An Open Letter to Marcel Proust:

Sir, thank you for having written what must be known only as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century; a work of genius.

Unfortunately, this letter cannot be a letter of exaltation, but a rather a letter of apology. You deserve all the adulation which you have received these past 100 years since the first volume of your novel was published. And the Proust group on goodreads is testimony to the faith which you have properly placed in your readers’ abilities to not settle for a simple book; you had the faith to believe in what you were to write and to believe in your book finding readers who could luxuriate in what can only be called a masterful work.

But for me, I can only apologize. Our minds would seem to work upon different currents. My literary experience has me ensconced in what was written after you wrote, in those works of fiction written by authors who must have learned an enormous amount of what you taught that fiction could be, what it could do. It is a matter of finding myself more at home in a postmodern aesthetic than a modern aesthetic.

If I dare oversimplify the contention over modernism, I have to place myself more in the camp with James Joyce than with yourself. But that is merely a matter of my preference for one genius over another, just as one may prefer Plato over Aristotle or Kant over Hegel or Heidegger over Wittgenstein. Whichever side one finds oneself, one can only believe that one is witnessing the heights to which thought can aspire. I am entirely incapable of disparaging your novel or your prose or your aesthetic, but only find myself traveling down other roads of thought and experience.

In the back of my mind I think it may be only a matter of language. I have a small suspicion that your thought, your writing, is at home only in the French language, and despite the efforts of three generations of the Englishing of your novel, the English language itself may not be a comfortable abode for your experience. Lacking masculine and feminine nouns and pronouns, perhaps your dependent clauses can only land as a clunk in English, so poorly adapted for this kind of subordination of one thought to another. I don’t know my French well enough to be certain of any such hypothesis, but it only leaves me wondering.

I have heard complaints posited against your narrator Marcel, that he is self-absorbed. I find such a judgement about Marcel to be entirely out of order. Much more than obsessing about himself, your narrator is highly attuned to the impressions which other human beings make upon him and the impressions he makes upon other human beings, and this entire complex of our affect and of our effect upon others results in a profound attunement to the moral shape of what it’s like to be a human being. Marcel does not believe that he exists sufficient unto himself, but experiences himself at all times enmeshed with the experiences and recognitions of other people, people upon whom he depends for his very being. Marcel finds his being at all times in and with others. Perhaps the fiction we need today is a fiction which would translate Marcel’s attunement to others into a twenty-first century character; that there is some gap between Marcel’s world and our own, that the gap is too large for us to translate Marcel’s world and his response to it into our own contemporary world of experience. But perhaps rather it is precisely this gap which is what fascinates so much in reading your novel; that it requires an imaginative and engaged reading by which one would find oneself as a reader dislocated into a strange world, and gaining from that distance a new insight into how we can shape ourselves as moral beings within our own world. And indeed, the further I read into your novel the more convinced I am that the very same difference in aesthetic preferences between us is at the very same time what links those postmodern novels I love so much with your very modernist novel, one of the three pinnacles of modernist noveling. Perhaps the aesthetic difference between the modernist and the postmodernist novel is nothing about this or that characteristic, but is reflective merely of the different shape we find ourselves in living under different conditions and different pressures, different traumas. Were you writing and reading today, would you find yourself attracted to a fiction like that of Joseph McElroy's? I do feel you would. And if I could recommend one book to you from my postmodernist library, it would indeed be his Women and Men; therein I suspect you would find a kindred thinker, a questioning about how to bring ourselves to a respect of the gap between us as individuals, as ones and simultaneously as twos.

I do not know at this time whether I will maintain my intended schedule to read your entire novel in 2013. I may luxuriate a bit and extend my reading into next year. But I am convinced that, despite our differences, I will not add to those statistics found here on goodreads whereby your first volume has received over 12,000 ratings while this second volume already has a mere one fifth of that number. I will not allow myself to be counted among those who have abandoned your work.

I thank you for your time in reading this, and I do look forward to returning to your novel in the not too distant future.

Sincerely,
Nathan “N.R.” Gaddis

Κατάφερε και με μάγεψε περισσότερο από τον πρώτο Τόμο και ακόμα δεν μπορώ να καταλάβω πώς το έκανε αυτό.

ΕΚΠΛΗΚΤΙΚΟΣ.

“À Sombra das Raparigas em Flor” é o segundo volume de “Em Busca do Tempo Perdido” de Marcel Proust. Se no primeiro volume tinha sentido o êxtase e o deleite, posso dizer que neste segundo volume o êxtase elevou-se ainda mais durante toda a primeira parte, para depois declinar durante toda a segunda parte. Ou seja, como um todo, continua sendo muito bom, embora menos equilibrado que o primeiro.

Todo o tomo se concentra na descoberta, adolescente, do amor pelo sexo oposto, dedicando-se Proust a dissecar o ruminar que nos assombra em cada nova relação que se enceta. Na primeira parte temos a primeira relação com Gilberte, filha de Swann e Odette, e na segunda parte surge Albertine.

A primeira parte surge com maior intensidade, provavelmente por se tratar da descrição da primeira verdadeira paixão do narrador/Proust, o que lhe permite uma verdadeira escalpelização das emoções, sentimentos e ideias. É delicioso ver Proust a trabalhar as ideias vertidas em texto no sentido de nos dar a entender o que se sente em cada momento, o que cada esgar ou palavra é capaz de estimular dentro de nós, como o nosso cérebro equaciona, se melindra e esconde, ou avança destemidamente para raciocínios não-lógicos, carregados de emoção, toldados pela paixão. Neste sentido toda a primeira parte apresenta um trabalho de enorme profundidade na desconstrução da psicologia humana, do estudo dos processos da consciência, cognição e experiência humanas.

Já na segunda parte entra-se num registo mais leve, e também mais lento, com o narrador a partir para uma estância balnear (Balbec), deixando para trás Gilberte, para desse novo cenário ver surgir o seu segundo amor, Albertine. Nesta segunda parte vão entrar alguns novos personagens, nomeadamente o pintor Elstir que me decepcionou um pouco. Esperava mais da relação, que as descrições do espaço assumissem um patamar mais visual, mas isso não acontece. Talvez porque estamos aqui demasiado focados sobre as raparigas de Balbec, quem verdadeiramente atrai o jovem. Em termos visuais, o primeiro volume consegue ter partes mais ricas que aquelas que aqui vão decorrer a partir das conversas sobre várias telas.

E agora, resta-me avançar para o terceiro volume.

Ler com imagens e citações: http://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/2...

Not sure if it's because I got used to Proust's writing by now or it's his own writing that further morphed with the second volume, but I loved it even more than the first volume. A beautiful masterpiece.

As I was reading it, I noticed a few parallels/mirrors between Vol.1 and Vol.2:
Gilberte (Vol.1.2 & Vol 2.1) - Albertine (Vol 2.2)
Swann/Odette - Saint-Loup/Rachel
Bergotte (writer) - Elstir (painter)
... only to later see this mirroring effect between the first two volumes explained by Proust/narrator:
If in this craze for amusement Albertine might be said to echo something of the old original Gilberte, that is because a certain similarity exists, although the type evolves, among all the women we successively love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, well fitted, that is to say, to gratify our senses and to wring our hearts. They are, these women, a product of our temperament, an image, an inverted projection, a negative of our sensibility. So that a novelist might, in relating the life of his hero, describe his successive love affairs in almost exactly similar terms, and thereby give the impression not that he was repeating himself but that he was creating, since an artificial novelty is never so effective as a repetition that manages to suggest a new truth. pp. 514-5

(More thoughts with some quotes coming in the future, I hope.)

"Albertine Simonet'nin ne demek olduğunu bilmiyordum. Tabii ki o da bir gün benin için ne demek olacağını bilmiyordu."

Proust'la yolculuğum devam ediyor...

"Bu kadın, çocukluğumdan beri kafamda yazılı olan ve tipi rolüne aykırı olmamak kaydıyla, her hoş genç kızds rol alma isteğini gördüğüm aşk komedisinde bana replik verecek olan kadındı."

[UPDATED]
What I loved about this book was the evocation of adolescence. The narrator travels a bit in this book - to Balbec (a mélange of several Norman/Breton towns) with its beautiful old Gothic church (of which literally thousands litter the landscape in France - particularly in Brittany) and its seaside resort (roughly modelled after Cabourg as well as Trouville/Deauville in Normandy). But first, we see the life of Swann and Odette through his eyes. The reader needs to forgive Proust for re-inventing this story (Swann and Odette having been broken up definitively at the end of Chez Swann) and just enjoy the salon of Odette and her group of followers including the out-matched and ultimately doomed Bergotte (forever inferior to the Balzacs, Flauberts, Hugos, Dumas, and Stendahls who proceeded him). The pastiche of the ridiculously pretentious M. de Norpois was also amusing. But the best part of the book, the second half, breathes life into the youth of the narrator and introduces Albertine who will play a central role in the cycle La Recherche. The prose is languid and evocative as the title invokes in French. Once again, I feel that the original translation "In a budding grove", does not due justice to the Prussian title. "L'ombre" means shadow but in this context does seem to talk of a field with trees in flower around it (it makes me think of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe but with a much younger set of picnickers), "jeunes filles" means young girls fo course, but "en fleurs" evokes more of the fertility and beauty of the innocence of youth. English does not really have a nuance to it to give the same feeling to the reader. I would be at a loss to give a perfect translation here but "Budding Grove" excludes the presence of the young girls and the feelings on excitement and longing that their presence under the flowering trees brings out in the young Marcel as narrator.

The central action here which impacts the rest of La Recherche is the meeting of the narrator with Albertine. She is a fascinating character and is described with excruciating detail as the narrator successfully insinuates himself into the "petite bande" of Albertine, Rosemonde, Gisèle, and André whom he sees raising havoc on the boardwalk in front of his hotel. We are also introduced to the narrator's best friend, Robert de Saint-Loup, who will have an important role to play further on.

The character of Elstir and his discourses to Marcel about art are also invaluable and beautiful, but the central action is Marcel falling in love with Albertine. Rarely has an author captured the complex movements of an adolescent heart falling deeply in love for the first time as well as Proust does here. The text is very slow and extremely descriptive which puts off many of the uninitiated, but if you take the time to appreciate it, it is like walking through Musée d'Orsay and taking your time to look at every painting from Manet, Monet, Courbet, etc with eyes wide open from wonder and amazement.

Some of the moments that I most enjoyed:
- Albertine's beauty spot which moves around her face each time the narrator sees her
- Elstir's studio and his interesting and wonderful wife
- The night at Rivebelle with Saint Loup when the narrator gets drunk - he description of inebriation is accurate to a "t"

Finished Jan. 10, 2016; reread and finished Jan. 15, 2020

At least for me, Proust (it seems) has to be read slowly to be digested. So, having finished this in January, I felt that I now had to re-read it in its entirety before going on to vol. III.

There was something Cartesian, as I noted, in Swann's Way -- this, on the other hand, is the Impressionist volume -- most perfectly expressed by the works of Elstir and by the beach at Balbec.

Perhaps this has something to do with maturing of 'Marcel'.

Anyway, reread in June 2016. This is my third reading of the volume -- the first having been 40 years ago -- and so I probably have as good a grasp of it now as I have of Swann's way, which I have also now read on numerous occasions.

4 and 1/2 stars

This volume started off great for me, but soon became quite repetitive. I felt the first section ("Madame Swann at Home") could've belonged with Swann's Way, though that would've marred the latter's perfection. I later realized the section fits if the arc of this book is the narrator's path from Gilberte to his next love. Throughout this section the narrator confesses his love for Gilberte, but what we get are detailed descriptions of Madame Swann. I found the relationships of Swann and Odette (in Swann's Way) and then that of the narrator and Gilberte here so similar that I very briefly toyed with the idea that Swann and the narrator are actually the same person!

The next section ("Place-Names: The Place") was a lot of fun and much more interesting to me, as new characters greatly opened up the narrative, and probably the narrator's world as well. The end of this section contains a detailed description of a painting by the fictional artist Elstir that's quite beautiful.

I loved the last section ("Seascape, with Frieze of Girls"); it evoked for me the feelings I think many have when they first become romantically interested in others. I was reminded of being at a Mardi Gras parade when I was about 12 or 13 when a boy in an out-of-town marching band took a pair of beads from around his neck and threw them to me after our eyes had caught: I think most everyone has, or will have, a story like that that sticks with them down through the years. As Proust points out, it's not always the person per se that you're attracted to, having more to do with the time he or she comes across your vision. Near the end of the book, the tone changes in almost a chilling way, and the very last image is startling.

My wife, when it was a question of my choosing which book to read next, from among those shelves on which the unread volumes habitually reside, having rolled her eyes as though to express (not without, however, an undertone of tolerance and, I might even claim, of affection) her disapprobation of the vast number of titles from which to select, the imposition of whose number could hardly sensibly be diminished by subtracting just one of them, my daughter pointed to the six-volume Folio Society set of Proust, translated by Scott Moncrieff and updated first by Terence Martin and later by the Warwickshire poet DJ Enright – a translation which had struck me forcibly as being founded on a fundamental grammatical unsoundness – and asked me, with the unconcerned yet pert attitude captured so well by the impressionistic brushstrokes of De Schryver in his painting of the flower girls of the rue du Havre, whether I had read that one.

As a gentleman who, on leaving the theatre, realises that he has left his cigarette case in his box, but, unwilling simply to turn around without explanation and walk back, thus exciting the judgement of others, must first make a great show of having remembered something, striking his head as though thunderstruck by a realisation which, in fact, he had made unnoticed some minutes previously, so now in response to my daughter's query I demonstrated, though my exaggerated gestures and phrases of acquiescence, a willingness to consider reading a book which, in reality and unbeknownst to those around me, I had already been working up the desire to come back to for some time.

How well I remembered those days, ten years ago now, when I abandoned Proust's great novel after the first volume, retaining an impression of tedium interspersed with moments of great insight, and piqued especially by the clumsy sentence structures, only to be told, by more inveterate Proustians than myself, of whom there are many on my friends list, that I must return to him in French. I would like, having now done this, to say that he is just as inconsistent and irritating as he was in English, but honesty compels me to agree that he is, indeed, much easier to follow in his original language. I am very far from being a translation snob, finding, in general, that a lot of quasi-mystical nonsense is talked about the translation process, but it does seem to me that Proust is a very difficult writer to put into English (or into many other languages), since he leans heavily on the specific logical clarities of French grammar, where distant subclauses can slot into place like the closing brackets of a complicated equation whose convolutions often fall apart in Anglo-Saxon renderings. A verb in French usually tells you the exact person and number of its subject, whereas a regular English verb only distinguishes between the third-person singular and everything else, and in the past tense doesn't even do that; to take another example, the word ‘it’ in French is gendered, and therefore more specific than its English equivalent. (Sometimes, English cannot help but be more concise, since unlike French it allows compound nouns: so Odette's silk dressing-gown is in French a robe de chambre de crêpe de chine.) For these reasons and many others, most of Proust's sentences must either be chopped up to make sense in English, or must be kept long only with a considerable loss of clarity, and while I would always choose the former of these options (which is also the path taken by his translators into more distant languages like Japanese), most English translators, feeling that the long sentence is the very essence of the Proustian style, opt for the latter.

None of which is to say that Proust is not sometimes deliberately opaque in French as well, only that opacity of sense is easier to appreciate without a corresponding opacity of language; and certainly, one is tempted to feel, on reading sentences like the following, that he is a writer who finds it almost constitutionally impossible to say even something quite simple without feeling the need, repeatedly and to no great purpose, to interrupt (using the full range of commas, dashes, parentheses) himself:

Mais Odette était seulement à côté de lui, alors (non en lui comme le motif de Vinteuil), ne voyant donc point – Odette eût-elle été mille fois plus compréhensive – ce qui, pour nul de nous (du moins j'ai cru longtemps que cette règle ne souffrait pas d'exceptions), ne peut s'extérioriser.

Boredom, which can come from over-familiarity, can, paradoxically, also come from originality; there is a kind of tedium that is spurred by seeing something completely new to which one cannot react in any pre-set way. Proust's long, measured sentences lull you, they drift in and out of each other, they have a soporific effect, and yet, though I was only rarely struck by their beauty, there is a weird fascination to them, in the same way that, watching a film by Béla Tarr or Tarkovsky, I can doze off on the sofa and wake some time later (often to find the same shot still playing out), yet still feel that it was a meaningful and interesting experience. Proust himself tries to get ahead of the phenomenon:

toute conversation neuve, aussi bien que toute peinture, toute musique originales, paraîtra toujours alambiquée et fatigante. Elle repose sur des figures auxquelles nous ne sommes pas accoutumés, le causeur nous paraît ne parler que par métaphores…

Any new conversation, like any new painting or original music, will always seem convoluted and tiring. It relies on images that we're not used to, the speaker seems to be talking all in metaphor…

‘Well, the chap was plain barmy,’ as Evelyn Waugh wrote to Betjeman in 1948. ‘He never tells you the age of the hero and on one page he is being taken to the W.C. in the Champs-Elysées by his nurse & the next page he is going to a brothel. Such a lot of nonsense.’ One sympathises. The slippage of time is central to Proust's theme and, one generously supposes, justifies what at times seems to be a lack of control over temporal details. Linguistically he leans heavily on what grammarians of Greek would call the ‘customary imperfect’ (‘My grandmother would…’), so that we never know exactly when he's talking about; dates and ages are studiously avoided, and though occasional references to external events allow us to position things roughly in the last decade of the nineteenth century here, anachronisms, perhaps deliberately, abound.

I don't think this means (though some critics have argued that it does) that Proust is preserving this slice of Belle Époque France unchanged, as though in aspic, because in fact change is everywhere. At one point he compares society to a kaleidoscope, which recombines elements in new ways from time to time, and this kaleidoscopic view of things is very telling of his approach: one time shifts into another, one place into another, one person into another, though the parts that make them up are not new – the hawthorn trees at Combray are the hawthorn trees at Balbec, and Odette is Gilberte is Albertine is Andrée is any one of the jeunes filles who are distinct only until they embody the same generic love interest for the narrator.

We can spend our whole lives talking, Proust says, without doing more than indefinitely repeating the emptiness of a moment, and at times he seems determined to prove it. He will lavish twelve pages on the kind of idle thought that might occur to you while getting into the bath, and will do so with such intensity and such minute attention that you are torn between admiration and a kind of alarm, as though faced with something pathological. You can turn the page (in the big Bouquins edition I'm reading) and be faced with a double spread of some fifteen hundred words, with nary a paragraph break in sight. It's daunting; but this intensity means that his evocations of social awkwardness, adolescent love, and (young) female allure come with a fierceness of focus that is more or less unmatched.

For someone so obsessed with love and beauty, Proust is decidedly bleak in his outlook on these things. Le phénomène de bonheur ne se produit pas, he says: happiness doesn't happen. Indeed the fact that there's no hope is something he raises to the level of a guiding principle, suggesting that

c'est en somme une façon comme une autre de résoudre le problème de l'existence, qu'approcher suffisamment les choses et les personnes qui nous ont paru de loin belles et mystérieuses, pour nous rendre compte qu'elles sont sans mystère et sans beauté

it's as good a way as any of resolving the problem of existence – to take things and people that seemed from a distance to be beautiful and mysterious, and get close enough to realise that they are without beauty or mystery

…which, unlike Proust, I do not feel is a very good way of resolving the ‘problem of existence’. But the French appreciate this kind of thing, and this book won him the Goncourt Prize with its attendant five thousand francs, which he apparently blew in a few days on several lavish dinners at the Ritz. I spent most of my time reading this feeling bored or irritated; and yet at night, his sentences, already so close to dreams, span kaleidoscopically across my mind, and I would reach for the book as soon as I woke up.

Somehow, an improvement on Volume 1, particularly in the book's second half, a languid summer in Balbec whose self-contained treatment of time and character reminds me of Magic Mountain. Structurally, there are similarities to Swann's Way - both feature an introspective and social beginning that segues into a linear narrative that, in many ways, could work as a self contained novel. Though not nearly as funny as Swann in Love, the beach section benefits from spending its time in the head of our protagonist, whose neuroses and weaknesses are fascinating case studies for a modern reader and are more interesting than Swann's simple charm. And Marcel is funny too, in his subtle way. (I laughed when he described a hilly walk as "a bit too vertical for my liking).

Suddenly, in short, you are finally in the novel. You begin to read the book like a novel. And it starts to come together.

The characters of Balbec, both major - the charming Saint-Loup, the changeable Albertine - and minor - the chatty elevator boy, the Greek chorus of restaurant diners - do wonderful work here, and the best moments, like when the narrator is surprised by Albertine on a meander, soar. I was not as into Madame Swann at Home, though Odette is of course a great character, because Proust's repetitive, drawn-out examination of the denouement of love can't help but seem sluggish. In a way, the whole volume speaks to the novel's theme: I like it better retroactively because I think of the great moments, those sections of such extreme beauty and observation, and forget that it meanders too much, and that at times I was frustrated. This project stands apart from anything else that I've read, for good and for bad.

In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2:
n  Within a Budding Social Cataloging Websiten
Translated from the French by J. Chabouard

I had arrived at a state of almost complete indifference to Gilberte when, two years later, I joined the website Goodreads. Our new teacher for French, Mme Moir, was an avid lover of literature, and she had advised us to each create a virtual account on this so-called 'social cataloging website' this year so we would be able to keep track of our books and write our reading journals inside our 'natural habitat', as she would joke. It is with our younger years that we are not remotely surprised by the entirely new plains which an orbit of the Sun may bring, and every phenomenon of consequence becomes a single, breathing thread which may be a temporary virus or a permanent presence in the multitudinous ball of yarn that is to become our habits later on. So it was with this website - as one who preferred to read a Penguin Classic in the library at lunchtime rather than exchange vulgar jokes or discuss members of the fairer sex with others in the school quadrangle or oval outside, it seemed a welcome development that I have a place to connect my loves of literature and the Internet, though at first I did not have even a remote idea of the inherent environment of this land.

I took pleasure in the function of adding those books that I had read in Combray and those books that I would like to read in the future, alongside the elementary homework tasks relating to the class group-read (of Chateaubriand for the first school term of the year), but I found the transition into the, shall we say, societal side of Goodreads not entirely sufficient for providing warmth to my heart. I did not know anyone in my year whom also fancied reading the classics, and I did not see the point of adding to my friend list those (it seemed everyone fell into this category) whom only read fantasy, sci-fi and Young Adult novels. So it was that the only name to grace my list on the right hand side of my profile in the first month was that of Mme Moir (exploring her older reviews, I made the unfortunate excavation of a second account of hers, devoted to books with romance occurring between two or more male characters). I felt confused in discovering some of my classmates appearing to already have over a hundred friends on the website after several weeks had elapsed - it seemed to me that they lived on different planets to myself. After a while, writing about the books I read became a natural part of my day and I spent more and more time on this endeavour, along with reading the abundant book reviews already existent on the website, instead of toiling toward my own work, though I had the questionable yet dependable excuse of the former being of benefit to the latter.

As reviewing became a habit, I made the acquaintance of other thoughtful reviewers from around the globe, and after a number of months I was proud to befriend some of these older, literary specimen who were encouraging and kind to my youthful pen. Although Mme Moir was a competent teacher, each day I learnt more about literature, and through it, a diverse range of culture, history and the arts from these ladies and gentlemen who seemed to me to be omniscient teachers, or perhaps professors, inside my Toshiba laptop computer. One night, I found a new review penned by my friend M. Orozevich, and was impressed yet again by his erudition and wit. This refined gentleman was one of the most popular reviewers on Goodreads, and you could expect to find some good-natured banter and lively discussion in his comment threads, not dissimilar to the way you might expect a cat to roll onto its side in want of attention after meowing and piercing you with affectionate eyes in a certain manner that is far from easy to describe in human words - it was the way of nature. I ran my eyes over the last few comments, and was struck by the most recent comment - or rather, commenter, whom appeared to be a young, adolescent girl. Her comment held nothing special in its content, but her way of expression had caught my eye, and over the next half hour I ventured through her profile pictures (they were quite pleasing to the eye), playfully named shelves, energetic quotes and succinct reviews. Her name was Albertine.

She had joined Goodreads two years earlier, and apart from the occasional reviewing, seemed to be active in the several groups she had joined. While I bathed in reading all of the comments she had made in The Philosophy in Twilight, ☆Contemporary Classics★ and ♪♫Dancing Readers♪♫, the group called Balbec Gurlz was a private one and it left me extremely curious, as Balbec was a seaside town just a few hours away by train from where I lived. As I took on the persona of Hercule Poirot and this time read through some of her comment threads, I found four other young girls whom were members of Balbec Gurlz - a group of five friends. When my mind made the association that these five girls, each who seemed to me to be full of life and magic not seen in those who attended my school, were one group, I felt a sensation as if I had tasted honey after being on a strict diet without any sweetness for one year, or I had discovered a new violin concerto which seemed infinitely more perfect and profound than any other piece of music I had ever heard before. I saw these five charming girls whom loved books, spent much of their daily hours on this website like myself, and lived not too far from myself in life, as one collective paradise, as a divine entity which held the key to a higher plane of existence, the optical instrument which would allow me to witness the colours which had been missing from my life. I spent the next week monitoring the activity of these five girls, considering the best manner of action for me to be acquainted into their circle; pentagon; star (did I want to expand their sphere? negate the pentagon and create a hexagon? or sit at the central point of their five-pointed constellation?).

I decided that the most prudent course to follow in this uncharted sea was to utilise the mutual friend for Albertine and myself, the person of M. Orozevich (I did not have any mutual friends with the other four girls); as Albertine often asked him questions about the book in the comment threads of his reviews, I hit upon an ingenious idea: I would wait until Albertine made a comment, and nonchalantly leave a comment after her, in which I would ask an appropriate question of my own regarding his writing process and leave an opinion on his review, in which I would comment on the content and inadvertently answer one or two of her questions, as if by chance. M. Orozevich, ever conscious and considerate of the chance coincidences and the virtue of including relevant parties into the discussion in his threads, would most likely answer Albertine first while mentioning that her queries had already been partly answered by myself. He may also reply to my comment by pointing out Albertine's. I had noticed that she was quite proactive in adding new friends, even after one conversation in a comment thread, I had observed, so I thought the chances of her noticing me and sending a friend request were not low after this scenario. In any case, she would notice me and go through my profile; if I felt brave, perhaps I would even address her in M. Orozevich's thread, exclaiming surprise at the coincidence. Yes, this would be the way to go.

The next night I observed the books M. Orozevich was currently reading, and calculated that he would most likely finish the philosophical essay on absurdity in five more days; M. Orozevich was very precise with his reading and reviewing routine on this website, so his review could be expected to be published the following night around 8pm, France time. To make the desired comment, some knowledge of absurdity was necessary; I borrowed three books on existentialism which seemed related to the book M. Orozevich was reading, from the school library the next day, and devoured them in my free time. It was later that I looked back on this week and realised that I had never studied something with such intense determination. It was also important to comment after Albertine at the right time; from her reviews and comments, I had discerned that she was usually online in the periods 7:30-8am, 4-6pm and 9-11:30pm each day. Working out the time difference with M. Orozevich's time zone and noting his times of activity as well, I found a 30-minute interval between 11:30pm and midnight that Albertine would have left her comment by, but in which M. Orozevich would not have been online yet.

As I prepared for the fateful night, I was becoming more and more infatuated with the five girls through following their pages and activities; apart from Albertine, whom left the biggest impression on me as the first of the girls that I saw, and who had a lively yet comforting and harmonious manner of speaking, Andrée was the one who shared my literary interests in the classics the most; she had even read a collection of poems by Pessoa. One night, in my agitation I had clicked on 'Follow Reviews' on her page, but realising that I had vowed to stay incognito to the young Balbecians until I had made Albertine's acquaintance, I immediately cancelled it. I prayed that she had not been online at that moment, and that such a notification would not appear on her page - my heart was beating heavily for the rest of that night. I was also attracted by Gisèle for her witty and humorous reviewing; and Rosemonde for her simple yet lyrical style of writing, not only in her reviews but comments on other people's. Oh, so many treasures in one place! The fateful night arrived, as I had calculated, on Friday - M. Orozevich published his review around 8:30pm - as I read through it, imagining the kind of questions Albertine would ask, I laughed as I realised I had not taken anything in at all. I told myself to calm down, pecking at a little piece of madeleine and sipping some iced water.

Albertine was online around 9:30pm - I observed her replying to some comments on her latest review until 9:45pm, and then I lost track of her for half an hour or so (perhaps writing in Balbec Gurlz?). She 'liked' a couple of her friends' status updates (I was jealous of one of them, the boy Octave, who seemed to be like any of the loud and boisterous boys at school; if he deserved to be a friend of Albertine's, surely I did, if not doubly so?) around 10:15pm, and posted a new reading update of her own around 10:40pm. Then, at 11:02pm I found that she had 'liked' M. Orozevich's review, and she left a comment on the review at 11:18pm. Not straying from her usual manner of commenting on his reviews, she had thanked him for "giving her another history lesson in such an accessible and entertaining manner", and had asked questions about Karl Jaspers, Kierkegaard and the notion of philosophical suicide. I grinned like the homeless man in the latest of Bergotte's novels - I had read up on Kierkegaard and philosophical suicide over the past week. It seemed like Albertine had gone offline after leaving that comment - I had a little over 35 minutes until M. Orozevich would usually be online, and thus around 50 minutes before he would reply to Albertine's comment (following several others) on this review. In any case, it was important to comment as soon as possible after Albertine so it would seem like a happy coincidence.

"Monsieur, I applaud you for another fine review on non-fiction this month: I was especially amused by the segment with your Tom and Jerry rendition of The Absurd Man. Regarding your The Revenant associations on Kierkegaard, I have been of the view that Christianity is the scandal, and what he calls for quite plainly is the third sacrifice required by Ignatious Loyola, the one in which God most rejoices: 'The sacrifice of the intellect'. This effect of the 'leap' is odd but must not surprise us any longer. He makes of the absurd the criterion of the other world, whereas it is simply a residue of the experience of this world. 'In his failure', says Kierkegaard, 'the believer finds his triumph.'* You have made me want to pick up Dostoyevsky's Demons, being especially struck by the quote you included:
If Stavrogin believes, he does not think he believes.
If he does not believe, he does not think he does not believe. - I raise my hat in respect to you for lighting up this absurd corner of the world with your masterful writing."

I clicked on Comment - 11:43pm. I breathed a sigh of relief - my week had not been in vain. With the objects of our attentions whom we have never approached, we do not expect them to have any notion of our existence (while wishing they did), and so I was not concerned at all that I had perhaps incorporated more factors than necessary in my comment which would pique Albertine's curiosity. I had seen her status update on The Revenant last week, and I had seen a comment on Andrée's review of White Nights where Andrée had mentioned Demons to her. Of course, my portion on Kierkegaard seemed quite an adequate response to her question; it wasn't a direct answer, but it circumscribed the theories which she would be satisfied with reading. If she were to conscientiously read the comments after hers, she may even be delighted that a stranger had made such an intimately connected comment. I knew that two of the Balbecians followed M. Orozevich - perhaps they would point it out to her before M. Orozevich if they were online now? A sudden wave of exhaustion came over me - it seemed like my hardest assignment for the year had just ended. I looked forward to the beautiful weekend when Albertine would notice me, read some of my reviews - maybe even send me a friend request? I turned the computer off, rubbed my eyes, changed into my pyjamas, and reached for the light switch. Tomorrow...





March 1, 2016

* = the passage beginning with 'Christianity' has been taken word for word from The Myth of Sisyphus (p.36) by Albert Camus; as well as the quote from Demons.

Volume 1 - Swann's Way
Volume 2 - Within a Budding Grove

A Note about the Translation

I wanted to support the translation of this volume by James Grieve, a lecturer at my alma mater, Australian National University, when I was there in the 70’s.

I’m pretty sure he taught two of my close friends. While I can’t recall meeting him, I did socialise with one of his colleagues, Robert Dessaix, who subsequently became a talented writer.

It was a very capable French Department. However, in the 90’s, it was decimated by budget cuts and Grieve was made "redundant". He subsequently undertook a full teaching load for no remuneration, declining an opportunity to move to Sydney, so he could continue to cycle everywhere around Canberra and continue his commitment to the cause of French language and literature. ANU hasn’t even updated his CV to give him credit for this translation (which for what it’s worth was the favourite of Alain de Botton).

I approached Grieve’s translation a little sceptically at first. I still have a few quibbles (he translated "petite bande" as a "little gang" of girls, which you might do for punks, but I wonder about middle class girls, even if they were perceived as unruly). However, I quickly stopped paying attention to the translation and focussed on the pleasures of the text.

A Note about the Title

The novel continues and extends Proust’s literary analysis of love, focussing mainly on the narrator’s journey through late adolescence and his early sexual experiences (at ages 15 to 20, unless I’m mistaken).

The title of the Grieve translation is "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower", in contrast to the Kilmartin translation "Within a Budding Grove".

Taken separately, it’s difficult to determine the intended meaning of each alternative title.

To what extent is sexuality implicit in the title?

This question reminded me of the title of Chapter 28 of Thomas Hardy’s "Far from the Madding Crowd", a highly sexually-charged chapter that goes by the name "The Hollow Amid the Ferns".

"Within a Budding Grove" might simply refer to a forest of trees, which bud in winter in preparation for spring, a fairly innocuous translation, if still a metaphor.

There is also an English song which might have been known to the translators:

"Yet soon the lovely days of Spring
Will leaf the budding grove."

The budding could also be symbolic of the adolescent experience and puberty of both genders, since females are not mentioned in this version.

On the other hand, given the literal meaning of the French title, the "budding grove" might be a more pointed reference to female puberty, a "rosebud" being slang for female genitalia (see also its significance in "Citizen Kane").

Grieve’s translation is more literal. The young women are in flower (or in bloom), a metaphor for puberty. Perhaps the shadow refers to the darkness of the girls’ transition to adulthood or the fact that they tower metaphorically over the narrator and cast a shadow over his life and social and sexual experiences?

What, There’s More?

After the tour de force that was the first volume, it still amazes me that Proust was able to continue writing about love with such insight, sophistication and wit (and there are more volumes to come).

He keeps finding new things to say, all of which seem to be definitive in their analysis.

Proust possessed amazing powers of observation. In the first volume they were directed partly at his own childhood relationship with his mother, but mainly at the relationship of Charles Swann and Odette de Crecey.

The second volume continues the scrutiny of Swann and the now Madame Swann, but the narrator moves to centre stage.

He is an older and greater participant in the action. However, even this statement has to be qualified in the case of Proust.

The great bulk of the text is what occurs in the narrator’s mind, as he responds to events and stimuli around him. He is still an acute observer. He doesn’t just look and think, he reviews, he criticizes, he critiques, as if every aspect of life is a literary or aesthetic experience.

At times, it approaches the lyrical and the musical, as if Proust were composing a symphony or an opera assembled from his responses and interactions.

The sensation of touch is not enough. He must cerebrally process the sensation and convert it into art. An animal can touch and feel, only a human can create Art. Proust worked at the pinnacle of what a human can fashion from their life experience.



Catherine Deneuve as Madame Odette Swann in the film of "Time Regained"

At Madame Swann’s

It quickly becomes apparent that Odette de Crecey from Volume 1 has married Charles Swann and had a daughter Gilberte, who is a similar age to the unnamed Marcel and is aged from 15 to 18 during the first section of the volume.

Odette divided opinion in volume 1, because she was a high class courtesan. Her marriage to Swann surprised Paris’ polite society and there are still many who scorn her. However, despite all expectations, it seems that their marriage has been a success, at least to the extent that it has been mutually advantageous, which after all is possibly the least we can expect of any marriage.

There are unresolved implications of dual infidelity, but they are back story and not the focus of this volume.

Swann has lifted Odette into High Society, and she is grateful. Odette has given Swann a daughter, who loves him, despite being equally strong-willed, but just as importantly Odette confers on Swann a "purely private satisfaction" that cements their relationship.

The status of the Swann family, despite Swann’s Jewish background, allows Odette to establish a successful literary salon, but also to redesign herself.

Her complexion is dark. In volume 1, her beauty was always played down. Now, "she seemed to have grown so many years younger, she had filled out, enjoyed better health, looked calmer, cooler, more relaxed". Her new pattern was "full of majesty and charm". She wore "this immutable model of eternal youth". At the same time, whatever she wore:

"...encompassed her like the delicate and etherealized epitome of a civilization."

These qualities are, apparently, attractive in a woman.

While Marcel purports to be in love with Gilberte, he is at least partly in love with Odette as well. Alternatively, he actually wants to be Odette, if only so that he can partner Swann, whom he admires. [This is not a simple relationship.]



Picasso’s "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon"

See Jim Everett's allusion to this painting here on Proust Reader 


At Balbec

Two years later, presumably when Marcel is about 18 to 20, his health requires him to spend a few seasons at the beach resort town of Balbec.

He uses this time to forget his love for Gilberte. Instead, his attention is drawn to a "petite bande" of "jeunes filles en fleurs".

This provides the set up for much contemplation on the subject matter of volume 1, memory and the nature of love, as well as the complications introduced by adolescent sexuality.

It’s these issues I’d like to focus on for the rest of this review. I hope you’ll forgive me if I resort to the abstract or the impersonal, so as not necessarily to reveal the object of Marcel’s affection and spoil your reading of the novel.

A Critique of Pure Devotion

In volume 1, we learn much about the nature of love from the point of view of Swann, as narrated by Marcel. Presumably, the narrative was dictated at a later phase of his life. Here, we see him undergoing his own adolescent experiences, even if they were narrated subsequently.

We learn what the older Marcel knows, only not in chronological order. Proust adheres to a subjective order of revelation, which in a way reflects the fact that memory itself is not chronological. It prioritises itself according to laws that we might never know or understand.

From now on, I'd like to allow Proust's words to speak for themselves as much as possible.

The Subjectivity of Love

The Object of Our Affection is what we make of them:

"Love creates a supplementary person who is quite different from the one who bears our beloved’s name in the outside world and is mostly formed from elements within ourselves."

"Love having become so immense, we never reflect on how small a part the woman herself plays in it."

You love me, because I made you love me:

"This real Albertine was little more than an outline: everything else that had been added to her was of my own making, for our own contribution to our love – even if judged solely from the point of view of quantity – is greater than that of the person we love."

You’ll be my mirror:

"When we are in love, our love is too vast to be wholly contained within ourselves; it radiates outward, reaches the resistant surface of the loved one, which reflects it back to its starting point; and this return of our own tenderness is what we see as the other’s feelings, working their new, enhanced charm on us, because we do not recognise them as having originating in ourselves.”

The Conjunction of Love and Pain

"Whatever I longed for would be mine only at the end of a painful pursuit...this supreme goal could be achieved only on condition that I sacrifice to it the pleasure I had hoped to find in it."

The Quest for Beauty as a Source of Love and Life

"I was at one of those times of youth when the idle heart, unoccupied by love for a particular person, lies in wait for Beauty, seeking it everywhere, as the man in love sees and desires in all things the woman he cherishes."

"Looking at her, I was filled with that renewed longing for life which any fresh glimpse of beauty and happiness can bring."

The Desire to Please, to Possess and to Penetrate

In order to gain love, you must make the acquaintance of the one you desire and then seek their approval:

"I was not yet old enough, and had remained too sensitive, to have given up the wish to please others and to possess them."

First, you have to enter their field of vision and engage them in conversation:

"It was not only her body I was after, it was the person living inside it, with whom there can be only one mode of touching, which is to attract her attention, and one mode of penetration, which is to put an idea into her mind."

Sometimes, a kiss is not enough. You must incite admiration, desire and memory:

"Just as it would not have been enough for me, in kissing her, to take pleasure from her lips without giving her any in return, so I wished that the idea of me, in entering her, in becoming part of her, might attract not only her attention, but her admiration, her desire, and might force it to keep a memory of me against the day when I might be able to benefit from it."

The Relevance of Physical Intimacy

"I had thought the love I felt for Albertine did not depend on any hope of physical intimacy."

The Unattainability of the Love Object

"Love, mobile and pre-existing, focuses on the image of a certain woman simply because she will be almost certainly unattainable."

Sometimes, it’s not impossible, just difficult:

"I was inclined to magnify the simplest of pleasures because of the obstacles that lay between me and the possibility of enjoying them."

The Attainability of the Love Object

The more easily attainable the love, the less the pleasure:

"The main reason for the shrinking of the pleasure to which I had been so looking forward was the knowledge that nothing could now prevent me from enjoying it."

The Possession of the Love Object

"Our love too seems to have vanished at the very moment when we come into possession of a prize the value of which we have never really thought about."

The Postponement of Gratification

"It is seldom that a joy is promptly paired with the desire that longed for it."

The more you dally, the greater the dalliance:

"What monotony and boredom color the lives of those who drive directly…without ever daring to dally along the way with what they desire!"

But don’t dally too long:

"It is not certain that the happiness that comes too late, at a time when one can no longer enjoy it, when one is no longer in love, is exactly the same happiness for which we once pined in vain. There is only one person – our former self – who could decide the issue; and that self is no longer with us."

Be wary of sabotage and self-denial:

"The only thing I cared for, my relationship with Gilberte, was the very thing I was trying to sabotage, through my prolonging of our separation, through my gradual fostering not of her indifference toward me, but – which would come to the same thing in the end – of mine toward her. My unremitting effort was directed to bringing about the slow, agonizing suicide of the self that loved Gilberte."

Self-denial should not be conditional, lest the conditions not be met:

"...unless she made an unambiguous request for us to clarify our relationship, accompanied by a full declaration of her love for me, both of which I knew were impossible..."

The Satisfaction of One Desire Creates Another

"To possess a little more of her would only increase our need for the part of her that we do not possess; and in any case, within our part, since our needs arise out of our satisfactions, something of her would still lie forever beyond our grasp."

The Coincidence of Desire and Reality

"When reality coincides at last with something we have longed for, fitting perfectly with our dreams, it can cover them up entirely and become indistinguishable from them, as two symmetrical figures placed against one another seem to become one; whereas, so as to give our joy its full intensity of meaning, we would actually prefer every detail of our desires, even at the instant of fulfillment, to retain the presence of still being immaterial, so as to be more certain that this really is what we desired."

The Source of Our Memory

"The things that are best at reminding us of a person are those which, because they were insignificant, we have forgotten, and which have therefore lost none of their power. Which is why the greater part of our memory exists outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn’s first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having no use for it, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again."

The Habits of Love

"This recurrence of pain and the renewal of my love for Gilberte did not last longer than they would have in a dream of her, for the very reason that my life at Balbec was free of the habits that in usual circumstances would have helped it to prevail. It was because of Habit that I had become more and more indifferent to Gilberte."

The Mutability of Love

"If we consciously or unconsciously outgrow those associations, our love, as though it was a spontaneous growth, a thing of our own making, revives and offers itself to another woman."

"There was in me a residue of old dreams of love, dating from my childhood, full of all the tenderness my heart was capable of, all the love it had ever felt, and which was now indistinguishable from it, which could be suddenly brought back to me by someone as different as possible from me."

"This liking for new places and people is of course worked into our forgetting of older ones."

The Indivisibility of Love

"My feeling was no longer the simple attraction of the first days: it was an incipient, tentative love for each or any of them, every single one of them being a natural substitute for any of the others."

The Resemblance of Our Love Objects

"There is a degree of resemblance between the women we love at different times; and this resemblance, though it devolves, derives from the unchanging nature of our own temperament, which is what selects them, by ruling out all those who are not likely to be both opposite and complementary to us, who cannot be relied on, that is, to gratify our sensuality and wound our heart. Such women are a product of our temperament, an inverted image or projection, a negative of our sensitivity."

You Are Too Like Me for Me To Love

"It was impossible for any love of mine for Andree to be true: she was too intellectual, too highly-strung, too prone to ailment, too much like myself. Though Albertine now seemed empty, Andree was full of something with which I was overfamiliar."

The Shadow

"At those moments in my life when I was not in love but wished I was, the ideal of physical beauty I carried about with me...was partnered by the emotional shadow, ever ready to be brought to real life, of the woman who was going to fall in love with me and step straight into the part already written for her...in the comedy of fondness and passion that had been awaiting her since my childhood...as long as she had a pleasant disposition and some of the physical characteristics required by the role."

Love or Enjoyment

"I sensed that those who know love and those who enjoy life are not the same people."




Emmanuelle Béart as Gilberte in the film of “Time Regained”


At the Zoo
[After and in the Words of Proust]

Madame Swann's
Easy step
Gave her coat
A loose and
Lazy sway.
Noticing,
I conferred
A shy glance,
Subtle but
Admiring,
Upon which,
Detected,
I was then
Rewarded
With a wink
Of her eye
And a slow
Flirtatious
Smile. Oh what
Ecstasy.


Ill Bergotten
[After and in the Words of Proust]

Matter-of-fact
And overrich,
The familiar,
Did he eschew.
Not content to
Toe the line, hence
Approached from some
Petty angle,
His ideas
Always sounded
Unbeauteous,
Wearisome and
Convoluted:
"A Cartesian
Devil, vainly
Endeavouring
To endure
Eternally
In equipoise."
Smartness for the
Sake of smartness,
Thus, were his words
Twisted around.
Ephemeral,
But not profound.


Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne
[After and in the Words of Proust]

Madame Swann sauntered along the
Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne,
Mellow, gentle, smiling and stately,
At the peak of wealth and beauty,
Delectable in the blooming
Summer season of her lifetime,
From which glorious point she watched
Worlds turn beneath her measured tread,
Until Prince de Sagan spied her.

His greeting evoked chivalry,
Polite and allegorical,
A noble homage to Woman,
Since recalled by Proust after noon
Any fine day in May, a glimpse
Of Madame Swann chatting with him
In the glow of wisteria.
Satisfied, at peace, in love, his
Spirit freed from hysteria.


Une Petite Bande
[After and in the Words of Proust]

Look there, far away
On the esplanade,
Making a strange mass
Of moving colours,
Five or six young girls
All as different
In their appearance
And their ways from the
Other bathers as
The odd gaggle of
Seagulls strutting on
The beach, wings flapping.