Swann's Way In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1

When I finished my weekly posts of my reading of Ulysses I asked on Twitter which book I should do next. The answer was a resounding In Search of Lost Times by Marcel Proust. It seemed to me like the perfect choice. It took me 19 weeks to finish the first volume, Swann's Way. In Search of Lost Times is like Don Quixote, written and published over a number of years and revised and translated. In the case of Don Quixote the book is manageable with onionskin paper to be squeezed into one thick volume (even with all the illustrations). Not Proust's work though. It's massive. It makes The Lord of the Rings look like a short story. The Modern Library edition that I'm reading offers the seven volumes in six. As there are seven distinct titles, I will treat Proust's oeuvre as seven separate books instead of one massive novel. I'm not doing this for scholarly reasons, just convenience. In Swann's Way there are two stories. There's the one of a young boy growing up among important and well known adults, aristocrats, artists and other celebrities. As a young child he is in awe of the adults around him. When the book closes and he has grown into young adulthood he sees his heroes with a better understanding of human nature. The person who brings about the end of his hero worship is Charles Swann. Most of this six hundred page volume is centered on Charles Swann and his courtship with Odette. She though isn't the idealized vision of beauty and sophistication he thinks she is. She is his equal in temperament, vanity and vices. She is best and worst thing that could possibly happen to Swann. I have a brand new copy of Within a Budding Grove which I am now working my way through. I suspect it will be another five months to finish this volume. See full list of posts on my blog.

(in realtá ho finito solo il primo libro) #2013/2014 - Dalla parte di Swann# Ho iniziato a leggere Proust perché é Proust. Perché La Recherche du Temps Perdu mi sembra un titolo delicato e misterioso. Perché A. Baricco ne ha fatto una lezione bellissima. Nel suo andare in profondità complica la sintassi nel modo piú lontano al nostro pensare. Ti stupisci di come magistralmente delinei qualcosa alla lontana per sette righe, e solo in conclusione con una grande sterzata ti restituisca il senso globale. Leggi confuso, barcollante, dove sta andando a parare? e solo quando finisci ti restituisce un intero pensiero nella testa. Prima no. Se lo interrompi prima non hai nulla. É come una spirale, finché non vai fino alla fine, al centro, non puoi capire di essere dentro una spirale. E non mi è risultato sempre accattivante. A volte persino noioso, specie nella sfera bucolica che é una delle tematiche che peggio tollero (con le dovute eccezioni). Poi, improvvisamente, diveniva piú vicino di ogni altro. Piú irresistibile dell'ultimo bestseller chiacchierato da tutti. Perché prima o poi la acchiappa una tematica che ti interessa, qualcosa che non ti saresti mai sognato di vedere scritto da qualcuno. Perché la trovavi forse troppo singolare o poco degna di nota perché qualcun altro potesse esprimerla con questa eleganza di cui lui é capace. Ed eccomi lí, rapita dal personaggio di Charles Swann, la cui somiglianza con il mio migliore amico mi ha quasi destabilizzato. Ed ancora, ecco un episodio della mia vita, dipinto lí. Uno di quelli che mi ha fatto piú male e per questo uno dei piú utili. Troppo singolare perché qualcun altro possa ricevere le stesse impressioni, gli stessi avvenimenti? No. Eccolo lá. E con questo mi ha stregato. Siamo profondamente egoisti anche in questo. Davanti a un genio letterario, che ha scritto ogni riga con la medesima intensità e ricercatezza, ho applaudito quando fungeva da specchio e sbuffato quando non vi erano punti di contatto.

I’d like to read a dif translation one day - i didn’t feel as compelled by it as I expected, but there are so many special moments that make it worthwhile. So impressionistic, just like a memory

It seems too short. Like it just scratches the surface. It does make the world seem larger . This last volume is much more depressing than the others mainly because everyone gets old and no one learns anything. i appreciated the philosophical discussions about art. In the end it does give you new eyes to see with but now i want to put on dark glasses and go back into my cave.

Great story and overall I liked it, even though halfway through the main character was making me frustrated with all of his choices and whatnot, but overall a solid story about war and how you choose to live your life, and also, a realistic story of what it's like to be a hero, to try to be, and to be ok when you're not or you're simply scared. I liked it!

The prose is amazing. Proust explores time, memory, human psyche, art, society. It is introspective and dreamlike. It is funny, sad, frustrating, so many things in a very human way. Landcapes, architecture, characters jump off the page and feel so real. Time slows down, even stops. Then speeds up or skips. I read this very slowly and reflectively, which I recommend. I plan to continue, but will take a break before the next volume. There is plenty of mysogyny and homophobia stated by characters in the text, including often by the narrator and Swann. The author was homosexual and the narrator is a stand-in for the author. Through this series a lot autobiographical details and experiences from Proust's life are folded into him. He also based a lot of the characters on people he knew. Many of the female love-interests through this series are actually based on men Proust knew.

What a book to make it through. Swann’s Way takes some perseverance and faith to read completely, not to mention patience. To appreciate this book I had to read it in small bits, and even reading 10 pages may only describe one or two visual scenes. But I focused on appreciating the imagery provided by SUCH in depth descriptions, as well as relating to the narrators ideas or memories. Sometimes the way he speaks of home, how he relates to it and his family, it’s easy to understand from your own point of view.

The first part of this book doesn’t exactly have a plot, and is more just about the narrators time spent as a child in Combray- and boy do you get a picture of what he loves in Combray. The narrator finds beautiful connections between what he sees and art he admires so deeply, and this them is seen a lot throughout the book.

The second part of the book is a very drawn out and agonizing love story that is at times frustrating but also kind of hilarious. I can appreciate the slow-moving love story involving, at times, unrequited love from afar, which is what happened with Swann’s love at times. I think you have to dig in to appreciate the literary beauty in the descriptions of this book, and figure out how to love a story that isn’t all story, even. I hit a wall during this book towards the end, although maybe someday I’d like to reread the whole book so I could comprehend more.

O quarto volume, “Sodoma e Gomorra”, foi o que mais me custou ler, nomeadamente pela repetição de conversas de vários personagens, ainda que apresentados de novos ângulos mas sempre muito focados na comédia de costumes, que não é o meu forte, sendo que no miolo deste volume entrei mesmo em saturação, com o tédio a apoderar-se da leitura, contudo no final Proust abre um pequeno capítulo que fecha de forma tão sublime e deliciosa, impossibilitando-me desgostar deste volume. Neste volume Proust dá largas ao tratamento da homosexualidade fazendo-o com profundidade e recorrendo às teorias da psicologia de então, tudo surge com bastante naturalidade o que deve ter gerado forte impacto na época, contudo hoje é algo que se lê sem choque, dada a modelação entretanto ocorrida na sociedade. Proust não diferencia o género, tendo tanto homossexualidade masculina (Sodoma), como feminina (Gomorra), às quais vai juntando para intensificar o choque no leitor, o tratamento dado aos judeus em França na época. "Raça [os homossexuais] sobre a qual pesa uma maldição e que tem de viver o seu desejo na mentira e no perjúrio, visto que o sabe ser considerado punível e vergonhoso, inconfessável; (...) excluídos até, salvo nos dias de grande infortúnio em que a grande maioria se une em torno da vítima, como os Judeus em torno de Dreyfus, da simpatia - e às vezes do convívio - dos seus semelhantes, aos quais causam repugnância de verem o que são pintado num espelho..." Mas para mim o melhor continua sendo os momentos de introspeção, de análise profunda dos estados internos do narrador, quando se interroga de si para si. Como já tinha dito antes, a epopeia "Em Busca do Tempo Perdido" vai-se alternando entre estes momentos e os diálogos e apontamentos de crítica da alta-sociedade, e é interessante verificar nas várias análises online, como as pessoas se dividem entre os dois registos, existindo os que apenas aguentam a leitura pelo lado da comicidade e outros, em que me incluo, que seguem Proust mais pelas suas escalpelizações do Eu. Deixo dois dos melhores registos deste livro: “Mas mal consegui adormecer, naquela hora, mais verídica, em que os meus olhos se fecharam para as coisas do exterior, o mundo do sono (em cujo o limiar a inteligência e a vontade momentaneamente paralisadas já não me podiam disputar à crueldade das minhas impressões verdadeiras), reflectiu, refractou a dolorosa síntese da sobrevivência e do nada na profundidade orgânica e agora translúcida das vísceras misteriosamente iluminadas. Mundo de sono em que a consciência interna, colocada sob a dependência das perturbações dos nossos órgãos, acelera o ritmo do coração ou da respiração, porque uma mesma dose de pavor, de tristeza, de remorso, actua, com um poder centuplicado se for assim injectada nas nossas veias; mal, para percorrer as artérias da cidade subterrânea, embarcámos nas ondas negras do nosso próprio sangue como um Letes interior de sêxtuplos meandros, logo nos aparecem grandes figuras solenes, que nos abordam e nos abandonam, deixando-nos desfeitos em lágrimas.” p.168 “Mas o que é uma recordação de que não nos lembramos? Ou então vamos mais longe. Não nos lembramos das nossas recordações dos últimos trinta anos; mas estamos mergulhados inteiramente nelas; porquê então ficar pelos trintas anos, porque não prolongar para além do nascimento essa vida anterior? Uma vez que não conheço toda uma parte das recordações que estão atrás de mim, uma vez que elas me são invisíveis, que não tenho a faculdade de as chamar a mim, quem me diz que nessa massa para mim desconhecida não haverá umas que remontem a muito para além da minha vida humana? Se posso ter em mim e em torno de mim tantas recordações de que não me lembro, esse olvido (pelo menos, olvido de facto, visto que não tenho a faculdade de ver o que quer que seja) pode conduzir a uma vida que vivi no corpo de outro homem, e até noutro planeta. Um mesmo olvido apaga tudo (..) O ser que eu serei depois da morte não tem mais razões para se recordar do homem que sou desde que nasci do que este para se recordar do que fui antes de nascer.” p. 388 blog link: http://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/2...

Read in Portuguese, complete for the first time between April and June of 2015. All volumes reviewed in my blog, in Portuguese, while reading: Vol I - https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/... Vol II - https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/... Vol III - https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/... Vol IV - https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/... Vol V - https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/... Vol VI - https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/... Vol VII - https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/...

kitaba çok güzel başladım fakat çok yorulmuş bir şekilde bitirdim. özellikle son 200 sayfada sosyete ilişkilerini konuştukları bölüm beni benden aldı, kendi aile şeceremde iki kuşak geriye gidemeyen biri olarak benim durumumun nasıl olduğunu alın siz tahmin edin

I LOVED THIS BOOK!!!! It was such a good book that provided so much insight into what the war is like. Stephen Crane, though he never fought in a war, wrote as if he knew exactly what it was like to fight alongside an army and to see death and destruction. I loved this book and will most definitely read it again.

...how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose their charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not been apprehended by the senses. [...] The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time, the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.' A novel that has lived up to every good thing that has been said of it. To the extent that the trepidation and reluctance with which this reader had embarked on this colossus (the first of a larger and more intimidating monster of a series) had been at half-mark entirely swept away into oblivion, the turning of the pages driven solely by the feverish desire to know what happened next and if it would be just as or far better than what had already happened. Its readability is a surprising point. The 'Combray' section is a tad sluggish when read for the first time but it seems, from the perspective of someone at the last page, that the novel was only biding its time, its beauty that of a slow-budding bloom gradually unfurling itself. Thankfully it does not take too long to be accustomed to its discursive rhythms and thereafter, to enjoy a sentence as it winds its way down the page. Its generosity of language, however, feels precise rather than excessive; its texture and willingness to give pause and add colour gives the novel its aesthetic and emotional richness. To catalogue it as an elaborate meditation on the pangs of emotion and an education on its mercurial nature, and also a study of character and behaviour (especially behaviour around our social betters), and which is also a young man's reflection on his self-education, is to diminish it without fully explaining it. Proust on the other hand, is intent on fully explaining without diminishing the very illumination, the spark of an event or an idea or a person, that had motivated these enthusiastic digressions in the first place. It is a novel of infinite depths. 'One of the qualities that mark a masterwork is the inability of readers ever to feel that they have quite grasped it, or at any rate grasped it in its entirety, its wholeness.' (Joseph Epstein, 'Monsieur Proust’s masterwork') Now at the last page, the first chapter feels ripe for re-reading already. And fruitful years of companionship lie ahead. (Side note: Fine artists know other fine artists. Thank you Yves Saint Laurent.)

Something about Marcel, the narrator of Swann’s Way, reminds me of Michael Jackson. Maybe it’s because, (since he just recently died of mysterious, drug induced causes), wherever I go I’m hearing Rockin’ Robin or Ben or Billy Jean and I'm applying a Michael Jackson spin to everything in life or maybe even if Michael Jackson had not died, but was in fact still preparing for his “This is It” come back tour throughout Europe and beyond – perhaps I would still get this vague thought of MJ while I read of Marcel, suffering from insomnia, crying for his mom’s kiss or knew that Proust himself was sleeping in his cork-lined room waiting for dark so he could get up and write. Well I don’t mean he’s sleeping there now – but I just got so used to the shifting of tenses that I’m carrying on with the technique in my review. There is a lot of meandering and reminiscing going on and sometimes I just can’t stay with the man. Sometimes I stop and take a look at some lilac or lily pad he’s just pointed out and I realize he’s kept going and I have no idea what the heck he said or saw or remembered. And then, bam, he’ll make some sort of dead-on observation that is true to the quick and seems like it should be in a book listing things universal to all. I’m talking about something like this: Because she had no education and was afraid of making mistakes in grammar, she deliberately pronounced things in a garbled way, thinking that if she made a blunder it would be fogged over by such indefiniteness that no one would be able to make it out with any certainty, so that her conversation was reduced to an indistinct hawking, from which emerged now and then the few vocables of which she felt confident. Proust is stream of consciousness writing at its finest. But what he is conscious of is taking walks and going to salons with the pseudo artsy crowd of Paris and that can often get downright tiresome. But I must say that after reading Swann’s Way I feel somewhat more complete. I didn’t realize I had a piece missing, but I think it surely must have been. I already am feeling much more in the loop of things – and who would have thought that reading Proust would place one in the loop? But I am only on page 74 of my next book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog and there have already been four references to Proust which I understood! If I had read these books in reverse order I would have been heading down the Guermantes way under threat of a thunderstorm with my iPod blaring "Don’t Stop 'Til You Get Enough", missing all the details.

Our narrator is in love with Duchesse de Guermantes. He spends so much time positioning himself in places so he can assume the stance of someone who just happens to be passing by. He tries to worm his way into her life and her society because they are just so, so, witty! I mean everyone thinks so. Oh such a ridiculously gay life they all live! Can't you just read and read and read about it? Well I guess I can. I wander off a bit - but then get right back on the path.

Reading Proust is the euphoric bliss of reading the most perfect of all descriptions followed by the tedium of overexposure to some sort of plant or mole or off-balance characteristic of some major or minor character. At times I wanted nothing more than to dive into the budding grove and take a nap.

As I sat, Proust's third book open before me, in the concrete open-air portico of the 6th Street McDonald's, oppressed by the irony of nourishing my mind while poisoning my intestines, the two homeless men to whom I had a few minutes ago refused a dollar (not out of pinch-fistedness, mind you, but for the practical reason that I had on my person no cash but only my wife's credit card, which I could not be expected to loan out, however briefly, however charitably, to just anyone) sat down on either side of me and dumped out an assortment of fresh and delicately wrapped McChickens onto the table, previously the stool for the French master, but now a bizarre smörgåsbord of cuisine de l'intellect and dead American poultry. Taken aback, I examined the two men's faces, hoping to ascertain whether they had chosen to sit so uncomfortably close to me out of spite, as if to emphasize their awareness of the discomfort their black nails, sore-ridden arms, patchy facial hair, sour breath, and half-formed babble-talk gave me, or whether they were simply drawn, as people who live in social worlds whose strictures are less unspoken than yours or mine, less intuited, not communicated through minutiae of body language and ironic tones but through harsh words and even fists, and in a world more rife with pain, to another person's company, regardless of that person's apparent class or hygiene, just as strangers in a snowstorm might huddle together for warmth, the preponderance of their suffering having erased the arbitrary separations of their flesh which in fact only prevent their internal warmths from colluding to save them from an icy death. Their faces, however, were as blank as that snowstorm, and I could not discern their motive. Nevertheless, it could not have been, as I feared, a malicious motivation, for they did not speak to or even glance at me, but continued a conversation in which they had been immersed before my appearance as, apparently, a new piece of scenery. "She'll be back," said the first man, possessed of wildly curly hair and a mangy beard. "And if she ain't, I won't." The other man nodded in agreement with this meaningless construction. "She's just pissed off," the mangy one continued, "because I won't do her damn drugs with her." He unwrapped his first McChicken. "I ain't a drug user, I'm an alcoholic." "I like marijuana, to be honest," said the other man. "I only drink vodka," said the mangy one. "But she's crazy. She just wants me to do the methamphetamines with her. She's all pissed off. She's probably still walkin'." He shaded his eyes and peered down 6th Street as if seeking her faint figure. "She'll be back," he said again, conclusively. "And if she ain't, I won't." The other man spoke up. "Hell, at Target some guy asked me to wear a wire." "Yeah?" said the mangy one, impressed. "Oh yeah. He wanted to know about the homeless population of Lawrence. How they're doin', you know? So I'm wearing a wire right now. I told him, though, I said 'the homeless population of Lawrence is a-ok.' But he still wanted me to wear it. See?" He pulled up his shirt to show us a mottled chest bisected by a thin black wire which, by its presence, seemed to lend a sort of feudal dignity to the tiny black wires of his chest hair, as if it were a king among peasants. "Hell," said the mangy one in admiration. I reflected as they spoke that I ought to feel empathy for these men, but I found myself only thinking of the meth-addicted girlfriend, and was surprised to find myself sympathetic to her. I imagined the woman's desire, fueled by the transcendence and consequent misery of her own dalliance with chemical pleasures, to have her "man" join her in a similar state to the one which afforded her such ecstasy and agony. To be coming up, rising like Everest through every layer of fog and condensation which obscure the senses and finally to emerge, a rarefied peak of crystal clarity and frozen sensation, above all moisture and atmosphere, and to see your only partner, meanwhile, in the inverse trajectory of the alcoholic - slumping down into the valley of warm blackness and moist comfort, crowded in by the dense jungle of intoxication, glaucomic, blinded, numb - was to lack some vital validation which would have been afforded by a simultaneity between your experiences. It may be, I mused, that that validation of shared experience was the only comfort she sought from him, and in fact that any person seeks from their lover, whether their "Everest" is the white hell of chemical bliss or something more substantial.... .... And then something caught my eye in a small patch of grass next to the portico: it was a shock of dandelions, silver heads lit like glass in the morning sun, bowing before the procession of a stately breeze. Hard upon, I felt the breeze on my own face. I smiled - I forgot the suffering of the two men on either side of me. I thought of how good it was to be alive and young with robust credit; and to be clean and free from addiction, and to have regularly distributed facial hair; and I saw the gates of superiority and understanding, of nobility and free will, towering over me like the Golden Arches themselves, and I entered in.

Definitely the hardest (portion of a) book I've ever read, but well worth it. Proust's prose is labyrinthine and dizzying, like trying to follow a single leaf in a torrent of wind, but when one catches glimpse of the leaf it is achingly beautiful. Not sure I could ever in good faith recommend this to anyone because taking on a behemoth of a novel like this one has to be a personal decision. The experience will certainly be an intensely personal one, and if one doesn't find it rewarding or find one's own life echoed in the spiraling paragraphs, one won't make it past the first 20 pages. But to anyone who wants to take a deep-dive into a thousand pages of a lonely French boy's frantic imagination, I say, be brave! You won't regret it. Now for the next six volumes. We'll see if my review is premature or not.

His genius meditations on Time, Love, and Society as well as the incandescent descriptions of natural beauty more than make up for Proust's occasional tendency to jabber.

As I sat, Proust's third book open before me, in the concrete open-air portico of the 6th Street McDonald's, oppressed by the irony of nourishing my mind while poisoning my intestines, the two homeless men to whom I had a few minutes ago refused a dollar (not out of pinch-fistedness, mind you, but for the practical reason that I had on my person no cash but only my wife's credit card, which I could not be expected to loan out, however briefly, however charitably, to just anyone) sat down on either side of me and dumped out an assortment of fresh and delicately wrapped McChickens onto the table, previously the stool for the French master, but now a bizarre smörgåsbord of cuisine de l'intellect and dead American poultry. Taken aback, I examined the two men's faces, hoping to ascertain whether they had chosen to sit so uncomfortably close to me out of spite, as if to emphasize their awareness of the discomfort their black nails, sore-ridden arms, patchy facial hair, sour breath, and half-formed babble-talk gave me, or whether they were simply drawn, as people who live in social worlds whose strictures are less unspoken than yours or mine, less intuited, not communicated through minutiae of body language and ironic tones but through harsh words and even fists, and in a world more rife with pain, to another person's company, regardless of that person's apparent class or hygiene, just as strangers in a snowstorm might huddle together for warmth, the preponderance of their suffering having erased the arbitrary separations of their flesh which in fact only prevent their internal warmths from colluding to save them from an icy death. Their faces, however, were as blank as that snowstorm, and I could not discern their motive. Nevertheless, it could not have been, as I feared, a malicious motivation, for they did not speak to or even glance at me, but continued a conversation in which they had been immersed before my appearance as, apparently, a new piece of scenery. "She'll be back," said the first man, possessed of wildly curly hair and a mangy beard. "And if she ain't, I won't." The other man nodded in agreement with this meaningless construction. "She's just pissed off," the mangy one continued, "because I won't do her damn drugs with her." He unwrapped his first McChicken. "I ain't a drug user, I'm an alcoholic." "I like marijuana, to be honest," said the other man. "I only drink vodka," said the mangy one. "But she's crazy. She just wants me to do the methamphetamines with her. She's all pissed off. She's probably still walkin'." He shaded his eyes and peered down 6th Street as if seeking her faint figure. "She'll be back," he said again, conclusively. "And if she ain't, I won't." The other man spoke up. "Hell, at Target some guy asked me to wear a wire." "Yeah?" said the mangy one, impressed. "Oh yeah. He wanted to know about the homeless population of Lawrence. How they're doin', you know? So I'm wearing a wire right now. I told him, though, I said 'the homeless population of Lawrence is a-ok.' But he still wanted me to wear it. See?" He pulled up his shirt to show us a mottled chest bisected by a thin black wire which, by its presence, seemed to lend a sort of feudal dignity to the tiny black wires of his chest hair, as if it were a king among peasants. "Hell," said the mangy one in admiration. I reflected as they spoke that I ought to feel empathy for these men, but I found myself only thinking of the meth-addicted girlfriend, and was surprised to find myself sympathetic to her. I imagined the woman's desire, fueled by the transcendence and consequent misery of her own dalliance with chemical pleasures, to have her "man" join her in a similar state to the one which afforded her such ecstasy and agony. To be coming up, rising like Everest through every layer of fog and condensation which obscure the senses and finally to emerge, a rarefied peak of crystal clarity and frozen sensation, above all moisture and atmosphere, and to see your only partner, meanwhile, in the inverse trajectory of the alcoholic - slumping down into the valley of warm blackness and moist comfort, crowded in by the dense jungle of intoxication, glaucomic, blinded, numb - was to lack some vital validation which would have been afforded by a simultaneity between your experiences. It may be, I mused, that that validation of shared experience was the only comfort she sought from him, and in fact that any person seeks from their lover, whether their "Everest" is the white hell of chemical bliss or something more substantial.... .... And then something caught my eye in a small patch of grass next to the portico: it was a shock of dandelions, silver heads lit like glass in the morning sun, bowing before the procession of a stately breeze. Hard upon, I felt the breeze on my own face. I smiled - I forgot the suffering of the two men on either side of me. I thought of how good it was to be alive and young with robust credit; and to be clean and free from addiction, and to have regularly distributed facial hair; and I saw the gates of superiority and understanding, of nobility and free will, towering over me like the Golden Arches themselves, and I entered in.

“At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.” Hemingway called this work “one of the finest books of our literature.” His praise, along with my own Civil War obsession, made this novel an easy choice for me to pick up. Broadly, it’s about a young man’s experience as a volunteer soldier for the Union. Our protagonist has a name — Henry Fleming — but is most often referred to as just “the youth” or some other slightly derisive label. While many Civil War novels are rife with detail (sometimes, it seems, as a way for an author to show off their knowledge), Red Badge doesn’t even give specific place names let alone detailed troop movements or casualty numbers. Rather, Crane writes an intense psychological portrait of what it’s like to be a soldier. Henry wrestles with his conscience almost constantly; primarily, will he win honor by earning a visible “red badge of courage” (a battle wound), or would he shrink in the heat of battle and acquire a scar of dishonor on his soul? There are plenty of battle scenes to be had, but the reader spends a lot of time in Henry’s head. Rather than the overly valorous stories you often read about war, this is a realistic account of the battles that soldiers have within their own psyche. Will they display bravery in the gravest of circumstances? Or will they shrivel in the bigness of the moment? Many critics even today call it one of the most realistic war novels ever written (despite that lack of given detail). That should tell you how much of a probe it is into the headspace of a soldier. As for my own reading experience: I enjoyed the first half immensely and breezed through it rather quickly. After that, it was a little slower going. Henry got a little bit annoying (rather than just interesting) and the story felt somewhat repetitive. Ultimately, though, it was a rewarding story and I enjoyed the ending. Certainly worth it for any Civil War buff.

First half was good but the second half was exhausting just read the parts about the madeleines and the hawthorns and you’re good

Looks like this is simply aren't my cup of tea. I love to read quickly and books like these take way too much time to digest. On top of that, the author used so many words that the main point got lost in the overabundance. The effusive narrative flows well making it easy to read. That being said it was hard to care about any of the characters or even tell how old, approximately, the narrator is.

3.5/5

I've been meaning to read this for years and was looking forward to finally giving it a try, but it for the most part just wasn't for me. Cut out about 100 pages of the middle section and maybe I'd feel differently. There were a fair few nice passages especially in the first and third sections. I imagine this volume fits into the bigger work in a way that somehow redeems the annoying middle section, but I'm not sure I've got the patience to stick it out through six more volumes to see the payoff.