Catherine Mustread’s Reviews > Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. II of II > Status Update

'I was not traversing the same streets as the people who were walking about the town that day, I was traversing a past, gliding, sad and sweet; a past which was moreover compounded of so many different pasts that it was difficult for me to recognise the cause of my melancholy...' On target to finish by the end of the year! Whoo-ee! Will have been 13 months since I began in Dec. 2009. Crime & Punishment next.

Practically flying through this now at the rate of 10-20 pages/day! Finished Book 5, The Captive -- a thorough analysis of jealousy, explains a lot about relationships involving a jealous partner. Now ready for Chapter 2 in The Fugitive, dealing with Albertine's death. Could I finish this before the end of the year? Doubtful.

'The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them unfolds, that each of them is; and this we can contrive with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we really do fly from star to star.'

Finished Sodom and Gomorrah (Book 4, also titled Cities of the Plain) and am now finding Proust in everything I read, via reminders, references, and style. My reading to this point is totally thanks to Dennis Abrams and the Cork-Lined Room blog with summaries and discussion, provision of authors' critiques, and comments. Found S&G to be both surprisingly more interesting and more challenging. On to #5!

I am actually enjoying reading this now and am finding references to and similarities to Proust in lots of other books too. Just read the chapter on Proust in Proust Was A Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer, about how Proust revealed the fallibility of memory and that neuroscientists are just now beginning to understand how/why memories are so elusive. Still finding that 5-10 pages/day are quite sufficient.

Marcel returns to Balbec and mourns the loss of his grandmother yet still manages to find "moments of pleasure" with 14 girls including Albertine. “…other people, as we get to know them, are like a metal dipped in an acid bath, and we see them gradually lose their qualities (and their defects too, at times).”

From Roger Shattuck about Proust: "“No single theory or approach will make Proust easily and quickly available to all inquiring minds. The very resistance of his work to simplification and analysis constitutes its most evident general charactertistic." Next up is a section called The Heart's Intermissions.

“Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chooses the person one loves after endless deliberation and on the strength of diverse qualifications and advantages.”

“I was beginning to learn the exact value of the language, spoken or mute, of aristocratic affability, an affability that is happy to shed balm upon the sense of inferiority of those towards whom it is directed, though not to the point of dispelling that inferiority, for in that it case it would no longer have any raison d’etre."

"That great game of hide and seek which is played in our memory when we seek to recapture a name does not entail a series of gradual approximations. We see nothing, then suddenly the correct name appears and is very different from what we thought we were guessing."