In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 2: Within a Budding Grove, Part 2 & The Guermantes' Way

by Marcel Proust, C.K. Scott Moncrieff (Translator), Terence Kilmartin (Translator)

In this second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator turns from the childhood reminiscences of Swann's Way to memories of his adolescence. Having gradually become indifferent to Swann's daughter Gilberte, the narrator visits the seaside resort of Balbec with his grandmother and meets a new object of attention--Albertine, "a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes and plump, matt cheeks." For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin's acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of A la recherche du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade in 1989).

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Literature, France, Novels

888 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1918

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

[شمس · Rating 5 out of 5]

He put us inside somebody’s mind in a way, and with a kind of determination, and an elasticity, a capacity to move inside that mind in a way that nobody had ever done before [or ever can do] . . . he has this ability to conjure up a social world and then plunge you into the mind recording it, and the mind beyond just the recording of that world . . . and he makes the mind tactile; it is a very sensuous novel, so it’s not just the interiority of thought, it’s also the physical sensation of being inside that mind; it’s a kind of, Erotics of Thought, and nobody had done that before . . .

[ . . . ]

One of my favourite moments in Proust is when he says “Our lives are full of memories, but we do not have the ability to recall them . . . Given that that’s the case, why do we think those memories we can’t recall just go back to the last thirty years of our lives; maybe they go back to another planet, and lives we lived in the bodies of other men . . ." That’s to say this is really infinity we are talking about here. Now I think what happens is the concern about memory and what we can and we can’t know about our own minds, then fixes on the body and the mind and the existence of these women, and it becomes as it were an allegory for a chase after something, which in his wisest moments, Proust knows, one can never control or know, because you never know what the people you love are doing when they’re not with you . . . you can never know and control another person . . .

[ . . . ]

But he’s saying something so strange about desire, that you don’t desire directly, you desire though association; somebody reminds you of somebody else, somebody makes you think of somebody else, or even to refer back to the discussion of Ruskin, you only desire something if it’s already been aesthetically framed for you . . .

[ . . . ]

He’s a snob who provides the most brilliant critique of snobbery we’ve ever had, and there's a real ambiguity at the heart of his belonging in that world, he comes from an upper-middle class professional medical family, and all he wanted to do was hang out with aristocrats and royalty . . . and he allowed them to indict themselves in the most chilling and devastating way; they just tear themselves to shreds under his acute eye . . . —Jacqueline Rose, In Our Time - Proust

__________
Round two for me via the Everyman Edition of this work I wrote in a previous life.

I'm going to be a lazy-bones and just post all the quotes I've noted down in comments below to avoid the character limit for reviews.

Apologies for the lack of culling of quotations which will only have personal significance to myself, and for any spelling errors.

I may write something resembling a review sometime in the future . . .

[Ludwig M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trots somliga långa och uttröttande delar om franskt societetsliv så spränger den andra delen - likt den första - gränserna för litteratur. Fulländad konst enligt mitt tycke. Det är en tidsmässig investering att läsa Proust, men det är värt varenda sekund och stavelse.

[Andràș-Florin Răducanu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I find it quite surreal to be halfway through In search of lost time, this novel is, to put it simply, a masterpiece. I cannot wait to follow through with the next two volumes.

[Ben Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me nearly twice as long to finish Volume Two as it did to read Swann's Way.... The Narrator hanging out in Balbec with his grandmother nearly bored me to tears, and I couldn’t bring myself to care about the various staff and customers at the hotel, all of whom were described in excruciating detail, and 400 pages in I began to wonder if I would make it (I certainly wouldn’t be the first person to start but not finish In Search of Lost Time). Thankfully things get more interesting in the second half, and the encounter with Saint-Loup was sufficiently strange to keep me reading, and my perseverance was well rewarded with the introduction of Albertine. My favorite moment comes at the very end as summer ends and Narrator prepares to leave Balbec.

It is generally said that In Search of Lost Time is a meditation on the themes of time and memory, but it seems to me to be mostly about perception. A typical scene: The narrator is exposed to a new idea and his mind proliferates an elaborate fantasy which unjustly aggrandizes, romanticizes, or demonizes that newly discovered thing. Eventually the narrator encounters that thing and is disappointed or pleased when reality clashes with his mental image. Often his perception will change several times, a process which I sometimes found tedious and other times fascinating.
Most of all I love watching Proust’s sentences unfold… they are like vines that wind around endlessly until the flower unexpectedly at the end.

[Sloane Getz · Rating 5 out of 5]

finished vol 2!!

i loved this book so much. proust writes all the confusion and neuroticism of adolescence so vividly and so beautifully. really interesting discussions of the nature of desire, and how it conflates the person we desire with the world we inhabited when we first formed an idea of them - marcel's love for gilberte is more about his ideal of her parent's lives, his love for albertine is really a love for the wild sea at balbec and the rebellious exuberance of her gang of girls. i also just love the way proust writes about art.
that's it!!

on to #3!!

[Chris White · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Guermantes Way has been my least favorite so far but that’s only because it wasn’t as nostalgic and charming as the last two and was instead more ironic and dramatic. That being said the prose was still other worldly and the narrator’s slow realizations about high society were expertly and patiently executed, and the ending scene was the cherry on top. Proust is just incredible.

[Eolann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found the first two books in this series a bit exhausting, so was surprised how enjoyable "the guermantes way" was; it has a lot more of Proust's good parts (sense of humour, strong characters) and less of the bad parts (pile ups of similes and metaphors, the amount of affected gobshitery the narrator can come out with). Still think Proust could have used an editor; the longwindedness over some small event or action being repeatedly examined and described over multiple pages is a lot, but it's more bearable here. Not sure if I'll be as lucky with the later books in the series.

Most of the time the nameless narrator is blatantly a proxy for Proust, but he's made a few changes, namely making him gentile and straight (where Proust was half Jewish and gay) to accommodate French prejudices of the time. Its interesting to see how he's threaded these two identities through the books in other ways; a chunk of the supporting characters are either Jewish or gay, and the antisemitism of the French aristocracy seems to be increasingly developing as one of the main themes of the series. Also interesting to see Proust grapple with his own snobbishness; as much as he undercuts the aristocratic characters he's still blatantly enamoured of the trappings of wealth and peerage, and his habit of depicting the peasant and servant characters with affectionate condescension, while depicting the french middle classes as hopelessly declasse and grasping, strikes me as being very typically upper class itself.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am an unabashed Proust fanatic. Each time I enter into his world, I am amazed and enriched.

I am always reading Proust. Since I first got the courage to read his work, I have read him (mostly listened to him) over and over. Each time he delights me in new ways of observing what I experience in front of me and/or within me.

[Kolby reid Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me this was an easier read than the first volume. Marcel Proust's writing style took a little bit to get used to, but after I did volume 2 was a book I consider beautifully written. Highly recommend.

[S.C. Ferguson · Rating 5 out of 5]

God-tier shit

[Jeanne Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs 2 (Noms de pays - le pays) :
Merveilleux. A relire.
Certaines descriptions d'une beauté bouleversante : mer (plusieurs endroits), chambre de la grand-mère, l'église de Carqueville couverte de lierre, les trois arbres d'Hudimesnil. Et le lever de rideau final (la momie)
Les arbres également mine de réflexion, de même que l'analyse de la peinture d'Elstir.

Du côté de Guermantes :
Mes réactions très hétérogènes. Sans me toucher autant que les scènes de "Noms de pays - le pays", Doncières (l'hôtel !), l'opéra (les toilettes, la vision aquatique, le sourire), la mort de la grand-mère, me paraissent très belles. Au contraire, les scènes de la vie mondaine (Villeparisis puis Guermantes) m'irritent. La peinture à demi-mot de la scène sexuelle avec Albertine, du désir de Stermaria, me paraît datée et vaguement ridicule.
Surtout l'hypocrisie (ou le manque de lucidité ?) dans l'expression de préjugés antisémites ou homophobe, me perturbe, me contrarie. Et l'arrogance dès qu'il s'agit de décrire la vie des domestiques (même en les prenant en pitié, comme dans le cas du valet martyrisé de la duchesse) me choque carrément. Problème de vieillissement de l'oeuvre ?
Mais j'embarque de nouveau à partir du moment où est mentionnée la poésie des noms dans la fin du dîner chez la duchesse. Et la scène finale éblouissante (les souliers rouges, l'égoïsme etc...)

[L · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tome 2, "Les jeunes filles en fleur."

[Roger Feitor · Rating 5 out of 5]

estilo magnífico,
escritor completo,
necessita de muita concentração e, depois, perdemo-nos com ele na sua busca do tempo perdido...