In those same years, as I was constantly moving from one book to another like a wandering soul, hopelessly searching for something that I didn't even know what it was, I came across it. Maybe I thought that in the search for lost time, the thickness of the book, its volume, and its bindings didn't scare me. I just wanted to read it. But how I got away from it after two volumes was not within my control. For a long time, the third volume was in a "deposited" state, and it seemed that the depositor had so deeply fallen into the third volume that even when I put it aside for a long time, its place in the bookshelf remained empty. I ask myself whether the time will ever bring me back to this book again?

It was a strange encounter with this book. I was drawn to it initially, but then something happened that made me lose my grip on it. The third volume became a mystery, left in a state of limbo. I often wonder if I will ever have the chance to pick it up again and continue the journey that was interrupted.

The memory of this book still lingers in my mind, like a forgotten dream that I long to recall. Maybe one day, fate will smile upon me and lead me back to that book, allowing me to finally discover the secrets and treasures that lie within its pages.

I came into The Year of Proustifarian Delights accompanied by a vague dread.

I was worried that I was embarking upon a seven-book voyage of joyless obligation.

I feared it would ultimately prove that I have too much dullard in me to chug along with anything other than the empty appearance of rapt literary euphoria.

I thought I'd be approaching these books like they were the kind of high-school required reading that sucks all the fun from the one pastime that's stuck with me since I learned to unlock the English language's secret treasures over two decades ago.

Because one of my lifelong constants has been unflagging self-doubt.

So imagine my relief when this book turned out to be the most pleasant surprise in my literary travels.

By all rights, I should have hated the first volume of "In Search of Lost Time."

I don't really care that much about a precocious child's mommy issues.

I'm not interested in the trifling concerns of society-obsessed folk.

And I want nothing to do with a bitterly hostile love affair, especially when watching its ugliness unfold from an insider's vantage point.

But here I am, on the other end of a book that brought me needless apprehension, thoroughly enchanted by the magic Proust worked with "Swann's Way."

His beautiful, seamless storytelling has shown that almost anything can make for a powerfully intoxicating reading experience when crafted by a master wordslinger.

It's not just his dazzling language; it's the ideas, the connections, the tangible humanity that prove our species' nature hasn't changed much in a century.

That even with our gadgets, we're slaves to our lost pasts and need for love.

That all anyone really wants is a little affirmation of our personal worth at the end of the day.

The emotions here are palpable.

If I couldn't understand the rises and falls in a character's moods and luck, I could sympathize.

Far from being banal, each moment of lowest woe and highest elation is part of the human experience.

I wanted to hug little Marcel when he was denied his mother's nightly kiss and celebrate with Swann over a seemingly loving romance.

But then I wanted to kick Swann in the ass for mistaking obsession for affection, knowing from my own failed relationships how that ends.

The celebration of nature, music, food, books, and human memory are all familiar to me.

I reread passages not for understanding but for the joy of losing myself in some of the most gorgeous prose.

Tell me more about alien architecture! Describe spring's perfumes and colors to dull my American winter!

Remind me that a song can bring heartache until we can distance ourselves from the pain and rediscover its merit.

My only complaint? This book made me feel too much.

Every stab of loss, every bad decision, every mawkish pity-party dragged me along with the fictional characters.

It got exhausting.

Still, a round of hurrahs for the book that drove me to self-discovery and showed me that, while I'm not as tasty as teacakes, this beautiful book sure is.

The places we have known do not belong solely to the
world of space in which we situate them for our
greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among
contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time;
the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain
moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas,
as the years.

And so ends Swann's Way, Book One of In Search of Lost Time. Our narrator takes us back to his childhood through precious memories and, at the very end, moves these memories closer to his present. He talks of family, home, town, neighbors, love -- his and others'.

Proust's work is famous for its form---sentences that seem to begin and end almost without structure, with multiple clauses that can cause the reader to become lost on occasion. True! I did find myself tracking back to the beginning of a sentence every once in a while to be sure of its full intent. But I also found myself re-reading phrases and sentences because of their sheer beauty or because of their resonance in my own life.

There are many wonderful reviews of this book already so I will keep mine simple. I am very glad that I have finally begun the Proustian journey and am doing this with a group of like-minded readers.

This book is a remarkable exploration of memory, time, and human experience. Proust's detailed descriptions and profound insights make it a captivating read. The way he weaves together the past and the present, and the emotions and relationships within, is truly masterful.

Highly recommended to those patient readers who have not yet met M. Proust. It may require some effort to fully understand, but the rewards are well worth it. Prepare to be immersed in a world of rich language and deep emotions.

Proust! Memories! With almost 5,000 reviews, I thought it would be beneficial to provide examples of his writing for those who haven't read him before. Proust's writing is truly a work of art. It is beautiful, lyrical, complex, and at times, perhaps even a bit convoluted.

Let's start with the famous passage about madeleines. "And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of a little piece of the madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane." This passage shows how a simple taste can trigger a flood of memories.

Another example is his detailed description of Swann's woman friend, Odette. "It must be remarked that Odette’s face appeared thinner and sharper than it actually was, because the forehead and the upper part of the cheeks, that smooth and almost plane surface, were covered by the masses of hair which women wore at that period drawn forward in a fringe, raised in crimped waves and falling in stray locks over the ears." Proust's attention to detail is remarkable, painting a vivid picture of Odette in our minds.

I also liked this passage: "But the lies which Odette ordinarily told were less innocent, and served to prevent discoveries which might have involved her in the most terrible difficulties with one or another of her friends." It gives us a glimpse into the complex web of lies and deceit that Odette weaves.

Finally, here is an example of what I consider his occasional complex writing: "The name Gilberte passed close by me, invoking all the more forcefully the girl whom it labeled in that it did not merely refer to her, as one speaks of someone in his absence, but was directly addressed to her." This passage requires careful reading and reflection to fully understand its meaning.

I hope these examples have given you a taste of Proust's writing. Enjoy!

Note: Proust’s masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, was originally published in seven volumes. There are more than a hundred editions, and the volumes have alternate names in English. Wikipedia provides a good summary of all the pieces and the sequence of volumes.

Photos: The first photo shows Proust's imagined village in Normandy, inspired by his childhood village of Illiers, now renamed Illiers-Combray. The second photo is of madeleines. The third photo is a painting of the woman who partially inspired Odette. The author's photo is from irishtimes.com.

It is not easy to talk about a book of this kind. It was a second reading, after many years, spurred on by a splendid GdL.

When facing Proust, with his prose that assaults you with the rare ability to engage all the senses, any word seems poor, inadequate and superfluous to me. From the memories of childhood to Swann's tumultuous love, to the protagonist's adolescent infatuation, to his way of evoking moments of the past through names, it is an unceasing flow of melancholy, smiles, emotions, scents and colors that are almost palpable. Time, which the author plays with, decomposing it into moments or recomposing it in a single instant of the duration of life, returns almost on every page, lingering on the past on which the present superimposes itself, in a series of leaps aimed at understanding, evoking, the changes of the heart; the importance of memory, the keeper of crystallized images that a gesture, a scent, a color bring back to life; the great capacity for observation and introspection, the sometimes amused gaze that brings people and places to life, giving us an unillusioned portrait of the society of the time.

This book is truly a masterpiece that allows us to immerse ourselves in a world of emotions and sensations, and to discover the beauty and complexity of the human experience.

Proust is perhaps the author I most pretend to love more than I actually do. In certain circles, admitting a preference for dozens of other authors can seem like an admission of some intellectual and critical mediocrity. Joyce is another such case. Although I don't often pretend to love Joyce, except for his story The Dead and parts of Ulysses. Proust and Joyce are the two sacred cows of 20th-century literature. That being said, Proust had a huge influence on two of my favorite writers, Woolf and Nabokov, so I've never questioned his genius, even if I couldn't always connect with it. Therefore, rereading Proust twenty years after my first encounter with him felt, to some extent, like putting my intellect to the test.

Pretty quickly, I recalled the issues I had with him. Firstly, his sentence structure and dissonant syntax. For someone who loves music so much, it's strange how eccentric his relationship with rhythm is. As happened the first time I read him, I found myself losing the thread halfway through one of his clunky, estranging, labyrinthine sentences. Proust takes pleasure in snatching one thread from you in the middle of a sentence and handing you another. Then you realize you're holding both, and sometimes they've been beautifully embroidered together, while other times they still seem raggedly disparate. And he forces you to read more slowly than you're used to. This can also be tiresome until he finally succeeds in subverting your rhythms to his more laborious, discordant cadences. I also quickly learned to be cautious of anything in parentheses. In essence, I don't much like the way he writes, his style. And of all the great writers, Proust can be more boring than most. I suppose Woolf eventually got a bit boring in The Years and Between the Acts. Tolstoy was boring at the end of War and Peace. But Proust is often boring in the midst of his brilliance. With Proust, you can get one of the best pages in the history of literature, followed a few pages later by what I could only describe as purple-prosed whimsy.

However, one also has to admit that the human mind often works in the way Proust writes about it. He captures some essence of the mind's mechanics at any given moment. Proust perhaps has more to say about the workings of consciousness, the timelessness of the human mind, than any other writer. No one has ever anatomized the swarm of sensibility active in each passing moment like him. He makes us aware of how time occurs on many different levels. And how mutable and ongoing all experience is. There are no full stops in the human mind. There is no final draft.

And he also, through Swann, makes us realize how much of our time we waste on misguided pursuits.

Swann is a brilliant portrayal of the disparity between the inner self and the social persona. Something Woolf attempted less successfully in Mrs Dalloway. (No surprise she read Proust just before writing Mrs Dalloway.) He forces us to ask questions about authenticity, the concept of a true self. All of Swann's diligently earned achievements to present himself to the world as erudite, cultured, eloquent, and dignified are torn to shreds by his slavish and rather pathetic obsession with the unworthy Odette. The sense of self he had constructed is revealed as a sham. There's a great quote by Hilary Mantel about the authenticity of the self in her book about her experience of surgery. "Illness strips you back to an authentic self, but not one you need to meet. Too much is claimed for authenticity. Painfully we learn to live in the world, and to be false. Then all our defences are knocked down in one sweep. In sickness, we can't avoid knowing about our body and what it does, its animal aspect, its demands. We see things that never should be seen; our inside is outside, the body's sewer pipes and vaults exposed to view, as if in a woodcut of our own martyrdom." Odette is Swann's sickness.

The last few pages made me laugh when Proust, as an old man, is horrified by the vulgarity of the fashions now prevalent compared to the elegance of the aesthetic he remembers from his youth. If he thought that was bad in 1920, heaven only knows what level of disgust he would reach at how we choose to clothe ourselves nowadays. It occurred to me then that for more than a century now, one could argue that fashion has become more garish and vulgar with each new decade. It's perhaps one of the reasons historical fiction/cinema is so popular - people were a lot more beautiful to look at in the past. How we dress is an example of how, in the evolution of the species, practicality has almost completely overshadowed poetry as the touchstone.

I'm tempted to give this 4 stars because that would reflect my level of enjoyment, but it's miles better than any other book I've given four stars to, so it has to be five, despite the problems I encountered.

**Childhood Expectations**

The Delphic maxim “Nosce te ipsum” or “Know thyself” is a powerful force not just in Western philosophy and Christian theology but also in much of Western literature. Marcel Proust's “In Search of Lost Time” is a prime example. It's an experiment in self-understanding that includes the concept of purposefulness, which is often overlooked in modern science, especially psychological science. Purposefulness is the ability to consider purpose rather than simply adopt a specific one. It's a difficult concept to understand and live with as it can easily turn into a specific purpose due to the frustration caused by its unsettling nature. Proust, in “Swann’s Way,” stubbornly refuses to let purposefulness be subsumed by purpose.

About 20 years ago, I was invited to speak at a meeting of the Italian Bankers Association. At the dinner, I sat next to the chairman of the Banco Agricultura, a charming 70-year-old man. Unlike most Northern Europeans, he had a different social manner. Instead of starting with pleasantries and then moving to business, he reversed the order. After 10 minutes of business chit-chat, he said, “You know I think Freud had it entirely wrong.” I was taken aback but intrigued. He explained that according to Freud, we all experience traumas in our youth that we have to live with for the rest of our lives. But his experience was different. He believed that we all make fundamental decisions about ourselves in childhood that we try to live up to. He then told me how he, a trained scientist, ended up in banking as a result of a childhood decision.
I was sceptical of the chairman's rationale until I watched an instalment of the British ITV programme “7-Plus.” The programme follows the lives of a dozen or so Britons from the age of seven at intervals of seven years. In the early years, the children are inexperienced and inarticulate, but they make statements that reflect their later selves. Some of these statements are uncanny. For example, a seven-year-old Yorkshire lad who herded cattle on his family's remote farm said he wanted to know everything about the moon. By his mid-thirties, he had become a prominent astrophysicist. The association between most childhood statements and life outcomes is more subtle, but almost all correlate to a significant degree.
The ITV programme is anecdotal rather than scientific, but I find it compelling. Alfred Whitehead observed that we are all born either Platonists or Aristotelians. As with religious faith, we can't verify either position except by adopting it. Confirming evidence follows from the choice, not the other way around. Proust knew this. He understood that our beliefs, especially those about purpose, don't come from a rational analysis and verification process as rationalists suggest. Nor do they emerge incrementally from our experience in the world as empiricists claim. Instead, they are vague and ambiguous intentions that drive our actions.
Proust's intense romantic self-consciousness, his drive to understand himself through feelings, leads to a post-modern recognition that the unconscious is indistinguishable from reality, a reality that we create. The Self, our consciousness combined with this reality, is indistinguishable from God. The Self is inherently unknowable except as a direction of search, a conclusion Proust reaches repeatedly in “Swann’s Way.” Every feeling is traced through memory until memory points further without a material reference. When memory stops at objects without recognising the transcendent reality, Marcel realises he is in error.
Proust also uses grammar to make his point about the obscure reality of these “strange attractors.” In describing a meadow by the River Vivonne in Combray, he uses a long and complex sentence with ambiguous pronouns and allusions to a mysterious Asian past. This is part of his experiment to express what is just beyond the reach of expression. His work is a new genre that makes the search for the Platonic ideal visible by subverting literary habits without making the text incomprehensible.
For Marcel, life is a search in which habits can provide comfort and security but can also inhibit the discovery of who we are. By simply accepting our habitual responses to events, we short-circuit the investigation of why and how they should be. This is especially true of our habits of thought and our ways of dealing with the emotional world. Proust's implicit proposal is that there is an emotional epistemology that is the heart of human purposefulness, an epistemology that excludes nothing and uses every approach it can imagine.
Proust's implicit contention is that what is important in adult life is decided in early conscious life, which adult life then makes unconscious. This confirms the views of the chairman of the Banco Agricultura and Freud (although Proust was ignorant of Freud) as well as the producers of ITV. But like the chairman and unlike Freud, Proust saw this as a positive necessity. He believed that human beings are creative idealists who become oriented to a certain configuration of how the world ought to be. His “therapy” is not Freudian. He doesn't seek to neutralise the motivational effect of childhood ideals or subject them to choice. Instead, he wants to further articulate and explore what these ideals might be and who we might be behind the veil of appearances.
The ideals created in childhood are what we actually are, but they are not deterministic. There are many ways in which these ideals can be interpreted and approached. Only afterwards can the creativity of the individual be seen. This is the domain of choice and learning. “Nosce te ipsum” doesn't imply an analytic understanding of our desires. Without some sort of reflective assessment, these desires, feelings, and aversions remain unappreciated, as does the Self in which they occur and which they constitute. These desires are created in youth not as specific neurotic fixations but as memories and responses to a vague, inarticulate presence, perhaps an essence, that is just behind and beyond what we perceive and can express.
This knowledge is essential because without it we may pursue ineffective paths, but it is also useless because it won't bring us closer to the real content of the ideal. Neither the past nor the Self can ever be found or recovered. But they can be appreciated. “Worldly” desires, like love, social position, power, and wealth, are forceful but sterile once achieved. They don't create what ought to be because what ought to be is irretrievable. For Proust, as for Augustine, each of us is like Citizen Kane, pursuing an ideal we can only faintly know, often through inappropriate means. The Rosebud is our unique possession, a sign of its hidden meaning, and the only possession we need.
In his 1651 publication of “The Leviathan,” Thomas Hobbes intentionally mistranslated “Nosce te ipsum” as “Read thyself.” When we read, we are forced to interpret and bring ourselves into the text. When our interpretation becomes a text, it too is subject to interpretation, and so on ad infinitum. As Richard Rorty quipped, it's interpretation all the way down. There is no terminal point of truth in a text, nor is there a true Self. The post-modern position sees our job as one of permanent interpretation, an un-ending search for the truth about the world and ourselves. Hobbes had the insight that we are texts to be read and interpreted, and Proust shows us how this is done. The fact that the horizon recedes as we approach it doesn't invalidate the task.
Goal-orientation, according to many psychologists, therapists, and management consultants, is a desirable human trait. But this is demonstrably false. Goal-orientation is a neurosis that involves the fixation of purpose regardless of consequences. It implies a wilful rejection of the possibility of learning through experience. The most vital experience is not about learning how to do something but about learning what is important to do, about value. Loyalty to purpose is a betrayal of purposefulness and of what it means to be human. This is a prevailing poison in modern society, and Proust understood this toxin. Without even giving it a name, he formulated the cure. This, for me, is the real value of “Swann’s Way.”

The elusive bird divided the height of the unknown tree and in an effort to make the day shorter, it pecked at the void around it with a net, but from that void, such a unanimous response and such a heavy reaction was found in the silence and tranquility of the two that you would say the moment it had strived for passed more quickly and stood still forever.

I need the constant presence of literature in order to land on the ground and not get lost in the great storms of my life. When you think of such a thing, how many books come to your mind? That accompany you step by step for days, weeks, months, and years, and a part of them dissolves in your existence and a part of yourself is placed in them? I went in search. Maybe your choice is different.

The sight of this moment

Now that I have read the first volume (maybe my opinion will change with the passage of time and reading the future volumes), in my opinion, the search is an invitation to live in the moment. To use all the senses one hundred percent. To relax instead of constantly running, to take a deep breath and look at the simple white wall in front of you that you have not paid attention to in all the years of your life. To remember the taste of that sweetness that years later, in a moment when you did not expect it, its memories come to you.

In my opinion, Proust means life. But by life, I don't mean big events like birth and death; rather, I am talking about all the observable details that maybe years later, when you don't know what dark days you are going through, you remember by looking back at your past. These are the insignificant events that together make up your life. Proust's work is full of detailed observations and small events that maybe only the person who is in search of the meaning of life can remember them.

When I say Proust means life, I am talking about the vivid descriptions of the simplest human experiences. Of love and heartbreak, of the desire for love, of fear, of constant worries, of all those events that make you see yourself in the mirror and in other people and make them bigger and more real than the characters in a hundred-year-old novel.

I was looking, at first with a gaze that is nothing but the chatter of the eyes, but from its window, all the senses, worried and petrified, are drawn, a gaze that the heart wants to touch the pain it sees and take the soul with it and carry it away.

The class lesson

Proust tells Jean Cocteau in a letter, "My book is a painting." Besides the messages he evokes in the belly of the story for his reader, Proust creates many opportunities for acquaintance with art. Sometimes he spends many words to describe works of art and in such a way that he creates that work and its artist that every time you hear their names, you remember Proust. In total, in all the volumes of the search, more than a hundred artists are named, and if you are a researcher and examiner and spend time to get to know these works better, probably after the end of the collection, you will have a greater artistic taste.

The continuous pleasure; in the slow reading of Proust

I can talk for hours about the importance of slow and continuous reading of this work. The continuous pleasure that comes from the company of Proust in the bitter and sweet journeys of life is unique. For me, Proust is a companion who accompanies me in these years of my life so that whenever I get tired on the way and want to stop, I look at him and by remembering all my previous steps, I find the courage to continue. So that I can remember all the feelings I had while reading and all the other versions of myself that live on the margins of the pages of these seven volumes of the book of life.

For example, I think of the first nights when the pressure of work and class was so high that I read the initial pages of Proust in sleep and wakefulness, or the night when reading one page took a thousand hours because I was restless and constantly checking my phone, or those hellish and rainy nights when I lost my grip and thought I was the biggest fool in the world because I was exactly doing the thing that I had the potential to do, or the night of my birth, when finally I had the taste of finishing the first volume.

For this very reason, I think the best way to read Proust is to go slowly and continuously. Over time, my experiences and Proust's words blend together, and years later, when I return to it, I can see myself on all its pages.

From the experience of studying the Persian translation

On the last page of this volume of the book, I wrote that one day I will learn French so that I can read it in the original language. Until that day, I have to hold on to the Persian and English translations. Currently, I am reading the collection in Persian, and the truth is that it has been a very winding path for me. Mahdi Sahebi's Persian is beautiful, it is not a hasty translation, it is thoughtful, it has harmonious combinations, and it makes people smile. But Proust's prose is not simple. It is full of sentences within sentences, commas, hyphens, parentheses, and... and sometimes, from one point! With all these, the Persian translation has done a good job of conveying Proust's speech. The only flaw that can be picked up from the Persian version is its lack of work in writing proper names in the original language in the footnotes. Sometimes, the search for some works of art or less well-known names is almost impossible without referring to the English translation or the original French version.

Finally

I have a friend, from the distant years, who first helped me return to the world of words and then accompanied me in reading Proust. In my opinion, the presence of people who have common goals with you, even in the time of great storms, is a great blessing that helps you walk more firmly. I am grateful to you, Shaghayegh, for being with me and being there.

'reality will take shape in the memory alone...’

For a century now, Swann’s Way, the initial volume of Marcel Proust’s magnum opus, has captivated and charmed readers. Mere moments after opening the cover and delving into the text, the reader is whisked away to the heights of rapture, held firmly by Proust’s prose, leaving no doubt that it rightfully earns its place among the timeless classics. In his swirling passages of poetic ecstasy, his entire life and memories come alive on the page, meticulously dissecting the characters who populated his childhood and painting a vivid picture of the society and social mores of the time. Swann’s Way is a powerful love story that captures the romance between Proust and his existence, as he wields his sprawling lyricism like a tender touch and a gentle kiss, sensually undressing the world and revealing all the poetic beauty hidden within the garments of reality.

Open the novel to any page and you are likely to encounter a long, flowing sentence filled with love and longing for the depths of existence. Proust is a virtuoso. His famously complex sentences rise and fall in a dramatic fashion, performing incredible emotional acrobatics across the page, much like a violinist does with sound in the most elite of classical compositions. It is no wonder that I quickly became completely enamored with Proust. Even Virginia Woolf read him in awe. Some of the most exquisite passages I have ever laid eyes on can be found within these pages. Consider, for example, this beautiful passage on the power of music:

’Even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed, latent, in his mind, in the same way as certain other conceptions without material equivalent, such as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective, of bodily desire, the rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned. Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we return to nothing in the dust. But so long as we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state in which we shall not have known them than we can with regard to any material object, than we can, for example, doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has just been lighted, in view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which has vanished even the memory of the darkness. In that way Vinteuil's phrase, like some theme, say, in Tristan, which represents to us also a certain acquisition of sentiment, has espoused our mortal state, had endued a vesture of humanity that was affecting enough. Its destiny was linked, for the future, with that of the human soul, of which it was one of the special, the most distinctive ornaments. Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is without existence; but, if so, we feel that it must be that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, are nothing either. We shall perish, but we have for our hostages these divine captives who shall follow and share our fate. And death in their company is something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain.’

Throughout Swann’s Way, we see this sentiment expressed, as Proust seeks to cover all of reality in a blanket of art. By transforming our perceptions into beautiful notions of prose, music, sculpture, architecture, or any other form of aesthetics, he endeavors to discover the true shape of meaning and cling to an ideal, an ideal that will linger like a sweet perfume long after the object of desire and reflection has either faded or revealed its less appealing aspects. Through his exploration of memory, Proust is able to weave all his sensory perceptions and the external stimuli experienced over a lifetime into a charming bouquet of words,赋予 them a linguistic weight that allows them to be shared and enjoyed by others. He despairs when he contemplates that his experiences were not shared by others and had no reality outside of himself. However, he finds solace in literature and hopes to become a writer, as it gives him the power to capture the true essence of anything. By contemplating an object, he discovers that it is “so ready to open, to yield me the thing for which they themselves were merely a cover”, and language becomes the snare to capture and immortalize these fleeting impressions and moments of epiphany. For Proust, it is the impressions and the inner beauty that matter, rather than the objects themselves. He falls in love with Mlle. Swann not because of her physical appearance, but because she connotes “the cathedrals, the charm of the hills of Île-de-France, the plains of Normandy”, as well as her association with his beloved Bergote. He loves the idea of her more than the actual person.

The centerpiece of the novel, Swann in Love, is an emotionally charged journey from the sublime romance and intimacy of love to the obsessive, nerve-wracking depression of love gone wrong. This story, which could almost stand alone as a novella, had the strongest grip on me. Perhaps it was because of my own bruised memories of similar experiences, but my heart went out to Swann, despite all his flaws, self-pity, and shameful actions. Proust creates a near-Greek tragedy in him by elevating him to a man of legendary proportions and then casting him down. Swann, like Proust, seeks the ideal, even to the point of self-destruction. A man of the arts, he associates his image of the ideal with aesthetics, but unlike the narrator, he brings it to life through sculpture, paintings, and music. Odette becomes most beautiful to him when he can appraise her like a sculpture. Their lovemaking takes on a more personal and artistic quality through their euphemism “make cattleya”, which extends all further acts of intimacy performed under that title to the first, passionate and idealized union of their bodies. The “little phrase” played by the pianist during their first encounter at the Verdurin’s becomes the anthem of their love, and its melody carries the image of his ideal Odette, the Odette who loved him deeply and swooned over his every word. Even when the Odette he can physically hold no longer measures up to this ideal, he continues to pursue her, fighting to uphold some semblance of self-dignity, even though it is this very dignity that will ultimately be lost in the process. Proust masterfully delivers both love and tragedy at their finest.

Through each remarkable passage, Proust provides a detailed and lifelike portrayal of the people and places in his life. His family and friends are given a second life through his words, which paint a vivid picture of their greatest traits, habits, and flaws. Proust has a keen eye for social manners, and the reader can easily pick up on the most subtle vanities, ill-manners, or acts of kindness of all those he encounters. Of particular interest is his brutal portrayal of the Verdurins and their group of the “faithful”. He refrains from passing judgment, instead allowing their actions to speak for themselves and betray their ignorance of the ideas they claim to hold dear. The Verdurin scenes bring to mind memories of college parties, where less-than-sober individuals speak passionately about art but have little of substance to say when challenged. These are the same people who label others and look down on those who do not meet their “high standards” of art (and, let’s face it, sometimes that person is me). Proust immortalizes these fakes in his words, making me think that he was having the last laugh at a group that once looked down on him.

I highly recommend this novel to anyone with even the slightest interest in literature. The language is simply beautiful, even after being translated. First loves, heartbreaks, losses of all kinds, and the exciting phase of childhood when our understanding of the world around us begins to unfold, all come to life in this book and will make your emotions dance and sway. 100 years after it was written, Proust still holds great significance in the world today and stands above many of the authors who have followed in his footsteps. I cannot emphasize enough how incredible his prose is. I have found a new author to cherish and savor each and every word. So, take the Swann’s Way and embark on this wonderful literary journey.

5/5

‘I looked at her, at first with the sort of gaze that is not merely the messenger of the eyes, but a window at which all the senses lean out, anxious and petrified, a gaze that would like to touch the body it is looking at, capture it, take it away and the soul along with it…’

In my opinion, in this work the spoilers do not bother, so I resorted to texts of help for its reading. No one ignores, for example, the famous scene of the Narrator, who, by dipping a Madeleine into the tea, summons, through the taste, the images of childhood.

Remembering the past - without respecting the chronological order of the facts - seeking the lost time to find it again in the last volume. Proust's writing is an embroidery not in cross stitch but in pointillé: one stitch forward, half a stitch back, one stitch forward, half a stitch back, resulting in a total that is greater and thicker than the total of the stitches.

But what does Proust have that others don't? He has a narrative that never ends, that is, in a certain sense, never begins. Proust plays with Time in the three parts of the book, and places the Narrator for long minutes in suspension in front of a hawthorn bush, to give just one example.

The book has long Pauses, or, if Proust were not known as a prodigal novelist in descriptions, which causes a certain tedium. However, those descriptive passages are, in relation to the breadth of the work, neither very long nor very numerous (a little over thirty, according to the specialists).

The writing is very detailed and I confess that I skipped some pages, once in a while.

Will Proust change my life? I move on to the next volume.

For years, I have been plagiarizing early. This catchphrase is for me the pillar on which one of the richest journeys is built, one of those that start inside but go out of the pages of this book and proclaim the beginning of their party in time, the one that was lost and must be regained.
The "Searching" is a spreading book, like the key that loosens the paper tablecloth and spreads slowly through the threads of the paper doll.
I am very glad that I was finally captivated by this long-legged manual that I started. The enemies of detail in any narrative and for any purpose they may serve, obviously, and a work that extends to seven volumes is not for them, they will never understand its spirit because they will never think it is worth their patience. And it doesn't matter.
Proust invents his own theory of relativity and transports us to the dream world, the one that has more than the known dimensions. If time is the curvature of the other three dimensions, in this curvature, in this deep well, the author pulls us, and thus the past and the present are united in a way in which the past is relived, through the review of memories. Memory wakes up a beautiful breakfast with the taste of a madeleine soaked in tea. The bud starts from the mouth and stands up, brings forward, the thread that unites the past with the present, and regenerates them with specific qualities.
Proust will wonder by sounding the soul and behaviors in given conditions in their journey in time, throws the drop into the lake and transports us to the concentric circles that move away from the source that caused them, from the bite of the madeleine and the explosion in the mouth. Thus, a time lapse is created where we, the readers, on our fantastic rafts, slide slowly on the rings of time and sometimes the sun hits our eyes and then we find our own catchphrases, these magical points in time that unconsciously led us from the past to this present.
Proust blows into our mouths the smoke of a narcotic, or rather an activating substance: activates time, memory, a past-oriented attempt that, however, gives value to the present, finds its place in the present. The past, dressed in the magical cloak of embellishment with the vehicle of memory - this illusory, erratic vehicle, the extremely elitist one, that keeps us poets and distributes the best for us, bounces through the narrative and thus an elegy is formed for love, art, memory, forgetfulness, time. Proust takes the body out of dozens of bottles of forgetfulness and with whatever spills out of it, compressed for years in the small volume that corresponded to it, composes through words a spacetime mosaic that goes out to breathe in the clean air of the eternal story.
Through this work, Proust came to support and gloriously justify my so far asterisked theories about art and literature, their purpose, the value they occupy in life. He allocates time from the past to the present and thus we, the dreamers, enjoy the liberation that results from the opening of the old trunk with the bite of a madeleine soaked in tea, drinking milk with a little dust of Greek coffee dissolved in it, biting a slice of butter spread with sugar on top.
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I read the book making in some places a comparison of the translation of Paul Zannas with the French original. Obviously, it was a great challenge for the translator to render the language with the endless sentences of the author. However, I silently gave my congratulations and my respect for this translation, as well as for his excellent meter.
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«From that moment on, only the sunbeams, the scents, the colors seemed to me to have value ∙ because the change of images had caused a radical change in my desire, and –as abrupt as ever in music– a complete change in the tone of my sensitivity. Later, it happened sometimes that a simple atmospheric change was enough to cause in me this transition to another tone, without the need for the return of an era. Because often you find yourself in a day that has lost the way of some other day of another era, which makes you live in it, to immediately recall, to lament the characteristic pleasures of it, and it interrupts the dreams you had, inserting earlier or later than its order this kind taken from another chapter, in the changed calendar of Happiness. But quickly, like these natural phenomena, which our comfort or our health can only enjoy randomly and limitedly as long as the day when science intervenes and then, making them at will, offers us the possibility to have them at our disposal free from care and independent of the approval of fate, so too the production of these dreams of the Atlantic and Italy ceased to depend exclusively on the changes of the seasons and the weather. I only had to pronounce the names: Balbec, Venice, Florence ∙ […]»

6/5*

Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure.

This phrase, which opens Proust's masterpiece, has been the subject of much debate and discussion among translators. In my view, it has been unfortunately butchered many times in English translations. I had the privilege of reading the entire work in French, a feat that most French people themselves do not accomplish, as they often struggle to get past the first volume. So, I cannot objectively compare the translations of Moncrieff and Kilmartin. However, I can say that Proust's writing is so nuanced, with its wide range of idiomatic expressions and complex grammatical forms that have no direct equivalents in English. My brief glances at English translations left me disappointed, much like when I attempted to read Stuart Gilbert's French translation of Ulysses.

Putting aside my reservations about translations, I am certain that reading "A la recherche du temps perdu" in English is still an amazing experience. I know several people, including close friends, who have managed to plow through all 2500+ pages. But if you have the ability to read in French, I highly recommend doing so. The original French is, in my estimation, more limpid and evocative. The word "longtemps" creates an almost fairy-tale-like atmosphere, as if we are about to enter a world of dreams and memories. The use of the passé composé "me suis couché" emphasizes a specific moment in time, while "de bonne heure" adds a touch of vagueness and mystery.

"Du côté de chez Swann" is the first volume of Proust's work and contains several chapters that introduce us to the protagonist, Marcel, his friend Gilberte, and many other memorable characters and images. One of the most famous of these is the madeleine, a French pastry that triggers Marcel's long and detailed memories of his past. The shape of the madeleine, with its clamshell bottom and round top, reminds me of Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus," in which Venus stands in a shell, her long hair flowing in the wind. This image, in turn, recalls the portrayal of Mary Madeleine in ancient portraiture, perhaps giving rise to the name of the pastry. While the true origin of the name remains a mystery, the madeleine has become an iconic symbol of Proust's work and a powerful reminder of the connection between our senses and our memories.

Another unforgettable image in this volume is the spire of the church of Chartres, which Marcel sees from the back of a carriage as it bounces along the curvy country roads. The spire appears to move back and forth across the horizon, creating a sense of relativity and instability. This idea that solidity is relative pervades Proust's work and is a recurring theme throughout the novel. Looks are nearly always deceiving, and what we think we know about the world and the people around us is often just an illusion.

Admittedly, it took me several attempts to finish this first volume of "A la recherche du temps perdu." I had only learned French two years before, and I was still struggling with the complex grammar and the vast scale of time that Proust employs. The story seems to unfold in a leisurely and almost dreamlike manner, with long passages of description and reflection that can be challenging to follow. However, I kept coming back to it, and finally, around 1999, I managed to get past the first 75 pages and became completely engrossed in the story. I read the entire work, including the thousands of footnotes, which provided valuable insights into Proust's life and the cultural context in which he wrote.

As you embark on this literary journey, it is important to note that Proust wrote this book in notebooks, often while he was confined to bed due to his poor health. The manuscript is sometimes unclear, and there is still debate among scholars about certain passages. It is truly astounding to think that Proust was able to create such a complex and interconnected narrative using only these notebooks, without the aid of modern technology like Google or Ctrl+F. The magic of this work lies in its seamless integration of characters, themes, and memories, and in the authenticity and vividness with which Proust brings his world to life.

I hope this expanded review has given you a better understanding of the first volume of "A la recherche du temps perdu" and has inspired you to pick up the book and begin reading. Whether you choose to read it in French or in English, I am confident that you will be rewarded with a rich and unforgettable literary experience. And if you're interested, I would be happy to share my translation of the first few paragraphs with you. I titled the series "Making Up for Wasted Time" because "Temps Perdu" has that sense of time lost or wasted, and Proust's life as a dandy was indeed rather sedentary. But as we readers, we are the beneficiaries of his "wasted" time, as it has resulted in this monumental and amazing work of literature.