Reading the 20th Century discussion

Well, here we are in the final volume of Proust to take us to the end of 2025!

I'm still reading The Fugitive (vol. 5) so will be a bit late to this but wanted to set up the thread anyway.

No worries, I’m going to be behind in starting this. Will probably read until end of December instead of finishing in November.

Thanks you for setting up the thread, RC. I'm currently almost finished with The Captive and will be reading The Fugitive this month. Since I'm just one month behind, I'll turn to our last volume in December. So much look forward to it.

Ha, well we can read The Fugitive in tandem, Vesna!

Roman Clodia wrote: "Ha, well we can read The Fugitive in tandem, Vesna!"

Sounds great, RC.

I've started this and seem to remember it better than some of the earlier volumes. There's still a lot happening but, as usual, it's the effect on 'Marcel's' interiority that is really important - and finally he's acknowledging that himself. It's like he's caught up in the present with the thoughts we've been having while reading the books he's been writing in the future.

This is also the volume that pulls all the threads together from the other books and helps make sense of some of the questions we've been asking.

This is just a personal preference but I’m still surprised on the casualness with the death announcements of characters. We have spent so much time with some of them to just have a quick mention still gets me, but the theme of time is very prominent in this volume. We are traversing through so many moments, I cant tell what age ‘Marcel’ is now, late 20s/early 30s? There is a sense of maturity but I don’t know if that’s older ‘Marcel’ speaking/commenting or young adult ‘Marcel’.

Daryl wrote: "This is just a personal preference but I’m still surprised on the casualness with the death announcements of characters. We have spent so much time with some of them to just have a quick mention"

Yes, that's very noticeable, especially in the previous volume. It's striking though how 'Marcel' often comes back to deaths and sometimes spends more time the second time around thinking about the emotional impact. Remember the death of his grandmother early on? It seemed quite cold when first mentioned but then came back to haunt 'Marcel' and us later.

The age question is interesting as my sense is that 'Marcel' is switching easily between how old he was at the time of the story which, as you say, was probably about 30 - and the time he is at the point at which he's writing this book which I feel is much older. I think that gets explicit in this volume.