Violante ou la mondanite

by Marcel Proust

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

[Marion · Rating 5 out of 5]

Proust and I go a long way back, since he is one of those authors that literature teachers try to make students read over and over again. For me, it has always been a conflicted relationship, because I really like the atmospheres he creates and the ideas (that were completely taboo for his time) that he expresses, but I always got lost in his sentences, that could last up to two pages, which when you have a novel of 500 or more pages can prove tiring. I also admired his work in his essay Le Contre Sainte-Beuve where he takes the position that you cannot judge or explain an author's (and generally, and artist's) work by his life but only by what he produces. I really liked Violante or High Society though, maybe because it was the first time I read a short story from Proust, which was a lot more digest than any book from À la recherche du temps perdu, I also surprisingly really identified with Violante.

I think the pace of the story was completely adequate, because it felt very realistic: sometimes years feel like they only last a minute and moments can seem like a century if we keep replaying them in our heads and romanticizing them as she does with Honoré after their first meeting - even though her first impression was disgust, so all the ellipsis make sense; and moreover we can really experience how the inevitable corruption or Violante's pure soul arises.

The story reminded me a lot of Candide by Voltaire, in the sense that both are about a character (Violante or Candide) that has been isolated from society after their parents' deaths, leaving them like a blank canvas in the hands of a master (Augustin or Pangloss) that teaches them everything they need to know about life in the most philosophical way possible, and then this protagonist leaves to experience the real world and the mundanity of society, and then we see how they react to it over time and how it affects a person's behavior.
Proust also was secluded from society because of the fact that he was jewish and homosexual, which wasn't the norm back in the day, so we saw the effects of being in society from afar and we therefore can see how he judged his contemporains.
Therefore, I think the story is mainly about how society corrupts our true desires and makes people become superficial, all the while tricking them into thinking they have can escape it anytime they want, but "I just need a little more time, i'll do it the day after tomorrow…" This approach that Violante had to life really resonated with me since I have felt it many times (for example in my studies, I am doing something that is now socially very widely accepted and makes it easier to integrate, after that I want to study art history but I don't know if something more appealing such as a job opportunity might arise before I have the chance to do that for myself). Not only that, but also how when we tend to chose the easy path and adapt to intellectual standards that are lower than the ones we would like to have just because they are the ones everyone around us has chosen, but the consequence of that is boredom, and a habit that is very hard to break because it also carries a certain idleness.

[Tiresia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Carino, ma troppo breve per entrarci a fondo