“Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.”
― Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove


Marie Laurencin, 'Les jeunes filles'

My first recommendation when reading Proust is the reader MUST make sure they have a reliable bookmark, because when (not if, but when) you lose your place your faulty memory will not be able to remember exactly where you just were. One young nubile girl starts to blend into another young nubile girl who looks at this point a lot like her friend. One picked flower starts to smell like another from an earlier page; a page that seemed to exist a whole lifetime ago. One young man with mommy issues starts to look almost exactly like another young man with grand-mommy issues.

That being said, you don't read Proust for the lines. You read Proust for everything else. It is those moments between plot points where all the rich texture resides. There is something languorous about just simply letting Proust's prose wash over you ~~~ wave after wave. Suddenly, you really don't care if you've already read a certain page because you are content and you recognize that you will read it again in just a few pages anyway and it will be beautiful and true all over again.

[Original review of print edition]

There's a lot of stuff in Volume 2 of A la recherche du temps perdu, and people see different things in it. To me, though, the unifying theme is a continuation of Proust's analysis of how romantic relationships work, which he started in Un Amour de Swann. There, he examined one particular kind of relationship. Swann spends a fair amount of time with Odette, who is very nice to him and keeps saying how she wishes she could see him more often. Without realizing it, he comes to rely on her always to be there for him. One night, she isn't, and he suddenly discovers he's hooked. The balance of power changes completely: he needs her all the time, she's hardly ever available, and his life is taken over by psychotic jealousy. If you've never had this kind of thing happen to you, count yourself lucky.

In the second volume, Proust looks at two more kinds of patterns, where the relationship isn't as clearly defined as it is with Swann and Odette. He shows how hard it can sometimes be to understand that a relationship has started or ended. With the narrator and Gilberte, he's involved with her in an early-teen way, and then, somehow, things go wrong. He's mad at her, and thinks he won't see her for a bit. Then it continues a bit longer, and he still hasn't seen her. After a while, it's clear that the relationship is over, but it's not obvious whether he ever made a real decision to end it. He examines all his shifting thoughts and emotions in the minutest detail, and you still don't know. At least, I didn't.

With Albertine, in the last third of the book, we get the case that I find most interesting. He's at Balbec (apparently it's based on the real-life resort town of Cabourg; I first learned that from a Brigade Mondaine novel). He sees this rather rowdy gang of teenage girls who go around together, laughing and indulging in various kinds of horseplay. He's a sickly kid, and their boisterous animal spirits appeal to him. There's one in particular that he keeps on bumping into by accident. Her name is Albertine, and after a while he decides he's fallen in love with her.

Being Proust, he has to carefully go though all the times they've met, and look at how his feelings evolved in response to those chance meetings. When he reconstructs everything, an interesting fact emerges: he thought he was meeting the same girl every time, but in fact he may not have. It's possible that he met different girls on the different occasions, and the feelings just crystallized out as deciding that he was in love with Albertine. He doesn't know, and they don't know! If the book had been written 15 years later, I would have wondered if this was an allusion to the new quantum theory: you have, as it were, a wave-function of girls, which collapses into the single Albertine observation. But I'm pretty sure that that was still in the future, so Proust made it all up himself. Impressive. Conceivably, the causality went the other way: perhaps some quantum physicist was inspired by Proust's novel!

The thought I find so interesting here is that, as Proust shows, you can fall in love quickly, but then there is a philosophical problem: who are you falling in love with? At one point in my life, I was kind of interested in the semantics of denotation and reference, but linguistic philosophers like Kripke, Quine or Montague never seem to look at examples as complex as the ones that Proust makes up. I would love to know if someone has done an analysis of his books from this kind of angle. From the practical point of view, though, I think there is a useful lesson to be learned. If you fall in love quickly, the person you're in love with may not really exist. That's worth remembering.
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[From Noms de pays : le nom]

I have just posted a LARA version of A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs - you can find it here, view in Chrome or Firefox. We now have a total of 380,000 words text/42 hours audio of Proust in LARA form. As with Du côté de chez Swann, the French and English text have been taken from Gutenberg and the audio from LitteratureAudio, and I have automatically aligned them using the same methods.
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[And after another rereading...]

Proust is unique. Who else could even have imagined the idea of turning The Critique of Pure Reason into a romcom, let alone succeed in doing so? But he makes it seem like the inevitable development of Kant's thoughts.