In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1: Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove, Part 1

by Marcel Proust

Here are the first two volumes of Proust’s monumental achievement, Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove. The famous overture to Swann's Way sets down the grand themes that govern In Search of Lost Time: as the narrator recalls his childhood in Paris and Combray, exquisite memories, long since passed—his mother’s good-night kiss, the water lilies on the Vivonne, his love for Swann’s daughter Gilberte—spring vividly into being. In Within a Budding Grove—which won the Prix Goncourt in 1919, bringing the author instant fame—the narrator turns from his childhood recollections and begins to explore the memories of his adolescence. As his affections for Gilberte grow dim, the narrator discovers a new object of attention in the bright-eyed Albertine. Their encounters unfold by the shores of Balbec. One of the great works of Western literature, now in the new definitive French Pleiade edition translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Literature, France, European Literature, Novels

633 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1913

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

[Liam O'Leary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review for Swann's Way

In the video above I show the book and describe my complete thoughts for Swann's Way.

About this edition:

I think the Everyman Classics edition is very nice. It's a revised version of Montcrieff's translation and has a Foreword by Harold Bloom which is wonderfully informative however a bit revealing of the entire series of books — NOTE: this Vol.1. has a foreword and translator's preface for the entire series, the remaining volumes do not have these.

Why I'm pausing my Proust journey:

Here are some of my 'more negative' views about Proust, which are why I'm not continuing to read Proust for now. Swann's Way is a love story in slow-motion, and it's very well articulated and descriptive in ways I have never seen, and doubt I ever will see again. However, I did find parts of Swann's Way tiresome — Proust might spend 5 or 10 pages writing about a Church steeple or a party where people are making the most mundane smalltalk. I'm sure everything makes sense eventually, like, in the fifth book there might be some flashback to the Church steeple and it'll seem like Proust meant all along to make some extended metaphor, but honestly, I just wonder whether it's vastness for the sake of vastness. There's a lot of profound thought on the nature of recognition and memory but it almost feels like it reaches the end of its development and the story is just stuck on the same reflections. This too, might be intentional and later seen to be the core point.

Maybe what I am trying to write is that Proust just isn't that fun, or funny to me (yet). It is too slow and uneventful as a narrative, regardless of how wonderfully descriptive it is. Something feels empty about it to me. And Proust is certainly an excellent case for wondering — did this really need to be this long? I can't imagine why every single page of Swann's Way is necessary to the entirety of In Search of Lost Time. Maybe the effect is to create a vastness of a life lived in reflection, but were it so, it all seems a bit excessive to me.

I also find some of Proust's views outdated or not true to my experience. This doesn't seem a great comparison given it being over a century old, but if Proust as an author is going to write a story where most of it is him narrating to you what he thinks life is about, then it deserves to be judged on the utility of that narration.








*******************[previously written]***
Review coming soon.

Note: I only read Swann's Way of this collection (up to page 416 of 633). I don't intend on reading Within A Budding Grove any time soon. I'm marking this as Read for simplicity's sake, and so I can feel done with it, and keeping it to this edition for my page number references. I doubt book 2 would differ much in quality, but I could be wrong.

[Unknown · 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 . . .

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

Impeccable!

[Ludwig M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Det kanske är svårt att säga vid denna tidpunkt, men jag tror inte jag kommer läsa något bättre än detta. Utomjordisk litteratur!

[felicia varenius · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliantly well-crafted. Captures details with immense precision, even the most trivial things, evoking emotions from unexpected moments. The book was slightly overwhelming, and it took time to digest the intricacies.

“[…] with rays of pink and gold and white by the fragrant petals of these ephemeral stars, which kindle their cold fires in the murky atmosphere of golden afternoons” (p. 216)

“What moved me was the thought that this Florence which I could see, so near yet inaccessible, in my imagination, if the journey which separated it from me, in myself, was not a viable one, could yet be reached circuitously were I to take the plain, terrestrial route” (p. 382)

[Stian Jørgensen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Må ærlig innrømme at her er det så mye språk at det er lett å miste tråden når man leser, og vanskelig å huske hva man egentlig har lest. Proust skriver nesten umenneskelig lange setninger, med et veldig komplekst språk, i alle fall i denne utgaven. Han er også veldig poetisk av seg og sniker ofte inn flere avstikkere i en setning. Det største en kan ta fra å lese Proust er nok verdien av minner, hvordan de former oss og alltid er med oss, selv om man skulle tro man har glemt.

Vi lærer for eksempel om forfatterens barndom gjennom en strøm av minner som utløses av lukten av en kopp te som han kjenner igjen, men ikke umiddelbart klarer å plassere.

Skulle ønske jeg kunne fransk så jeg kunne lest på originalspråket. De som kan sier at Proust faktisk er en jævlig fønny fyr, men det klarte jeg ikke alltid plukke opp på engelsk. Kanskje det også er lettere å plukke opp på norsk. Litt humor ville definitivt brutt opp leseopplevelsen og gjort det litt mer spiselig, det tok meg tre og en halv måned å lese 620 sider.

Det er ikke mye handling som finner sted, men dype refleksjoner over følelser og hvordan de gjør inntrykk på oss, former oss og skaper minner vi alltid bærer med oss gjennom livet.

[Sam]

Simply Ravishing

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

eh...

[Stephen Hayes]

I saw this book in the library and thought I'd seen it on a couple of those lists of books that everyone should read, or the greatest books of the 20th century, or even the Night train to Lisbon, which seemed to deserve the title In search of lost time almost as much as this one did.

I finished Night train to Lisbon, but I've still got a long way to go with this one. But I've read enough to know that it is a strange book. It seems to break every rule of good writing and style. It has sentences that run over a full page, full of subordinate clauses, and when you get to the end of the sentence you have to go back to the beginning agaain to see what the beginning of the main clause was.

I've been told this is a cultural thing.

French and Spanish writers love long convoluted sentences, while English speakers don't. At least so I've been told. From my time as an editor at Unisa I know that Afrikaans bureaucrats and academics love long and convoluted sentences too -- though sometimes I think it is for the wrong reasons. They think it sounds more "scientific". Too often, however, it's just a cover-up for bullshit. People without academic pretensions seem to be able to write clear and lucid Afrikaans prose, even beautiful prose, without the need to use turgid and turbid circumlocutions. Beyers Naude, for example. It seems strange to me that a language that has such beautiful poetry seems to have so many speakers who feel the need to uglify it with bombastic prose.

I've been told that In search of lost time is written in a "stream of consciousness" style, and that might help to explain the long sentences and convoluted syntax. But I've read other "stream-of-consciousness" novels and I don't recall the main clause being divided by half a page of subordinate clauses like an if-then computer program. Yes, one thought leads to another, but the syntax follows the thought, rather than the thought being divided by the syntax -- at least that is what I recall in The Waves and Ulysses. And this one has more digressions than Tristram Shandy.

Another confusing thing is that one is never sure of the age of the narrator. One moment he is sent to bed because he's too young to sit at the dinner table with the adults, and is scheming to get his mother to come upstairs and kiss him goodnight, the next he is holding adult literary discussions with a sophisticated friend who is excluded from the dinner table because he was rude about the narrator's great aunt. Still, I suppose my stream of consciousness jumps about like that except I'm not asking anyone else to read it, and as the author says, we don't know people, we only know out memories of them. But I think the author of Night train to Lisbon says it better, and in fewer words.

I'm sure I'll have to take it back to the library before I've finished it, and even if I do finish it there are still three more volumes to go. Maybe I'll renew it, maybe I won't.

[Jozef Vizdak · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished just the first part and will leave the start of the second for a bit. My thoughts are torn, for at some places I thought I saw the genius, but at others I just could not get into it. I usually have no problem with long descriptions, but here it felt just a little bit artificial, it not being the thoughts of a circa 10 year old child. Overall, I think I will continue, for I guess the best parts are going to be later in the narrator's later years.

"... in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice: I preferred not to see them; ..."

"... no woman ever thought of anything but love, and that there was not one of them whose resistance could not be overcome, ..."

"It is the same in life: the heart changes, and it is our worst sorrow; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change."

"Thus it is that most of our attempts to translate our innermost feelings do no more than relieve us of them by drawing them out in a blurred form which does not help us to identify them."

"Perhaps she would not have thought of evil as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one in which it was so refreshing to sojourn, had she been able to discern in herself, as in everyone else, that indifference to the sufferings one causes which, whatever other names one gives it, is the most terrible and lasting form of cruelty."

"In vain, however, did Swann expound to her thus all the reasons that she had for not lying; they might have succeeded in overthrowing a general system of mendacity, but Odette had no such system; he was simply content, whenever she wished Swann to remain in ignorance of anything she had done, not to tell him of ti. So that lying was for the an expedient of a specific order, and the only thing that could make her decide whether she should avail herself of it or confess the truth was a reason that was also of specific or contingent order, namely the chance of Swann's discovering that she had not told him the truth."

""People don't know when they're happy. One is never as unhappy as one thinks." But he reflected that this existence had already lasted for several years, that all he could now hope for was that it would last for ever, that he would sacrifice his work, his pleasures, his friends, in fact the whole of his life to the daily expectation of a meeting which, if it occurred, could bring him no happiness; and he asked himself whether he was no mistaken, whether the circumstances that had favoured his liaison and had prevented its final rupture had no done a disservice to his career, whether the outcome to be desired might no have been that as to which he rejoiced that it had happened only in a dream - his own departure; and he said to himself that people did no know when they were unhappy, that one is never as happy as one thinks."

"For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity."

[Pranjal Awasthi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Proust's prose is like an incense stick. It burns slowly and emanates fragrance for a long time. Filled with deep meditations and deadpanw satire, Swann's way is one of those classics which deserve the immortal status they get. This book takes time and is unarguably a "difficult read". Sentences go on for either paragraphs, multiple pages are devoted to quotidian train of thought and over many pages nothing much really happens. You know what else is just like that - Life. So when the narrator remembers life, he's bound to write about life, in the way life demands. And therein lies the mastery of Proust. He's almost like a Seurat drawing a Le Grande Jatte with small points of color. Each point, prosaic in isolation but important for the picture at whole. Stay with this book, give it time, you'll not regret it

[Kolby reid Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was very difficult for me to get into. I wasn't used to the writing style. But once I did get used to it I was completely enthralled and it was difficult to put down. Proust goes in depth about so much and the writing became very beautiful. The plot of this volume was very good and contained a lot of points that made me laugh and others that contained strong romantic themes. I would highly recommend this if you are looking for something different. It may be difficult to get into but trust me it is a great book if you push through. I am super excited to start volume 2.

[Amanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ugh no. The little dry humor sprinkled in was all that kept this from being a one star. Otherwise…just leave Odette alone, Swann. If she wants to get her freak on (and it’s not compatible with yours) break up with her and be done with it. Your tirade about how horrible she is just makes you look sexist and dull. (And don’t give me the “it was a different time”. There was plenty freak de la frique going on in Paris in the 19-20th century.) If you enjoy loquacity and a lot of moralistic tirading, give this one a try.

[Erin McGarry]

It’s going to take me the rest of my life to finish the whole search (or remembrance, depending on your translation or point of view) but if I’m granted the time, I will find a way. Volume one—Swann’s way and Within a Budding Grove part one completed, less than 3,000 pages, 5 mini books, 3 volumes to go. At least now I can picture the gardens and streets he wanders in his reveries.

[Tyler Poon · Rating 5 out of 5]

he just like me fr...

[Jack Alexander Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vol. 1 of 4 completed. This may take me longer than I had planned.

[Henry YZX · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a bore.

[Yee · Rating 1 out of 5]

The text is largely descriptive. The sentences run on and on. This is almost as bad, if not marginally better, than Ulysses.