothly.
"Anyway, I thought, what if I do spend a lot of time at the Swanns? So does Bergotte! My family’s view on this might almost have been that, though I was lazy, the life I was leading was actually the best suited to a developing talent, since I was frequenting the same drawing-room as a great writer. Yet, to acquire talent from someone else, to bypass the need to create it out of oneself, is as impossible as it would be to lead a healthy life by dining out frequently with a doctor, while flouting all the rules of hygiene and indulging in every sort of excess."
This volume of In Search of Lost Time is translated by James Grieve. In it we discover the details of Swann's marriage to Odette, and witness our narrator as he discovers love and friendship (and his first sexual encounters) with Swann's daughter Gilberte and others. We hear discussions about what it means to be inside or outside the circle.
There's an interesting discussion about art and how truly great works can only be seen posthumously, from a perspective of years. That it takes time to understand the greatness contained therein. And the inability to see past works as innovative, as they form a sort of mass of past works, whereas contemporary works are jarring and vastly different in nature. However, each new iteration of art will have been just as jarring and novel to preceding generations. We read with shock that things we see or hear as not terribly different to other works of the time were banned or not popular or hidden away as they were too revolutionary. Or that understanding is plastic and too easily influenced by the words of others. One can like or dislike, find other meanings in something when it is critiqued by someone else. This is all in a small few paragraphs of the whole and shows how much is in these works. Our own confirmation bias will find certain passages interesting and others banal. The difference between the two passages is in ourselves, not necessarily in the writers ability. No two readers will read the same book.
Similarly there is a passage about how our narrator's impressions of M. Bergotte, taken solely from his books, collapses on meeting the fellow. How his very opinion of his works changes due to coming to know the writer's appearance or manner of voice, so different is it from his writing style. All this is succinctly and beautifully observed. It made me wonder about writers meeting their fans. A writer having spent so long working on a piece, but by the time it is distributed and read, they are distant memories for the writer, already having moved on to the next work. An artist always having one foot in the past and one in the future.
This collapsing of probabilities and potentialities is a recurring theme in the overall work - the impermanence and ever changing nature of reality and memory. How we rewrite our experience of situations over and over again until the original perceptions are erased and replaced by richer and different experiences. The idea of something or someone, the image created in ones mind is subtracted the more they knows the place or person, to be replaced by the actuality (or at least the reality of their perception).
Then there are obvservations about life that ring true no matter the syntax or difference in society or historical context. Take this example (forgive the length of the quote, but then Proust's paragraphs are really quite long) in which our narrator discusses and justifies his lack of progress in writing. As clear a description of the self-justifications of procrastination as any!
"Meanwhile, my parents would have preferred it if the intelligence which had so impressed Bergotte could have been made manifest in some achievement. As long as I had been excluded from the Swanns’ acquaintance, I was convinced that my inability to get down to work was caused by the state of emotional disturbance to which I was reduced by the impossibility of seeing Gilberte as and when I wished to. But then, once I had free access to their house, I could hardly sit down at my desk before I had to jump up again and be off there to visit them. And when I had left the Swanns’ and gone back home, it was only in appearance that I sat alone; my own thoughts could not withstand the torrent of words on which for hours past I had let myself be carried along: I went on turning out words and sentences which might have impressed the Swanns; to make the game more enjoyable, I even played the parts of the absent others, asking myself fictitious questions so designed that, in answering them, I could show off the brilliance of my banter. Silent as it was, this exercise was a real conversation and not a form of reflection; my solitude was a mental drawing-room scene, in which imaginary interlocutors and not myself were in charge of my speech, in which by producing not ideas which I believed to be true, but ideas that came to me without trouble, without any action of the outer world on the inner, I enjoyed the same sort of pleasure as is enjoyed, in utter passivity, by the person who has nothing better to do after dinner but sit quietly, lulled into a dull somnolence by poor digestion. If I had not been so determined to set seriously to work, I might have made an effort to start at once. But given that my resolve was unbreakable, given that within twenty-four hours, inside the empty frame of tomorrow where everything fitted so perfectly because it was not today, my best intentions would easily take material shape, it was really preferable not to think of beginning things on an evening when I was not quite ready – and of course the following days were to be no better suited to beginning things. However, I was a reasonable person. When one has waited for years, it would be childish not to tolerate a delay of a couple of days. In the knowledge that by the day after tomorrow I would have several pages written, I said no more about my decision to the family: much better to wait for a few hours, then once I had a piece of work in progress to show, my grandmother would be consoled and convinced. Unfortunately, tomorrow turned out not to be that broad, bright, outward-looking day that I had feverishly looked forward to. When it had ended, my idleness and hard struggle against my inner obstacles had just lasted for another twenty-four hours. After a few days, when my projects had still not come to anything, when some of my hope that they would very soon come to something had faded, and with it some of the courage I required in order to subordinate everything to my coming achievement, I went back to staying up late, as I now also lacked my incentive (the certain knowledge that the great work would be begun by the following morning) to go to bed early on any given evening. Before regaining my impetus, I was in need of a respite of several days; and on the only occasion when my grandmother hazarded a reproach in a tone of mild disenchantment – ‘So is anything happening about this writing?’ – I was aggrieved at her, and I concluded that, by her inability to see the staunchness of my purpose, by the anguish which her gross unfairness caused me, an utterly unsuitable state of mind in which to undertake such a work as mine, she had just succeeded in putting off once again (and possibly for a long time!) the moment when its accomplishing would be begun. She sensed that her sceptical air had offended an unsuspected but genuine resolve. She apologized with a kiss: ‘I’m sorry. I won’t say another word about it.’ So that I would not lose heart, she added her assurance that a day would come when I would feel well again, and that, of its own accord, my work would then start to flow smoothly.
"Anyway, I thought, what if I do spend a lot of time at the Swanns? So does Bergotte! My family’s view on this might almost have been that, though I was lazy, the life I was leading was actually the best suited to a developing talent, since I was frequenting the same drawing-room as a great writer. Yet, to acquire talent from someone else, to bypass the need to create it out of oneself, is as impossible as it would be to lead a healthy life by dining out frequently with a doctor, while flouting all the rules of hygiene and indulging in every sort of excess."
February 24, 2025
This is my favourite volume from the sequence.
In some ways it doesn't surprise me that Proust was forced to self-publish "Swann's Way". If "In the Shadow..." had been the first volume he might have found a more immediate readership not because this is better than volume one (although it is to me) but because it so much more accessible.
"Swann's Way's" challenging opening sections and somewhat unconventional overall structure is possibly why so many are reluctant to start "In Search of Lost Time" but "In the Shadow..." is comparatively much easier to read.
There are just two sections: the first is devoted to the narrator's encounters with Odette and Gilberte and the second is an account of the narrator's stay in a seaside hotel with his grandmother and his first encounters with Albertine and her "little gang" and Robert de Saint Loup. This second section is my favourite part of "In Search of Lost Time." It is lyrical, charming & funny, introduces or includes some of the sequence's best and/or key characters, and possesses an appropriately diffuse, dreamy, seaside atmosphere.
The micro-culture of the seaside hotel is examined at leisure and the milieu of the novel, of the hotel, the town, in addition to the subject of young love, and the narrator's tender and affectionate relationship with his grandmother, seems to inspire some of Proust's most beautifully poetic writing.
In some ways it doesn't surprise me that Proust was forced to self-publish "Swann's Way". If "In the Shadow..." had been the first volume he might have found a more immediate readership not because this is better than volume one (although it is to me) but because it so much more accessible.
"Swann's Way's" challenging opening sections and somewhat unconventional overall structure is possibly why so many are reluctant to start "In Search of Lost Time" but "In the Shadow..." is comparatively much easier to read.
There are just two sections: the first is devoted to the narrator's encounters with Odette and Gilberte and the second is an account of the narrator's stay in a seaside hotel with his grandmother and his first encounters with Albertine and her "little gang" and Robert de Saint Loup. This second section is my favourite part of "In Search of Lost Time." It is lyrical, charming & funny, introduces or includes some of the sequence's best and/or key characters, and possesses an appropriately diffuse, dreamy, seaside atmosphere.
The micro-culture of the seaside hotel is examined at leisure and the milieu of the novel, of the hotel, the town, in addition to the subject of young love, and the narrator's tender and affectionate relationship with his grandmother, seems to inspire some of Proust's most beautifully poetic writing.
August 18, 2025
Re-reading Proust is truly a magical experience.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews