Marcel Proust

The only paperback edition of the definitive translation of the first part of Marcel Proust's legendary seven-part cycle. In part one, the narrator recalls his childhood, aided by the famous tea-soaked madeleine; M. Swann describes his passion for Odette.

In Search of Lost Time: Time regained & A guide to Proust

Sarah Sammis

I started reading the In Search of Lost Time series (for lack of a better word) last year. For Swann's Way I did a weekly post covering thirty pages of the book. I started to do the same with thing Within a Budding Grove but in April I misplaced the book. By the time I found the book again I had fallen out of the habit of writing these posts. Plus, they weren't exactly popular, so I just decided to keep reading my thirty pages a week and finish the book.

In Within a Budding Grove the unnamed protagonist has grown up. After his romance with Swann's daughter has gone sour he flees Paris to find solace with his beloved grandmother. His time with his grandmother comes together as a mixture of comparisons with his childhood memories and his adventures as a young adult.

Of the two books, I feel like I connected better with Swann's Way. Now part of that might be the fact that I misplaced the book for so long. Part of it too is that I was reading the first book with greater care.

That said, there are excellent scenes involving the protagonist's attempts at finding a girl friend, over indulging at the local hotel restaurant and other juvenile pursuits.

I'm still debating whether I should continue with the remaining books. What do you think?

jess

the stream of consciousness lavished over the passages, brimmed us into the voyage of daily vicissitudes of life along its elements of adolescence, love, and yearning, surmounted by seemingly lyrical ramblings of his infinite cornucopia of elucidative oeuvre and his well-known stream of consciousness prose. 

as he drops a compelling morsel, perhaps a brief description of a lovely girl with whom the protagonist is clearly infatuated, he then moves on for a time only to detail a completely unrelated episode — he keeps the reader very hungry that way. we drool for more but we are cut off for precisely an endurable amount of suspense time, which will be fulfilling as you verse and devour through every thematic and momentary blur of time and space, in his very own form of involuntary memory prose.

the delight of reading these passages got me writing many personal annotations and highlights that are timelessly transcendental to reread again. managed to lodge this on my 2022 reads, my favorite read of this year definitely. how incredibly satisfactory, yet also, how memorable of an inebriation this book has given me.

In Search of Lost Time: Time regained & A guide to Proust

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