Not everyone reads a book.

Within books, we read ourselves, whether for exploration or for self-examination. And those who have a more vivid vision are more likely to be thoughtful.

The greatest book is not the one whose message, like a telegram on a paper strip, leaves an impression in the brain, but the one whose vibrant impact awakens the lives of others and spreads its own fire, which is kindled from all kinds of material, from one to another, and after it catches fire, it spreads from one forest to another.

| Romain Rolland | Inner Journey |

Search is a masterpiece that comes out of the vessel of time and death, a literary and fluid story in which every part is placed in absolute proportion, a masterpiece of a mind that shows how to extract the essence of life from the simplest elements of life, a truth that extracts emotions and memories that sometimes fall so deeply within me that reading them in the lines of the book brings a tremor of excitement.

A tremor resulting from the uprising of suppressed emotions, thoughts, dreams, and forgotten desires. As if you have taken out the vessel of time and death, and in the water of this vessel, for a moment, you take out several clear and transparent memories.

The flow of the book is so intertwined with the flow of my mind, and the flow of my mind is so intertwined with the flow of this book that sometimes it seems as if I am reading the book in my thoughts and memories.

An extremely unique and fascinating experience.

**"In the Realm of Proust's Literary Magic"**

Proust's writing is a captivating exploration.

When a man sleeps, he is surrounded by the ordered chain of time and the celestial bodies. But this order can be disrupted, as described in the vivid examples.

I initially thought Proust would be an elusive writer, but I was pleasantly surprised. His work is accessible, and we can all find a part of ourselves in it. The opening scene, with the little boy longing for his mother's good night kiss, is relatable.

Although his long sentences can be challenging, they build and create a sense of anticipation. If we let ourselves be carried away by his words, it's a truly ecstatic experience.

The central theme of involuntary memory is used to depict the dreamy leisure of his epoch, soon to be disrupted by war. His characters walk on time, concealing aspects of themselves.

Reading Proust makes us think about the hidden inner worlds of people. After just one volume, I'm excited for the journey ahead and a little sad about the other reading I'll have to postpone. I can't wait to see how my perception of the world and art will change as I continue reading Proust.

Jacques-Emile Blanche's portrait of Marcel Proust, my literary lover, adds a touch of mystery to this enchanting literary experience.

Marcel Proust's "Swann's Way" or "The Way by Swann"

A refined and delicate layer, I'm sure the owner of the song "With the Lovely People" would greatly enjoy this novel. Pure French atmosphere, a classic par excellence, it wanders among flower gardens, tickles your ears with magnificent music, wanders among printed paintings. There is no politics or religion here, no talk of death or wars. Art, love, and literature are all that your eyes master.

The first part of "In Search of Lost Time" is divided into three sections. In the first one, the narrator spends time recalling the early days of his childhood in Combray among his family. The narrator delves into the description of the landmarks of the town and the relationships between its people. The most beautiful thing in this part is the emotional portrayal of the narrator's attachment to his mother in the morning and his longing for her in the evening when he goes to sleep. It's a feeling that most people have experienced, and although the narrator has described it in the most creative way. The drawback of this part is the verbosity in describing nature and the life landmarks. You can taste the beauty, but not to the extent of reading a description of a tree in four pages or a church tower in another ten. Also, there are names for which I don't know the models, like the names of many flowers, many architectural styles, and also the painters, which form an obstacle in the way of indulging in that beauty through imagining it.

The second and largest section is about Swann, an aristocrat with a refined taste for art and his scandalous relationship with Odette. This story is the heart of the book and the most beautiful thing in it, in my opinion. You know that kind of relationship that weakens a person and deprives him of the sweetness of his sleep, his peace, and a great deal of his dignity. When desire turns from a curative for pain to an opium that makes you suffer from its loss and curse it when you succeed in doing what it wants, and it tempts your soul little by little. If you have read "The Servitude of Man" by Somerset Maugham or watched the film "Forrest Gump", then the relationship there is similar to the one here. The reader witnesses in this text a description of the emotions, some of them noble and some of them silly, that the lover feels. Also, he lives in that dimension where logic is defied according to the overwhelming emotion. Again, the drawback of this section is the verbosity in describing everything.

The last part is the shortest part of the novel. The narrator recalls a morning that includes the beginnings of his first love in his adolescence. The story is not complete, but it seems to me that Proust is rich in love stories that are full of mystery and conducive to pain.

Many consider this book one of the gems of French literature, and it's no wonder as it is rich with all this cultural and aesthetic heritage. I read it in an English translation and found it difficult due to the length of the sentences and paragraphs and the excessive use of the interrogative sentences, but I later learned that reading Proust in English is much easier than in French. Surprising!

Finally, I would like to mention the beauty of the design and binding of this magnificent edition from "Penguin". This design was made with love, just as Swann loved Odette.

The sweet taste left in the mouth by a piece of cake dipped in tea turns into the past: the entrance gate of a magnificent opus of thousands of pages, perhaps the most glorious of literary monuments.

The narrator of the novel, who states that the novel resembles himself a lot, says at the beginning of the book that the past comes to life not with thoughts in the mind but with tastes and smells. The knowledge of the past is stored/carried in objects, and the determinant of whether or not one encounters those objects is coincidences, he says. With this simple/ basic information conveyed in a chatty atmosphere even before the story begins, Proust gives the reader a key to the structure of the entire novel and even the series in search of lost time: the novel is not about new discoveries, surprises, secrets, but about things that everyone knows and feels, and the reader will progress "in search of his own lost time" along with the story. It can be seen that the story is always in the background and serves as a tool for the reader's own story as one reads.

The novel is not interesting either with the people or with the French countryside or Parisian society around which it revolves. As the novel lengthens, in its lengthening sentences, it turns into an epic with what it says and shows about nature, objects, art, looking, seeing, feeling, remembering, and with all of these together, within all of them and as a whole, about time. The narrator-hero is like a light shining from the lines as he struggles to "crack the shell" of objects, find the "sentences" inside music, establish a path/a connection to the people in his life from paintings, or as he questions what pleasure is, why it occurs, or where meaning is. With this light, it is impossible for those who read this novel to progress from their own traces and not think about, not question their own story, their own time.

"The places we knew in the past were not only part of the universe of the places where we conveniently placed them," says Proust, "they are thin slices of the impressions that made up our lives at that time, consisting of the memory of a specific image, the longing for a specific moment, and houses, roads, streets, like landscapes, years, they fly away."

Easter 2013.

When I reached the final pages of Du Côté de chez Swann, I had a profound realisation. I knew that I hadn't merely finished a book; rather, I'd just embarked on an entirely new literary journey. What I'd read were only the initial chapters of a much more extensive work. Reading through the entire seven volumes of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu would be, to borrow one of Marcel Proust's beloved images, like embarking on a very long and exquisitely beautiful train ride.

I came to understand that what I had accomplished thus far was simply to meander through the first few carriages of this literary train. Here, I encountered some captivating passengers and overheard some curious conversations. I marvelled at the diverse decor in each carriage while also recognising the common elements that recurred from one to the next. I crossed paths with some of the passengers more than once as they freely moved about from one section of the train to another, going backwards and forwards as they pleased. I gazed out of the windows of each carriage and spotted familiar landmarks, sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right. I noticed that the landscape seemed unchanging at times, yet the passengers would sometimes don different clothing. At other times, it was the scenery that was different while the preoccupations and conversations remained the same.

I found myself pondering if the train wasn't on some enormously complex orbit around a central point, passing over and back, revolving in both space and time. This is because, although Proust adored the precision of railway timetables, the chronology of this narrative is extremely fluid. At the beginning, I found this rather distracting, but now I've come to accept the fact that alongside clock time and calendar time, there is Proust time. And there may be many more profound meanings to Temps Perdu than the obvious one of 'lost time'.

I find it highly significant that many episodes in the early sections of this work take place around Pâques or Easter. When we recall that Easter is not a fixed date in the calendar, but a movable feast, falling on the Sunday following the full moon which itself follows the Spring equinox and depends on the earth's orbit around the sun, then the series of Easter times in the narrative become as challenging to pinpoint on a calendar as the resurrection of memories from a wafer of tisane-soaked cake.

But Proust has such a敏锐的 sense of how nature responds in each season that while we rarely know the exact date of any particular episode, we do know precisely where the episode is situated in nature's calendar. During the numerous Easters of the narrative, the weather is remarkably consistent, even though it may be March in one instance and April in another. Proust frequently returns to the types of flowers that bloom around Easter and often refers to the miracle of the renewal of nature. Aubépine or hawthorn is a favoured plant, with the thorns of the new growth tinged with pink in a subtle Good Friday analogy. Boules de neige or viburnum are also mentioned for their parallel with Easter weather when snow showers can occur as easily as sunshine. In this way, we are reminded that Easter has more than just religious significance. Plants too are influenced by the equinox, the earth has its own renewal calendar, and Proust time is cosmic time.

For years, I have procrastinated reading Proust, primarily due to the intimidating size of In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past. Now, after completing Swann's Way: Vol 1 (440 pages out of a total of 3365 pages), I am overcome with an urgent need to continue.

This novel is deeply engrossed in all the minutiae that encircle time, desire, love, memory, happiness, life, truth, names, and relationships. It is vivid and detailed, serving as a reminder to the reader to observe, feel, seize, smell, think, confess, and take bold risks in order to cultivate that one perfect bloom of love. Proust's prose is exquisite, his imagery is brilliant, and he appears to go for broke on every page. This is not a book to be simply read, but one to inhabit and drift through. However, first, one must discover and dip one's own Madeleine.

Now that I have read Proust, I can perceive his gentle fingerprints无处不在. It is difficult to precisely define what it is about his prose that is so captivating, but like a dance or a tune that seems to float, Proust's words and style are not easily confined within the pages of his books. The edges seep, the scent lingers.

“One cannot change, that is to say become a different person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one has ceased to be.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

Marcel Proust's work is a profound exploration of human nature, relationships, and the beauty that can be found in the simplest of things. His descriptions of asparagus, for example, are not just about the vegetable itself but about the emotions and memories it evokes. Proust's writing style is rich and detailed, allowing the reader to fully immerse themselves in the world he creates.

The relationship between Swann and Odette is a complex and often tumultuous one. At first, Swann is uninterested in Odette, but as she pursues him, his feelings begin to change. However, as his love for her grows, so does his jealousy and insecurity. The two become trapped in a cycle of passion and pain, unable to break free.

Proust's insights into human behavior are truly remarkable. He shows how our emotions and desires can often lead us astray, and how difficult it can be to break free from the patterns we have established. His writing also reminds us of the importance of seeing beauty in the world around us, even in the smallest of things.

Overall, Proust's work is a masterpiece that continues to inspire and captivate readers today. His unique perspective on life and love, and his ability to convey complex emotions and ideas in a beautiful and accessible way, make his writing a must-read for anyone interested in the human experience.

“At the hour when I usually went downstairs to find out what there was for dinner...I would stop by the table, where the kitchen-maid had shelled them, to inspect the platoons of peas, drawn up in ranks and numbered, like little green marbles, ready for a game; but what most enraptured me were the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and pink which shaded their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible gradations to their white feet--still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed--with an iridescence that was not of this world, I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form and who, through the disguise of their firm, comestible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognize again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting like one of Shakespeare’s fairies) at transforming my chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume.”

The more you look at asparagus the odder and more wonderful they look.

Now anyone can see beauty in the Pacific Ocean, in the Rocky Mountains, in the New York Skyline or in a Turkish spice market, but not everyone looks at asparagus and sees beauty. Proust looks at this unusual looking vegetable and sees so much more than just his next meal. He sees rainbows, mythical creatures, and an explosion of radiant colors. He inhales their aroma as they exit his body as well. Their final gift to his senses. When we see an asparagus and see so much more than just an asparagus; life, however small or however large, becomes a kaleidoscope of adventure. It is wise to see beauty in the smallest things.

Our narrator although I can not distinguish him from Proust; so therefore, I will continue to think of them as one and the same, is a reader. So much so that his parents have to insist that he do something in the fresh air before he buries himself in his books for the rest of the day. Many of us can identify with that desire, that indulgence if I may, that would allow us to spend a day in bed reading. Even the best jobs can not compete with the worlds to be experienced in books or for that matter with our favorite sheets, our fluffy pillows, and our washed a hundred times comforter.

”I always returned with an unconfessed gluttony to wallow in the central, glutinous, insipid, indigestible and fruity smell of the flowered bedspread.”

He loves his momma. In fact bedtime is one of his favorite points in the day where he waits with great anticipation for the moment when his mom slips in to kiss him goodnight. He will even risk the ire of his father to elicit this kiss if he feels his mother is distracted by guests or may believe she can skip this all important, much awaited brush of her lips to close the day.

Marcel Proust, he loves his momma, and there ain't nothing wrong with that.

He meets a girl, Gilberte, the daughter of Swann, a man who drifts in and out of his family affairs. A man who becomes an obsession of our narrator. As he pursues the daughter he also pursues the story of her father.

Swann meets a woman named Odette de Crecy. She, in the beginning, is much more enamored with him than he is with her. ”She had struck Swann not, certainly, as being devoid of beauty, but as endowed with a kind of beauty which left him indifferent, which aroused in him no desire, which gave him, indeed, a sort of physical repulsion, as one of those women of whom all of us can cite examples, different for each of us, who are the converse of the type which our senses demand.”

Swann looks at her the way we do when we are first analyzing a potential mate, overcritical in a Seinfeldesque manner. ”Her profile was too sharp, her skin too delicate, her cheekbones were too prominent, her features too tightly drawn to be attractive to him. Her eyes were beautiful, but so large they seemed to droop beneath their own weight, strained the rest of her face and always made her appear unwell or in a bad mood.”

As they are thrown together at the same parties and Odette continues to pursue him his opinion of her changes although reluctantly. He keeps a little seamstress as almost a counter weight to his relationship with Odette.

”But Swann told himself that if he could make Odette feel (by consenting to meet her only after dinner) that there were only pleasures which he preferred to that of her company, then the desire that she felt for his would be all the longer in reaching the point of satiety. Besides, as he infinitely preferred to Odette’s style of beauty that of a young seamstress, as fresh and plump as a rose, with whom he was smitten, he preferred to spend the first part of the evening with her, knowing that he was sure to see Odette later on.”

Swann begins to see her beauty differently and we, the reader, can start to feel the shift in affections. ”Standing there beside him, her loosened hair flowing down her cheeks, bending one knee in a slightly balletic pose in order to be able to lean without effort over the picture at which she was gazing, her head on one side with those great eyes of hers which seemed so tired and sullen when there was nothing to animate her, she struck Swann by her resemblance to the figure of Zipporah, Jethro’s daughter, which is to be seen in the Sistine frescoes.”,

Botticelli's Zipporah

He realizes that despite his best efforts he is falling in love with her or more accurately of an ideal version of her. His resistance has crumbled. ”And it was Swann who, before she allowed it, as though in spite of herself, to fall upon his lips, held it back for a moment longer, at a little distance, between his hands. He had wanted to leave time for his mind to catch up with him, to recognize the dream which it had so long cherished and to assist at it’s realization, like a relative invited as a spectator when a prize is given to a child of whom she has been especially fond. Perhaps, too, he was fixed upon the face of Odette not yet possessed, nor even kissed by him, which he was seeing for the last time, the comprehensive gaze with which, on the day of his departure, a traveller hopes to bear away with him in memory a landscape he is leaving for ever.”

*Sigh* Swann is in love. It is really an interesting roller coaster that Proust takes us on with this relationship. At first I felt that Swann was being rather unchivalrous with Odette and unduly harsh, but then as Odette pursues him I start to feel like maybe his first reaction to her was the proper evaluation. As he falls into pit after pit of jealousy both become mired in a relationship that probably never should have started. As his passion increases her ardour for him cools. He has turned a corner in the relationship that blocks his view of the road that would take him away from Odette. ”And this malady which Swann’s love had become had so proliferated, was so closely interwoven with all his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what he hoped for after his death, was so utterly inseparable from him, that it would have been impossible to eradicate it without almost entirely destroying him; as surgeons say, his love was no longer operable.”

“In each of their gardens the moonlight, copying the art of Hubert Robert, scattered its broken staircases of white marble, its fountains, its iron gates tempting ajar. All that was left of it was a column, half shattered but preserving the beauty of a ruin which endures for all time.”

A character, a friend of Swann’s named Princesse des Laumes shows up in the later pages of the book and I wish she’d had a bigger role. I want to share a bit of conversation she has with a General about Mme de Cambremer.

”Oh, but Cambremer is a quite a good name--old, too,” protested the General.
“I see no objection to its being old,” the Princess answered dryly, “but whatever else it is it’s not euphonious,” she went on, isolating the word euphonious as though between inverted commas, a little affection to which the Guermantes set were addicted.

Do you hear just a bit of the Dowager Countess Lady Grantham in that exchange?

Swann finds himself unhappily happily in love. ”he said to himself that people did not know when they were unhappy, that one is never as happy as one thinks.” I will counter that to say that rarely are people aware of how happy they are either. He may have been as happy as he was ever going to be when he was cuddling with his seamstress.

Our narrator sees Odette long after all the negotiations, passions, and pain have passed with her relationship with Swann. ”I doffed my hat to her with so lavish, so prolonged a gesture that she could not repress a smile. People laughed. As for her, she had never seen me with Gilberte, she did not know my name, but I was for her--like one of the keepers in the Bois, or the boatman, or the ducks on the lake to which she threw scraps of bread--one of the minor personages, familiar, nameless, as devoid of individual character as a stage-hand in a theatre, of her daily walks in the Bois.”

There are those books that once finished inspire the reader to turn back to the first page and start again. This is one of those books for me. It does not feel like a 600+ novel. Once you are sucked into the story which for different readers begins at different points the pages will seem to fly by. I finished this in the midst of the recent snowstorm in Kansas City. The blizzard provided the proper isolation for me to devote my total attention to the final 200 pages. If you are finding Proust difficult I might suggest starting with the section called Swann in Love. I know odd to think of reading a book out of order, but this is one of the few books that you actually can. If you enjoy that section then you can go back and read the rest, after all at that point as they say in poker you are pot committed. I may still be in a Proust glow, but I must say for me this fits the bill of a masterpiece. I’m in awe of the Proustian insights into human behavior and his unique and inspiring way to see the world around us. More Proust please.

**"The Marvelous World of Proust's Sensibility"**

Marcel Proust's work, especially in this first volume, is a profound exploration of a unique way of feeling, experiencing life, and perceiving oneself. It is not just a novel about the passage of time or the recovery of the past. Proust's style is complex and delicate, as seen in his famous "madeleine moment" and countless other examples throughout the novel. The power of objects and physical sensations to evoke memories and intense emotions is of great importance to him.

His descriptions of his ecstasies and passions, even in the face of the tiniest things, may seem almost unbelievable and extravagant to some, but I believe he is truthful. These spiritual experiences have always left me with a mix of envy and relief. People like Proust, who can feel so intensely, seem to live multiple lives at once, with the inevitable consequence of facing multiple deaths. The intuition of hidden mysteries and the constant internal struggle of such disparate states of mind must be both wonderful and demolishing.

On the other hand, Proust also represents great depth of reflection and feeling in the child he was. His passion for his mother, his ability to substitute and sublime his ordinary daily incidents with the vivid adventures of books and the psychological analysis of his neighbors, and his response to the colors, smells, sounds, and forms of his world are all remarkable. The exaltation that solitude provokes in him, and the power of his imagination to both create great joys and intensify his disappointments, are truly astonishing.

In conclusion, like with Pessoa, I am grateful for the fertile nature that can endow some of its creations with such delicate and immoderate spirits and the magnificent ability to express them in such beautiful texts as "Swann's Way". It may take some effort to get used to Proust, but it is well worth it, as inhabiting his world will truly fill one with joy, and he, the insuperable host, will receive us graciously.

“Así ocurre con nuestro pasado. Es trabajo perdido el querer evocarlo, e inútiles todos los afanes de nuestra inteligencia. Ocúltase fuera de sus dominios y de su alcance, en un objeto material (en la sensación que ese objeto material nos daría) que no sospechamos. Y del azar depende que nos encontremos con ese objeto antes de que nos llegue la muerte, o que no lo encontremos nunca.”

**"One cannot change, that is to say become a different person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one has ceased to be."**

Marcel Proust's "Swann's Way", the initial installment of "In Search of Lost Time", is a remarkable semi-autobiographical work. It delves deep into the themes of love, memory, and identity. Proust commences this volume with his childhood and concludes as a young adult upon his entry into French society. As an undergraduate, I had the privilege of reading all 7 volumes of what was then translated as "Remembrance of Things Past". I can vividly recall carrying those large grey volumes almost everywhere I went. This was because I felt an urgent need to utilize every spare moment to complete all 7 volumes. However, it is not merely the size of Proust's work that makes it a remarkable achievement. His beautiful prose about the narrator's journey through love, loss, and literature is both engaging and thought-provoking. I am now eagerly anticipating to see how long it will take me to once again traverse through all 7 volumes.

**"The reality that I had known no longer existed. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years."**

Proust's words here beautifully capture the ephemeral nature of our experiences and the places that hold significance for us. As time passes, the reality we once knew fades away, and the places we remember become mere fragments in our minds. The houses, roads, and avenues that were once so familiar are now as fleeting as the years themselves. This realization serves as a poignant reminder of the transience of life and the importance of cherishing the present moment.

Por la parte de Swann primarily deals with two themes. On one hand, there is memory and nostalgia, which are inseparable from each other. The memory of a certain image is simply a longing for a certain instant. And on the other hand, there is love, in this case a possessive, obsessive love that is a source of pain, anxiety, and jealousy, bringing very few moments of happiness, a "sacred evil," a poison for which, despite everything, no antidote is desired. ...he thought that when he was cured, what Odette might do would be indifferent to him, but, from within his sick state, he feared, in truth, like death such a cure, which would indeed have been the death of all that was in him at that moment.

The novel is full of all kinds of descriptions, extremely extensive and detailed, which, combined with the enormous paragraphs and the multitude of subordinate clauses, force one to maintain a state of total concentration during reading. It is a demanding novel, but the effort is undoubtedly worthwhile and once one gets used to the style (habit, the expert organizer), it is not as complicated as I had imagined (it is even fun).

But I think that, in addition to Proust's beautiful prose, what makes the reading a unique experience is that the author-narrator looks around and, observing the same world as us, the same more or less平淡 lives that we live and see around us, he captures everything from a different perspective. He is able to see, so to speak, with all five senses. An object, an image, a place, a smell, art, set his memory in motion and provoke amazing associations (perhaps the most easily understandable of which is that of the famous madeleine), serpentine and confused evocations that take us from one place to another, recre
ating the past and managing to transmit his memories to us in full, not only the objective data but also the sensations and feelings that are associated with them and making them our truth, our authentic past.

Just by reading a few pages, one realizes that in addition to being a great observer, Proust had a special sensitivity. He was able to reach that specific mental state that he talks about in the novel, necessary to seize a memory, to return to a past moment, but also to describe it with words. ...I paid attention to my mind. It was up to it to find the truth, but how? Grave uncertainty, every time the mind feels surpassed by itself, when it - the one that is looking - is at the same time the dark country in which it must search and in which all its baggage will be of no use to it. To search? Not only that: to create. It is faced with something that does not yet exist and that only it can realize and then bring into its light. To recreate a moment or a place, and to create literature, two things that are an abyss apart for most people and that for Proust perhaps were the same.

Finally, there is a moment when the narrator talks about his admired Bergotte and describes his sensations when reading one of his novels, and I think it is a description that can come quite close to what many of us will feel when reading Por la parte de Swann: In the first few days, like a musical tone that will buzz in our ears but that we still do not distinguish, what I was going to like so much about his style did not manifest itself to me. I could not put down the novel I was reading by him, but I thought I was interested only in the subject, as in those first moments of love when, believing ourselves attracted by a meeting, an entertainment, we go every day to see a woman. Later I noticed the uncommon expressions, almost archaic, that he liked to use at certain moments when an hidden wave of harmony, an interior prelude, elevated his style and at those moments he also began to talk about the "vain dream of life," the "inexhaustible torrent of beautiful appearances," the "sterile and delicious torment of understanding and love," the "moving effigies that forever ennoble the venerable and enchanting facade of the cathedrals" and expressed a whole new philosophy for me through wonderful images that seemed to be those that had awakened that song of harps that then rose and with whose accompaniment they offered something sublime.

This book is a wonderful treat for those who are passionate about literature. I'm not a die-hard literature enthusiast, so when I read it, I cursed several times and thought I would rate it 1* because of the unbearable frustration it caused.

Usually, difficult books are only hard to read at the beginning or sometimes a little at the end. But with Proust, it's like a stomachache that we long to get rid of for just 3 seconds, so that we can have the strength to resist the pain. But the Proust monster is still unyielding, so we have to give up in the end.

Proust is famous for his stream-of-consciousness writing style. It's like going to the market to buy vegetables and seeing an old lady chatting non-stop, then going to eat 100 kinds of random things, getting thirsty and going to drink water, having a stomachache and having to go home to deal with it, taking medicine, lying down and resting for a few hours, and then finally going back to the market to find the vegetables, only to find that the bag is lost somewhere. So we have to go back to each place we passed to find the bag and finally buy the vegetables. This makes reading often have to be repeated to find the clues and connect the beginning and end of the stories. The trouble is that you can open any page, and in fact, in 90% of the sentences in the book, you can find a long, cumbersome sentence in this stream-of-consciousness style. The hardest part is that you will fall into this stream-of-consciousness several times and feel completely lost, with nothing to do but show off your literary skills or show blind loyalty to the stream-of-consciousness writing style.

But...

All the hardships are only to lose 1* out of 5*, because we have to rate this book 5* for the most part. In fact, it's already very difficult to write a sentence like Proust. Continuously encountering comparisons that don't feel repetitive anywhere. On the contrary, when reading carefully, we find that the comparisons are too accurate, too vivid, and too evocative. That's from the perspective of the sentence. From the perspective of the story segments: they can be completely separated into small stories, such as the story of the Verdurin guests, resulting in a masterpiece comparable to a long story by Balzac or Bernhard. But all of these only create a strong impression. The core that I value the most, to raise Swann to a different level, is the slightly hazy and fleeting psychological descriptions, especially at the end of part 2. It makes me think of the moment when Humbert stands on the hill and listens to the sounds below, one of the most beautiful moments in the history of literature that I have ever read.

In addition, we can also mention Proust's very wide knowledge of art and history, the way of constructing a four-dimensional space is really detailed like weaving a dream in Inception, and the typical emotions that sprout from an artistic inspiration.

Regarding the sonata of Vinteuil, of course it's fictional, but we can also listen to this because it's the inspiration for Proust to write: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS13C.... Personally, if I were to choose, I would choose the violin concerto of Alban Berg.

Oh, regarding the translation, I think it's okay. I rarely encounter problems, although there are some, but the problem when reading this translation is bearable.

There wouldn't happen to be a Proust-Hater's Club around here, would there?

"Swann's Way" is truly awful. I continuously heard people fawning over it, so I made the effort to read it all the way through, just to be certain. Currently, I am in the process of reading the entire set. There are an abundance of books, each filled with numerous ideas that are chained together, both connected and disconnected, different, yet headed in a vaguely similar direction. It's like watching a freight train. No. It's more like watching a freight train wreck.

Every time I hear another nitwit gushing about little French cookies and the association of thoughts, a little Doomsday Clock of anger in my brain ticks forward. If you claim that your favorite part of a massive multiple-novel story is a tiny shred of half-insight that appears at approximately page fifty of the first volume, you are probably a poser. You have read just enough to discover the catch-phrase, just enough to fit yourself into the cheering crowd. You are cheering for the Emperor, and the Emperor has no clothes.

I find it truly baffling how some people can be so enamored with this work. It seems to me that they are more interested in appearing erudite than actually understanding and enjoying the substance of the story. I, on the other hand, am determined to plow through this entire set, not because I expect to have a change of heart, but simply to have a complete understanding of what all the fuss is about. Maybe, just maybe, I will discover something that I missed the first time around. But for now, I remain a skeptic.