Within a Budding Grove

Wie habe ich mich über die Figur des Ich-Erzählers, dem jungen Marcel, in diesem zweiten Band aufgeregt, mit ihm geschimpft, gelangweilt und dann doch wieder in seinen herrlichen Beschreibungen von Kleinigkeiten dahinschmelzen lassen. Die Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit verlangt wirklich einiges vom Leser ab. Handlungsarm, metaphernreich, geschwätzig, poetisch, in meinem Augen mit Lebensweisheiten versehen, die zwischen billigen Abreißkalendern und Philosophiebuch dahinschwänzeln mit ihren langen Schachtelsätzen. Da hab ich noch überlegt, wie ich dieses Lesevergnügen letztlich bewerten soll, da entlässt mich Marcel mit dem letzten Satz des Romans derart beseelt von dem Augenblick, da er nach der Sommerfrische am Meer wieder nach Paris zurückgekehrt ist und am Morgen seine Zugehfrau F. ins Zimmer tritt, dass ich nur eine gute Bewertung abgeben kann:

„Und während Francoise die Nadeln von den Fensterriegeln entfernte, die Stoffe abnahm, die Vorhänge aufzog, gleißte der Sommertag, den sie enthüllte, so tot, so zeitlos wie eine prunkvoll konservierte, jahrtausendealte Mumie, die unsere alte Dienerin vorsichtig aus ihren Leinenbinden schälte, bevor sie sie, in ihrem goldenen Gewande einbalsamiert, vor mir aufstrahlen ließ.“

Köstlich. Man könnte meinen, dass Marcels Liebesleben, welches über den ganzen Band hinweg so unglücklich verlief, in der Mumie endlich seine Erfüllung erhält. Home, sweet home. Endlich ist das stockkonservative Muttersöhnchen, welches jegliche Veränderungen partout ablehnt (und sei es die neumodische Erfindung eines britischen Sandwiches), wieder zu Hause. Wenn ich etwas zu kritisieren habe, dann ist es Marcel selbst, der in meinem Augen die zwiespältigste Figur des Romans ist, denn einerseits sind seine Menschenstudien und soziologischen Betrachtungen messerscharf und treffend und dann auch wieder derart weltfremd und verallgemeinernd, dass ich mir gewünscht hätte, der Ich-Erzähler würde auch mal Zweifel an seinem eigenen Handeln und Sagen bekommen. Aber diese Wolke des Snobismus, der Hang zur Arroganz, wenn auch zur eher stillen Überheblichkeit eines Introvertierten umweht ihn ständig. Und wenn der blaße Jüngling, noch nie in festen Händen, seitenweise Abhandlungen über die Liebe schreibt, kommt er mir vor wie ein eingebildeter Ahnungsloser. Der Autor zieht seine Figur natürlich nicht ins Satirische, er ist ja selbst die Hauptperson. Vielmehr lästert er eloquent über die Menschen in den Salons der Belle Epoque und das durchaus amüsant und treffend.

Ach ja, das war Band 2. Aber brauche ich wirklich sieben Bände davon? Auf jeden Fall brauche ich erstmal eine Proustpause, denn so wunderschön und zuckersüß seine Sätze sind: man kann ja nicht jeden Tag Sahnetorte essen. Oder Madeleines in den Tee tunken.

Proust structures a simple and lifelike plot in his veiled autobiography of his adolescent impressions and perceptions of love. Even though the plot's events, to an extent, are foreseeable and their intensity softened, Proust's narrative, on the other hand, is depicted in a wide array of colors, most often hazy, with various shapes and silhouettes, oftentimes distorted. He recollects his youthful encounters and subsequent reflections through a medium of fluctuating emotions and perplexed feelings. At times it feels like the story is all over the place but resembles one's unhampered thought process of raw impressions of experiences.

Within a Budding Grove: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 2 embraces the style of impressionistic depictions substantially more than in the previous volume. Proust shows us how the state of our internal feelings encountered by the objects of our attention, from different angles, often distorted by light, changes our impression of the reality of that same object or event through time. I will end with a wonderful example of Proust's portrayal of an experience after meeting a girl he liked: "But so far as the pleasure was concerned, I was naturally not conscious of it until some time later, when, back at the hotel, and in my room alone, I had become myself again. Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative, which we develop later, when we are back at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people."

Mein Lieblingsroman der Serie. Gelesen in Ahlbeck, Usedom.

خلصت الجزء الثاني من سباعية بحثا عن الزمن المفقود لمارسيل بروست، واللي كان عنوانها: في ظلال ربيع الفتيات:

واقدر أعيد بوصفي لها انها معجزة، معجزة سردية حقيقية الواحد مش مستوعب كتابتها من اكتر من قرن من ��لزمان، القدرة دي على التدفق في التعبير ملهاش وصف في مدى جودتها وعظمتها، وبردو لازم اعترف بعجزي اني اقرأ الرواية دي دفعة واحدة، عقلي مش هيستوعب الحلاوة دي من غير ما افصل، وهي كثيرة مرة واحدة على عقل اي حد.

Jedna minijaturna i nimalo autofikcionalna ispovest napisana u nadi da će za mene postojati razumevanja.

Ja, rab književni, ovim čitanjem probijam već dva probijena roka, a još najmanje dva ugrožavam. Prihvatanje prevelike odgovornosti je neodgovorno i, uprkos tome, kao kolekcionar obaveza, nastavljam sa lošom praksom. Istina, iako mnogo toga stižem i iako se izvlačim na prkos i snagu volje, sve me više okolnosti stižu, što treba sprečiti. No šta je tu je, Prust nema nikakve veze s tim. Uzrok je u meni i ošamućujućoj svakodnevici. Ipak, čak i da su se najcrnji scenariji obistinili, čak i da su svi dogovori prekšeni, a planovi preinačeni, čitanje Prusta biće uvek praznik za dušu, jedna od onih zaista retkih privilegija koje nepogrešivo brane posebnost književnosti kao jedinstvenog oblika organizovanja ljudskog iskustva.

"Vreme kojim svaki dan raspolažemo rastegljivo je; strasti koje osećamo rastežu ga, one koje smo probudili u drugima skučavaju ga, a navika ga ispunjava." (181)

Greh je Prusta čitati brzinski. Potrebna je izuzetna posvećenost, uranjanje i učestvovanje. Trajanje u traganju. A kad se te okolnosti poklope, dolazi samo raskoš. Raskoš promena, preliva, detalja, humora, ironije, melanholije, prolaznosti i stalne, božanstvene promenljivosti. 'U seni devojaka cvetova' pejzaž je pastelnih boja, pun igara svetlosti, iznenađenja pogleda i ljubavi prema mnoštvu, gde su čak i preteranosti raspamećujuće, poput pihtijastog vazduha i ružičaste grane poput žila kakva se viđa u unutrašnjosti oniksa (363).

Snobovi mogu biti izuzetno zabavni. Blok, Sen-Lu i Šarlis su vrlo zabavni.

Figure umetnika vrlo važne: Bergot kao Pisac i Elstir kao Slikar.

I, naravno, ljubavi: Žilberta (ćerka Odete i Svana) i nezamenjiva Albertina, jedna od 'devojaka cvetova', promenjiva u svakom svom (ne)pojavljivanju, čiji se ten poredi sa jajetom štiglica (488).

Znatiželjni nestrpljivci željni zanimljivosti mogu odmah skoknuti na stranicu 245 i videti kako se u romanu pojavljuje i reč Srpkinja i to u kontekstu takozvane 'ljudske ihtiologije'.

Suma summarum: smislodavna magija izmicanja.
Književnost.

The only book I've ever abandoned after the first sentence.

And what a sentence! But I'll come back to that. Let me first hasten to defend myself, to present my credentials, because I realise that Proust is held in such high esteem as to be almost beyond criticism – not in the real world of course, that would be ridiculous, but on Goodreads certainly. Of the 29 Goodreads friends who have rated this, 25 give it five stars, three give it four stars – one (the only French reader) gives it three. That is an astonishingly high proportion of full marks.

So my apologies to all of you. I plead only the right to a subjective opinion, one that has not been arrived at trivially. My history with Proust is as follows. I read Swann's Way very slowly over a period of several weeks, a reading experience memorable mainly for the fact that my girlfriend kept waking me up because I had dozed off halfway through a sentence. (Reading it in bed was probably a mistake.) There was a lot I liked about it, but I admit I didn't quite grasp what all the fuss was about. I thought it insightful in parts, trite in others. It was also plotless and self-indulgent, but those things don't bother me on their own.

The real problem was the prose style.

For someone revered as a stylist, Proust to me seemed irritating at best, at worst barely readable. I am prepared to accept that this is my problem. In my notebook from that year I divided the page into two columns headed ‘Awesomeness’ and ‘Awkwardness’ to try and clarify in my mind the different reactions I was getting to his sentences. But I gradually got fixated on the second category. Phrases like

I was well aware that I had placed myself in a position than which none could be counted upon to involve me in graver consequences at my parents' hands

strike me as being not just recondite, but fundamentally unsound – in English, and I stress that caveat because I'm aware that there may be a translation issue going on. This kind of construction plays better in French, and although I do read French, I happened to read Proust in translation just because I have a Folio Society set of the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright version. If you're going to tell me that this all flows more prettily in the original, I'm prepared to believe you. I think.

After I finished Swann's Way, my dubious reaction to it niggled at me. Surely I was missing something? As a rule I'm not someone who likes to follow popular opinion, but when so many people I respect seem to love this writer, maybe I have somehow failed to spot his essential charm…? So one day, several months later, I got the second volume down, poured myself a drink, sat in the garden and started reading. It opens:

My mother, when it was a question of our having M. de Norpois to dinner for the first time, having expressed her regret that Professor Cottard was away from home and that she herself had quite ceased to see anything of Swann, since either of these might have helped to entertain the ex-Ambassador, my father replied that so eminent a guest, so distinguished a man of science as Cottard could never be out of place at a dinner-table, but that Swann, with his ostentation, his habit of crying aloud from the house-tops the name of everyone he knew, however slightly, was a vulgar show-off whom the Marquis de Norpois would be sure to dismiss as – to use his own epithet – a ‘pestilent’ fellow.

I calmly closed the book again, got up, went inside and put it back on the shelf, where it has remained. (I went back and finished my drink.)

I love the audacity of this sentence. That is the only thing I love about it, though. I feel that every native speaker who reads it must have the same jarring sense of dislocation when they reach the words ‘my father’, because it's natural when reading it to assume that ‘My mother’ is the subject of the sentence, albeit immediately diverted by two long subordinate clauses. But eventually (on the third scan, in my case) it dawns that the only verb governed by ‘my mother’ is ‘having expressed’, and that the main clause hasn't even started until you get to his father. So what Proust has done here is to postpone the grammatical subject of his sentence until fifty-four words in. For the opening sentence of a novel! (And it introduces five separate characters!)

This is an unusual construction, to say the least. X having done Y, A did B is unremarkable; but introducing a subordinate clause set off by commas immediately after X leaves you hanging on, open-mouthed, for a finitive verb, and hence obscures the meaning. I understand that there are people who adore this style of writing and find it charming or delicate. I don't though, I find it deeply unfriendly. More than that, I find it somehow…creepy.

This is not because of the opacity itself. Because I'm a journalist, and because I like thinking about the mechanics of sentence structure, some friends have accused me of being overly harsh on writers who do not go for clarity and efficiency at all times. I do respect those qualities, but I deny the charge. I love complicated baroque prose styles, and there are plenty of writers who use Proustian effects in ways that move and excite me – Henry James, Thomas Pynchon, oh there's dozens really. It's really just Proust himself that leaves me cold. It's something to do with the intricate formal correctness of it – as though he's saying, ‘Claim to be confused by this if you must; I can assure you it adheres to all the rules.’ There is an over-earnest quality, a sickly intricacy, to his sentences. They seem to be made all of elbows.

The way he expresses himself is somehow true to the letter of language, without being true to its spirit. (At least in translation.)

So that's my experience of him. I'm sorry, but I am just constitutionally unable to get past the extreme ponderousness of expression to enjoy his flashes of insight. That's not to say that I've given up on Marcel, and when I have some more time I hope to try him again in French. But for now at least…he's staying on the shelf.

This second volume within Proust's panorama of self and senses shifts from the inner salons to the outer sea side alcoves and sun drenched hotel lobbies. There is an energy and vitality to this second book which is projected through even more vivid character portraits and through Proust's evocative expression of his infatuations and obsessions.

There's a greater sense of space, of terrain and the broader environment. For me this seemed to allow the often claustrophobia inducing long-winding-inner streams-of-thought to breath.

Up until completing the first 100 pages of this second volume constant enjoyment of Proust's writing style had eluded me. Even after completing Swann's Way, while I admired Proust's talent, commitment and effort, I still didn't feel a connection. I felt a great sense of discovery and a growth as a reader when it finally clicked; when I discovered reading in short staccato bursts unlocked the rhythm and stream of thought.

These Proust books invoke a kind of sensory delirium in me; a giddy euphoria in me as if I'm spinning around and attempting to capture the fleeting images and sounds as they hurtle around.

Sooo glad I pushed on through and found the heartbeat of this writing style. This book alone justifies the fandom Proust incites. Buzzed to read on and into the remaining books.

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