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.

کیست که نداند من بیچاره‌ی توام...

Increíble, sin palabras. Y, a la vez, tan complejo y tan rico que no me siento preparado -como ya me pasó con el primer tomo- para plasmar ni que sea un comentario que valga un poco la pena, cosa que de momento sólo me ha pasado con este autor. Por lo demás, resulta cierto que leer a Proust no es tarea fácil. Sus oraciones subordinadas larguísimas, con una riqueza de léxico impresionante, así como sus profundas digresiones constantes, en ocasiones de varias páginas, exigen una atención máxima al lector, que debe encontrar su propio ritmo y el momento más propicio para disfrutar de la novela. No obstante, cuando esto sucede el lector consume su tiempo de la mano de Marcel Proust y su protagonista -parcialmente autobiográfico-, que en esta ocasión ve pasar su adolescencia entre París y Balbec, con sus correspondientes amoríos -o, mejor dicho, intentos de ello- y sus relaciones mundanas con los más variopintos personajes de la aristocracia y la burguesía francesa de principios del siglo pasado. La extraordinaria sensibilidad del personaje para describir absolutamente todo cuanto le rodea y reflexionar sobre ello (por citar un solo ejemplo, la magistral descripción del grupo de muchachas, como un ente conjunto pero a la vez también con sus rasgos individuales que, no obstante, inicialmente le confunden) choca con su indecisión a la hora de tomar cualquier decisión en la práctica.

En fin, que el usuario y compañero Guille ya ha dicho mucho más de lo que yo podría apuntar, así que para una reseña en condiciones aconsejo encarecidamente acudir a su excelente comentario.

If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower ~~~  Marcel Proust



Volume II of Marcel Proust’s, In Search of Lost Time, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is a joy to read. n   In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flowern is a masterfully engaging, witty and involving read. Proust is brilliant.

As n   In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flowern begins, we meet the Marquis de Norpois, a diplomat and colleague of Marcel's father. He convinces the Marcel's father that it would be good for our hero to go to the theatre and see Berma in a production of Racine's Phedre. He also assures Marcel's father that a career in letters would not be bad a bad thing for young Marcel to pursue; Marquis de Norpois saves young Marcel from the diplomatic future his father envisioned for him. Soon young Marcel introduces us into his world of dukes, duchesses and barons, and most importantly, young girls. Marcel is now an adolescent, and he experiences his first taste of the obsessive loves that will soon engulf him throughout his life.



Once more it is love that is at the center of Proust's masterpiece, specifically adolescent love. Marcel has fallen in love with Gilberte Swann, the lovely daughter of Swann and Odette, who is now Madame Swann. Marcel tries to get an invitation to the Swann’s home through the good graces of M. de Norpois, but Norpois refuses to do what would have given him so little trouble, and me so much joy. Eventually our young protagonist is invited to Gilberte's home, and becomes an intimate of the Swanns. He loves Gilberte intensely, but the more he loves her, the less interested she is. Suddenly, he end the relationship, and refuses to see Gilberte anymore, although he still visits with Mme. Swann. Marcel suffers terribly from the ending this, his first love.

Marcel's family decides that it would be good for his health if he were to make a trip to the seaside town of Balbec; this helps him to most past his first hearbreak. The sensitive Marcel, is at first disoriented by the strangeness of his hotel room and by the new people he encounters, but he quickly recovers, and enjoys a summer idyll on the beach, ensconced in the comforts of the Grand Hotel. He is accompanied by his grandmother; she is an old-fashioned and practical lady, who believes in the benefits of salt breezes and fresh air. Here, they encounter the Marquise de Villeparisis, an old friend of his grandmother's, who drives them about the countryside in her carriage and is Marcel's first close encounter with an aristocrat.



It is here that Marcel becomes friends with another member of the aristocracy, Robert de Saint-Loup, a soldier and relative of the Guermantes ~~ Saint-Loup is one of my favorite characters in In Search of Lost Time. Robert, despite his upbringing, is a leftist who reads extensively, and admires Marcel for his intellect. He also has his own young love troubles with Rachel, a struggling young actress and former prostitute ~~ there are many thoughout the pages of In Search of Lost Time. Marcel calls her Rachel quand du seigneur ~~ achel when from the lord ~~ because he saw her once in a brothel and she reminded him of the character of Rachel in an opera. Marcel remarks could have had her for twenty francs, while Saint-Loup is now expending many times that amount to keep her. Their relationship mirrors that of Swann and Odette in Swann in Love ~~ Saint-Loup is hopelessly in love despite their difference in social class, while Rachel is constantly unfaithful to him.

The good looks, glamour, the social ease, the light cultural references and ability to walk into any restaurant in Paris. Robert de Saint-Loup has everything you need to get by in Proust's world.

It is here, while mingling with this aristocratic group, Marcel has his first encounter with the strangely-behaved Baron de Charlus ~~ a paragon of charm and politeness and insolence and rudeness. The Baron will take an increasingly larger role as the tale progresses. He is perhaps the most bizarre and interesting of all Proust’s aristocratic creations. I have much to say about Charlus and Proust himself, but all in good time.

Saint-Loup takes Marcel to marvelous dinners at a restaurant called Rivebelle, where they drink and eat, and where Marcel dreams of possessing the women he sees there. One evening at Rivebelle, they encounter the artist Elstir, who appeared in Swann's Way as the young painter known as Biche, a frequent visitor to the salon of the Verdurin's. He has now gained considerably in fame. Saint-Loup and Marcel write him a letter from their table, and he invites them to visit him at his studio. Such is the power of the aristocracy.



The visit is postponed, however, because Marcel has again fallen in love. This time it is not one girl ~~a little band of five or six attractive girls who go about together, and who Marcel tries to connect with, to no effect. He finally makes good on his visit to Elstir and finds, to his surprise, that Elstir knows the little band, and particularly their leader, Albertine Simonet. Marcel ~~ after an introduction from Elstir and several false starts ~~ finally gets to know the little band and becomes a member ~~ think Laurie in Little Women. He is torn between Andree and Albertine as to which girl he loves the best. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower concludes with Marcel attempting to kiss Albertine while she is alone in a room at his hotel, and she ... ~~ I'm not going to tell you ...

Love is the major theme of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower ~~ but but so too the idea that how we imagine something before we come to know it is often more beautiful or brilliant than its reality. Once we experience the reality, we are sadly disappointed.

n   In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flowern concludes with the end of the summer season. The weather becomes stormy and cold. The other guests have left. Soon, Marcel and his grandmother pack up their things and head back to Paris ~~ where ...

For a while I cherished, but lately let go of, Henry James’ famous line on Proust’s style — reading Swann’s Way, the only volume he lived to see, he felt “inconceivable boredom associated with the most extreme ecstasy which it is possible to imagine” — because I realized that even if James proposed a firm binary, a distinct alternation (he probably did not, given “associated”), I found that between encounters with Proust my own ecstasy and boredom have changed places, to say nothing of how they might mix and migrate in further reading, or in future re-reading. Returning to the copies of Swann’s Way and Within a Budding Grove that I read in college, I noticed that, by his markings and notes, and by what memory I have of him, my twenty-year-old self was very engaged by “love” — the exhaustive intensity of analysis devoted to Swann’s jealousy, to Gilberte in the Champs-Elysées, to the narrator’s first fixation on Albertine — and interested not at all in “art” — the architectural and theatric reveries, and the personal aesthetics the narrator patiently construes from Odette’s wardrobe and interiors, from the style of Bergotte’s novels, from Elstir’s painting and conversation. That younger reader is much like Proust’s narrator, who at Balbec would rather watch for Albertine’s promenade than take up an invitation to Elstir’s studio:

Meanwhile my grandmother, because I now showed a keen interest in golf and tennis and was letting slip an opportunity of seeing at work and hearing talk of an artist whom she knew to be one of the greatest of his time, evinced for me a scorn which seemed to me to be based on somewhat narrow views. I had guessed long ago in the Champs-Elysées, and had verified since, that when we are in love with a woman we simply project on to her a state of our own soul; that consequently the important thing is not the worth of the woman but the profundity of the state; and that the emotions which a perfectly ordinary girl arouses in us can enable us to bring to the surface of our consciousness some of the innermost parts of our being, more personal, more remote, more quintessential than any that might be evoked by the pleasure that we derive from the conversation of a great man or even from the admiring contemplation of his work.

This time around I had little patience for synthetic sentiment, for the crushes cultivated and self-applied as stimulants. I smiled with relief when his passion for Gilberte began to wind down — “The last time I came to see Gilberte, it was raining” — knowing that we would soon be back in her mother’s drawing room, surrounded by flowers, contemplating the transformations and continuities of that fascinating woman’s life during a tea-time hour when the autumn mist and setting light are “prolonged, transposed in the flaming palette” of chrysanthemums of enormous size and a variety of colors.

There was another reason, apart from those given already, for the flowers having more than a merely ornamental significance in Mme. Swann's drawing-room, and this reason pertained not to the period but, in some degree, to the life that Odette had formerly led. A great courtesan, such as she had been, lives largely for her lovers, that is to say at home, which means that she comes in time to live for her home. The things that one sees in the house of a "respectable" woman, things which may of course appear to her also to be of importance, are those which are in any event of the utmost importance to the courtesan. The culminating point of her day is not the moment in which she dresses herself for society, but that in which she undresses herself for a man. She must be as elegant in her dressing gown, in her night-dress, as in her outdoor attire. Other women display their jewels, but she lives in the intimacy of her pearls. This kind of existence imposes on her the obligation, and ends by giving her a taste, for a luxury which is secret, that is to say which comes near to being disinterested.

I think I’ll start The Guermantes Way this year, but not before reading something on Dreyfus. Du Bois biographer Lewis has a highly praised book on the affair.

Oh, adolescence. Is there any period of time more frustrating, conflicting and downright disappointing than that too-long span of gawky limbs and endless opportunities for embarrassment? When one's body is alien territory, when one is faced with an onslaught of wholly unfamiliar impulses, when the head and the heart and all of the hormones are battling for control over a vessel that just wants things to make the kind of black-and-white sense they did in the blissfully naive days that are just out of arm's reach but already rapidly fading memories, constantly pushed farther and farther away by the systematic remapping of a formerly recognizable world.

Both Proust's narrator -- still imbued with vestiges of an innocence that can only take root in a childhood shaped by terminal sensitivity -- and his vulnerable heart stumble cautiously and cluelessly beyond youth's idyllic safety zone into the uncharted realm of life after puberty: He is, indeed, alone in the umbra cast by blossoming young girls who have gained his affections but will not share the warmth of their vernal lights with him. One of Proust's most obvious successes with this volume is the familiar poignancy he gives to the fumbling initial efforts of gaining another young heart's favor because, really, did any of us understand the objects of our blindly obsessive desires at that age? Reading this book was like going through all those terrible milestones all over again, only with each misstep beautifully rendered and every confused failure examined with an enviably erudite melancholy that still captures the fatalistic immediacy of all those awful lessons' first cuts.

From the beginning, his understanding that the world he had not long ago regarded with a child's certainty was now turned on its head was apparent, as the feverishly anticipated chance to see his favorite actress results in the kind of shattering disappointment specially reserved for those times when an impossibly idealized dream becomes a vapid reality. This is only the first in a series of crushing blows, though: The narrator's dreams of literary greatness are effectively dismantled by his father's colleague; a beloved writer has little in common with the literary persona he has come to adore; his first taste of love sours with his beloved's cooling interest and cruel neglect; the church at Balbec simply does not live up to his expectations.

But the necessary dethroning of old favorites and the tarnishing of long-upheld ideals make way for the man the narrator is to become, just as childhood's magic sooner or later drains from all those things that once so enthralled our younger selves. It is imperative that the narrator grow tired of such things so he can make new discoveries: His happiness is no longer derived solely from the sensory delights of a delicious feast, the beauty of nature, his mother's love, the wonder of the arts -- though the echoes of these things do reach the core of his soul to move him with their familiar stirrings of joy when they prove to be at their most resplendent moments. With age comes discrimination: As one can no longer live in a constant state of marvel distracting him from the myriad things to be discovered both within and without him, he also must learn what is truly worth his awed regard.

Like all teenagers, the narrator gradually distances himself from his family, focusing on the friendships and infatuations that define life on the brink of adulthood. And, like every teenager I ever knew, some of those friendships are based on convenience rather than a mutual affinity for each other's company. The deepening bond between the narrator and Robert serves as a beautiful foil for the narrator's desperate attempts to tally the redeeming qualities within Bloch, a back-home chum whose coarse manner and general inability to recognize his own countless flaws make his presence difficult to bear even at a reader's safe distance. The two dueling personalities embody the narrator's own wavering balance between youthful indiscretion and the discrimination of experience, highlighting the decay of the former as it becomes unreasonable to cling to such childishness to any longer. Just as not every girl the narrator fancies will return his interest, he no longer has to subscribe to the youthful notion that he ought to be friends with everyone.

Proust's writing is the real star of the show here, with a sumptuous language that just drips poetry from each page. His insights prove time and again that human nature is constant across the ages, even though people themselves are in constant states of adapting to both interior and exterior forces. What I found the most remarkable, though, was the way he takes the tired tradition of similes to positively novel heights by playing two almost diametrically opposing elements against each other to fully express the emotional resonance of a seemingly insignificant moment: A household cook's reverence for her cuisine is likened to Michelangelo's dedication to his art; the fading hope of restoring a broken relationship is akin to the panicked desperation of a wounded man who has drunk his last vial of morphine; "[j]ust as the priests with the broadest knowledge of the heart are those who can best forgive the sins they themselves never commit, so the genius with the broadest acquaintance with the mind can best understand ideas most foreign to those that fill his own works." They take what could be bloated ravings exaggerated to the point of nonsense and translate them into a personal relevance that paints a more accurately vivid representation of a personality than bland narration ever could.

This is people-watching at its finest, a tour of humanity with an unusually tender soul leading the way through his own emergence into adulthood and his discovery of the world around him.