Remembrance of Things Past: v. 1 (Twentieth Century Classics) by Marcel Proust

À la recherche du temps perdu #1-2

by Marcel Proust

Swann's Way tells two related stories, the first of which revolves around Marcel, a younger version of the narrator, and his experiences in, and memories of, the French town Combray. Inspired by the "gusts of memory" that rise up within him as he dips a Madeleine into hot tea, the narrator discusses his fear of going to bed at night. He is a creature of habit and dislikes waking up in the middle of the night not knowing where he is.He claims that people are defined by the objects that surround them and must piece together their identities bit by bit each time they wake up. The young Marcel is so nervous about sleeping alone that he looks forward to his mother's goodnight kisses, but also dreads them as a sign of an impending sleepless night. One night, when Charles Swann, a friend of his grandparents, is visiting, his mother cannot come kiss him goodnight. He stays up until Swann leaves and looks so sad and pitiful that even his disciplinarian father encourages "Mamma" to spend the night in Marcel's room.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Literature, Philosophy, 20th Century, Literary Fiction, France

Paperback

About the author

Marcel 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.

Reviews

[AiK · Rating 4 out of 5]

По направлению к Свану - невероятно растянутый рассказ о внутренних переживаниях маленького мальчика и его болезненной привязанности к матери и одержимом желании непременно поцеловать ее на ночь и капризах, если по какой-то причине мать не может этого сделать. Такая же болезненная одержимость мучает Cвана в отношении Одетты, женщины, не равной ему по уму, образованию и происхождению, но которая вертит им как хочет.
Под сенью девушек в цвету. Сословные различия, мещанство, вульгарность, интеллигентность, искусство – вот темы, волнующие Пруста и во втором романе цикла. Так же как и в первом романе Сван, Марсель болезненно впечатлителен и его привязанности необыкновенно утонченно волнительные.

[Greta · Rating 1 out of 5]

Blahblahblahblahblah. Blahdeblahdeblah. Blahblahblahdeblahdeblahblahblah. Having said that, reading Proust is a lot like sitting at a table at a café with someone who can't stop talking about themselves and their thoughts, however mundane, and their experiences, however uneventful. Eventually, the chair you're sitting on gets quite uncomfortable, your coffee grows cold, and what you really want is to get up and leave. But because you're in it for the long haul, you sit, listening patiently, waiting for it to end.

I understand that Proust was searching for the meaning of life and was trying to stop wasting time and start appreciating his own existence, and the point of this exercise was to get us to appreciate daily life with renewed sensitivity and greater intensity through his musings on it all, or so they say. In the meantime, he managed to become known for his Proustian Moment which, due to the madeleine and the tea became a moment of sudden, involuntary, and intense remembering when the past promptly emerges unbidden from a smell, taste, or texture. That particular moment occurs early on in his novel, and in my own life, my precious time was actually wasted trying to appreciate Proust's neurotic search for love, social success, and meaning in his own mind. After this book and its 1,040 pages, it's time to move on.

[Ole-Jørgen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Brilliant, and very boring.

[Neal Maro · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the first two volumes of this book you live someone else's life and somehow at the same time manage to relive your own.

[Maria Donovan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a 1980s edition, which I am reading in an old house full of classic books arranged in alphabetical order. I would like to compare it to the newer translation, 'In Search of Lost Time' or perhaps I ought to try reading it in French? Stop! It's enough to wander through the pages of this translation, since it is here. I am on the second hundred pages - a good thing I like the countryside and can lose myself in a long description of hawthorns that fills me with such longing for their blossoms I can hardly wait until May be out. A million other things - I found myself writing much longer sentences and inventing a character who is nicknamed 'Marcel' for his love of sounding like Proust. I believe someone will try to punch him on the nose.

Some of Proust's sentences are so long, I hardly remember where they began and have to wind my way back again. My attention wanders. Then there is sudden action and a sense of humour that comes as something as a surprise. I can't quote because I'm writing this in the building site that is my dwelling-to-be. I can only say that the book, when I get back to it, is a welcome other world. After the first few pages, I thought about reading something 'easier' then decided to take it slowly and savour it. After all, if I'm going to read Proust then I'd better do it now.

I set off as one who embarks upon an expedition from which she might never return.

[Gille Liath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inside Life
Reading this I was struck by the similarity to that other tale of embittered and dying love, Of Human Bondage. This could well have been an influence on the latter – the timing works out, and Maugham spoke French. Comparing the two, this is far more convoluted. The language and thought are not difficult in themselves but the long, rambling, clause-nested sentences are tiring to the reader’s attention and the lack of signposts from the author to let you know where you are going mean that you can’t put it aside for any length of time or you will probably lose the thread.

However, the concomitant of Proust’s rambling style is that he gets inside life more effectively than any writer before him; the depiction of the interaction between Swann’s thoughts, emotions and actions, the way they slide into one another, is masterly. If it lacks the cut-crystal intellectuality Joyce achieved a few years later, it is much more literary, elegant and readable. At times Proust achieves what seems almost a direct effect on the senses, like that of the music he has so much fun trying to describe.

I had previously tried to read the unadapted Moncrieff translation, and found that almost an impossible task (mind you, I did have 2 kids under 2 at the time). This is much more readable, no problems except those that are obviously intrinsic to Proust's own style.

[Dan Graser · Rating 5 out of 5]

While it is difficult to finish 1050 pages and realize you are now finished only with volume 1 of 3, Proust's classic "À la recherche du temps perdu," here in translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff is worth the investment of time and attention. This is a novel like no other and requires a slower pace, attention to detail, and allowing yourself to become absorbed by what is at times an absurd narrative. I do wish I could read this in the original French as there is heavy debate as to the effect of the classic translations on the original text. In any event, there are moments of the most beautiful prose committed to print and there are prolonged stretches of memory and detail that will strain your attention, however, as I mentioned earlier it is worth your time. Proust's narrative gradually becomes not just a novel but a way of looking at the world, the people around you, and the very concept of memory, especially sense-memory. This Penguin clothbound edition is beautiful, sturdy, and quite a bargain. Loved the first third of this monumental work, looking forward to the next two!

[Michelle McGrane · Rating 5 out of 5]

“For a long time, I went to bed early.” So opens “Swann's Way”, the first volume in Marcel Proust's epic autobiography “In Search of Lost Time”. The first novel focuses on the author's childhood country home in Combray, Normandy, with his hazy impressions and memories of parties hosted by his high society parents. He includes description of the hawthorns and apple trees that led to the residence of the eponymous, but unattainable Swann, which obsesses the young narrator.

[Fran · Rating 2 out of 5]

My whole reason for choosing this enormous time by Proust (1000+ pages) was I'm slowly whittling down my 1001 Books to Read Before You Die list. And what a feat it was to finish! Slow and wordy it makes for a tedious march through too many unnecessary words and characters I felt no connection to. At least I can say I completed it.

[Joe McEvoy]

solid

[aeivu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sirr, I am in love not with a woman but with what you have created. I am hypnotized. I am neurotic when I read it. I just want some more. Alas! I am in a perfect state to enjoy you and will do so.

[Martin Ramsay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Borges wrote what better gift can we hope for than to be insignificant? What greater glory for a God, than to be absolved of the world?

Sickly man-child Marcel Proust who never left his room... Or at least that is the story that formed in my mind over many years... Would probably have disagreed. Everything seems to have significance for Proust from the colour of the sky to the shape of the waves and these help illustrate what he wants to say about certain preoccupations he has about things like melancholy:

“The zone of melancholy which I then entered was as distinct from the zone in which I had been bounding with joy a moment before as, in certain skies, a band of pink is separated, as though by a line invisibly ruled, from a band of green or black. You may see a bird flying across the pink; it draws near the border-line, touches it, enters and is lost upon the black” (199)

‘Remembrance of Things Past’ is a book I waited for thirty years to read. Silly me. I thought it would have been too difficult to read in my twenties. I foolishly let some part of myself that feared a challenge deprive me of a pleasue I could have enjoyed all those years ago. I should have read it when I was in my 20s because that is probably when I needed it most. It deals with lots of stuff like; memory, habit, obsession, beauty, snobbery, friendship, literature, the theatre, landscape and the importance of a name. Coming to the end of volume one the narrator reflects that:

“... when a name whose letters are every moment engraved more deeply on our hearts by our incessant thought of them has become ... the first coherent sound that comes to our lips, whether on waking from sleep or on recovering from a fainting fit, even before the idea of what time it is or where we are, almost before the word "I", as though the person whom it names were more "us" than we are ourselves, and as though after a brief spell of unconsciousness the phase that is the first to dissolve were that in which we were not thinking of her” (859)

If this isn't obsessive love I don't know what is! Then there is the observations of all kinds of cruelty including that practiced by the narrator's cook Francoise which is compared to a burrowing wasp. Her methods are subtle but unrelenting, applied on a daily basis. Francoise had:

“…adopted a series of strategems  so cunning and so pitiless that, many years later, we discovered that if we had been fed on asparagus day after day throughout that summer, it was because their smell gave the poor kitchen maid who had to prepare them such violent attacks of asthma that she was finally obliged to leave my aunt's service” (134)

At around a thousand pages ‘Rememberance of Things Past’ is rather long. You need lots of time and somewhere quiet to read. Proust has not just a lot of remembering to do, he also turns things over in his mind to pinpoint exactly the kinds of behaviour and attitudes that he is describing both in terms of social class as well as from different personal and historical perspectives. This book is encyclopedic. Here are some of the observations that have struck me:

“There is the anguish of M Swann's love for Odette... knowing that the creature one adores is in some place of enjoyment where oneself is not and cannot follow” (32)

Then there is the narrator crying in bed for his mother... “I felt that I had with an imperious and secret finger traced a first wrinkle upon her soul and brought out a first white hair on her head” 41)

There is the obervation about... “A "real" person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift” (91)

Then there is the young narrator obsessively copying out his beloved's name Gilberte and her address... “I felt discouraged, because they spoke to me, not of Gilberte, who would never so much as see them, but of my own desire, which they seemed to show me in its true colours, as something purely personal, unreal, tedious and ineffectual” (434)

The narrator is split in two by a love he feels that can never be realised... “there is the Gilberte he loves and the Gilberte he plays with in the park. There is the me who loves Gilberte and the me who plays with her in the park” (438) 

He oberves a few pages earlier that... “As a result he never enoys the time he spends with her... this is when he still believed that Love really did exist outside ourselves” 434)

The outside world proves just as elusive... “The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that compsed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years” (462)

As for the mind of the narrator, it appears that that may just be part of a much larger entity... “For my intelligence must be one - perhaps there indeed exists but a single intelligence of which everyone is a co-tennant, an intelligence towards which each of us from out of his own separate body turns his eyes, as in a theatre where, if everyone has his own separate seat, there is on the other hand but a single stage” (612)

Time seems to be the key to the various dilemmas presented by existence... “if our unhappiness is due to the loss of someone dear to us, our suffering consists merely in an unusually vivid comparison of the present with the past” (654)

And time seems to be what gives substance to Truth... “The truth which one puts into one's words does not carve out a direct path for itself, is not irresistibly self-evident. A considerable time must elapse before a truth of the same order can take shape in them” (659)

The constructs the narrator builds in his mind become the world he lives in... “We construct our lives for one person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, prisoners within the walls which were intended only for her” (682)

Adolesence is the only time we learn anything... “In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we know little peace of mind. There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. Whereas that we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolesence is the only period in which we learn anything.” (785)

In answer to Tolstoy and his observation about happy families Proust observes that... “In the human race, the frequency of the virtues that are identical in us all is not more wonderful than the multiplicity of the defects that are peculiar to each one of us” (796)

As for photographs... “A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things which no longer exist” (821)

There is the idea that true Beauty depends on the unattainablitity of the object of desire... “Let but a single flash of reality - the glimpse of a woman from afar or from behind - enable us to project the image of Beauty before our eyes, and we imagine that we have recognised it, our hearts beat, and we will always remain half-persuaded that it was She, provided that the woman has vanished: it is only if we manage to overtake her that we realise our mistake” (845)

Proust's world is a world cteated from art, literature, music and theatre. Here the narrator describes his world as if it were some kind of painting down to the butterfly sleeping on the window sill:

“When I came home from a walk and was getting ready to go down to the kitchen before dinner, a band of red sky above the sea, compact and clear-cut as a layer of aspic over meat, then, a little later, over a sea already cold and steel-blue like a grey mullet, a sky of the same pink as the salmon that we should presently be ordering at Rivebell, reawakened my pleasure in dressing to go out to dinner” (861)

“And sometimes to a sky and sea uniformly grey to a touch of pink would be added with an exquisite delicacy, while a little butterfly that had gone to sleep at the foot of the window seemed to be appending with its wings at the corner” (863)

Finally, on listening to music and comparing the charms of music to those of a woman, the narrator observes that:

“For these tunes, each as individual as a woman , did not reserve, as she would have done, for some privileged person the voluptuous secret which they contained: they offered it to me, ogled me, came up to me with lewd or provocative movements, accosted me, caressed meas if i had suddenly become more seductive, more pwerful, richer” (870)

870)

If only I had read this stuff years ago!!! Oh, and here are some things that Samuel Beckett had to say about Proust's world in 1931:

“Time is a double-headed monster of damnation and salvation” (1) 

“There is no escape from the hours and days” (2) 

“The individual is the seat of a constant process of decantation, decantation from the vessel containing the fluid of future time, sluggish, pale and monochrome, to the vessel the fluid of past time, agitated and multicoloured by the phenomena of its hours” (5) 

“At the best, all that is realised in Time (all Time produce), whether in Art or Life, can only be possessed successively, by a series of partial annexations - and never integrally and at once” (7) 

“Memory and Habit are attributes of the Time cancer” (7) 

7) 

“Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and its environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightening-conductor of his existence. Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit” (8) 

“Habit is like Francoise, the immortal cook of the Proust household, who knows what has to be done, and will slave all day and all night rather than tolerate any redundant activity in the kitchen” (9) 

“On arrival in Balbec there is no room for the narrator... for his body in this vast and hideous apartment because his attention has peopled it with gigantic firniture, a storm of sound and an agony of colour. Habit has not had time to silence the explosions of the clock, reduce the hostility of the violet curtains, remove the furniture and lower the inaccessible vault of this belvedere” (13) 

“The importance of involuntary memory... restores, not merely the past object, but the Lazarus that it charmed or tortured... But involuntary memory is an unruly magician and will not be importuned. .. I do not know how often this miracle recurs in Proust. I think twelve or thirteen times... The whole of Proust's world comes out of a teacup, and not merely Combray and his childhood” (21) 

“One only loves that which is not possessed, one only loves that in which one pursues the inaccessible” 35) 

“Our most exclusive love for a person is always our love for something else” (40) 

“Man is the creature that cannot cone forth from himself, who knows others only in himself, and who, if he asserts the contrary, lies” (49) 

“Reality, whether approached imaginatively or empiricaly, remains a surface, hermetic. Imagination, applied - a priori - to what is absent, is exercised in vacuo and cannot tolerate the limits of the real” (56) 

“Proust's impressionism - By his impressionism I mean his non-logical statement of phenomena in the order and exactitude of their perception, before they have been distorted into intelligibility in order to be forced into a chain of cause snd effect” (66) 

 “It is significant that the majority of his images are vegetable. He assimilates the human to the vegetal. He is conscious of humanity as flora, never fauna” (68)

[Paramita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book feels like watching the mind think.

What stays with me most is how Proust shows that we act before we understand why. The will decides silently, while reason and nerves hesitate, argue, and arrive too late.

This book isn’t about plot but about consciousness, how desire, memory, and time quietly govern us. Not a novel to escape into, but one that explains you to yourself.

[Aaron · Rating 1 out of 5]

Marcel Proust's lengthy ruminations on memory, also known as In Search of Lost Time, was published between 1913 and 1927 in seven volumes, and is here replicated in an English translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff in just three volumes. Volume 1 is made up of 'Swann's Way' and 'Within a Budding Grove', constituting roughly one third of the complete work. I bought the entire collection with the intention of reading them all in sequence, but considering it took me half a year just to finish the first book, I may well be throwing the towel in. Remembrance of Things Past is not the kind of book one would want to read in long sittings, nor is it something that should be taken up for light reading. Its rambling nature, meandering anecdotes and digressions, philosophical musings, and thoroughly unlikable, sickly, overly sensitive narrator require the strictest commitment on the part of the reader. This may be one of the most tedious books I ever read.

'Swann's Way' is about the early memories of the protagonist, presumably Proust himself, and his life in the provincial French town of Combray. Proust reveals himself to be an insufferable bore and a snob to boot. We then follow the character of M. Swann, a man of fashion who develops an obsession with a loose woman called Odette. The one-sided, Parisian love affair is a real chore to read. The book returns to Proust as an adolescent who falls in love with Swann's daughter Gilberte. 'Within a Budding Grove' continues Proust's friendship with Gilberte, and then moves onto the seaside resort of Balbec which he visits with his aunt for health purposes. There, he loiters around the hotel, sits on the beach, and falls under the spell of a group of young girls. That's about all that happens and it did not fill me with a burning desire to read the next instalment. To give the book some credit, some of Proust's insights are what could be considered profound, but there are simply too many of them and display the mental dalliances of a man who lived with his mind only.

[Amy MC · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved it. It's difficult to know where to start with reviewing Proust, but I've never read anything that felt so deep and searching. It's philosophical, otherworldly, an exercise in mindfulness from the perspective of the narrator and the reader. I had to frequently reread passages to ensure I absorbed as much as I could from their meaning, and even then some of them I had to leave and just enjoy the flow of the words or I'd have been contemplating them forever.

I feel like if everybody read this book and carried through their lives even a molecule of that introspection, the world would be a better place. Although I will say, for all its genius, I was genuinely distressed by the casual anti-Semitism and the narrators encounter with Albertine in her bedroom towards the end. I realise it's a product of its time, but ick.

[Tyler Horton · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think I could get why this book is a cherished classic, but for me it was awful. I 'read' the last 120 pages in 20 minutes because it was sucking the pleasure out of my pleasure reading. Page after page of the tortured inner monologue of a self-destructive man just gets to a person after a while. At the same time, I will admit that it contains the most elegant description of the way urine smells after eating asparagus that I have ever read. The competition was not fierce...

[Dan Francis]

Incomparable look at turn of the century upper class French society. Proust's insights reminded me of things I didn't know I had forgotten.

[Aiden · Rating 4 out of 5]

If ever I've simultaneously loved and hated a book, it is this.

[Joanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This volume has two books in the one volume. I read Swann’s Way twice and now I’m reading Within a Budding Grove.
Finished Within a Budding Grove.

[Joe Nutt]

Has no idea Proust invented the WAG. All that disapproving stuff about the girlfriends of professional cyclists.

[Peacefulbookery · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommended if you're interested in works that explore the human condition with both tenderness and unflinching critical insights. Don't be intimidated by the length.