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Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Format: Box set
The gift-boxed set of the three paperbacks.
Marcel Proust whiled away the first half of his life as a self-conscious aesthete and social climber. The second half he spent in the creation of the mighty roman-fleuve that is Remembrance of Things Past, memorializing his own dandyism and parvenu hijinks even as he revealed their essential hollowness. Proust begins, of course, at the beginning--with the earliest childhood perceptions and sorrows. Then, over several thousand pages, he retraces the course of his own adolescence and adulthood, democratically dividing his experiences among the narrator and a sprawling cast of characters. Who else has ever decanted life into such ornate, knowing, wrought-iron sentences? Who has subjected love to such merciless microscopy, discriminating between the tiniest variations of desire and self-delusion? Who else has produced a grief-stricken record of time's erosion that can also make you laugh for entire pages? The answer to all these questions is: nobody.
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| Note: this review is of Heuet's adaptation, not the original book |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
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Stephane Heuet, Remembrance of Things Past: Within a Budding Grove, vol. I (ComicsLit, 2000)
Heuet continues his ambitious adaptation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past with the first part of Within a Budding Grove. Our narrator is growing up, and the focus of this volume is a trip to the seaside, meeting some people, getting in touch with old friends, always silently reflecting on both his memories of the past (of course) and the social consciousness of the world around him. If you liked the first one, you'll like this one as well. ***
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| The Holy Grail |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Very well....I'm finally, after years of putting it off, writing a review of a work of Art that can't be reviewed in any meaningful sense of the term, a work of Art that approaches the sacred. As another reviewer puts it, if you think you have read literature with "depths" before, this opus will make ANYTHING you've ever read seem, in comparison, like one of those vapid books one picks up at airports during layovers. It is a work by which other novels, poems, paintings are to be judged rather than the other way around. In fact, after reading Proust, one can immediately tell if other "great writers" have read him almost from the start. Recent Booker Prize winning John Banville's The Sea is a good example of this.
The first time I read this work, about ten years ago, it was the ONLY thing I did, so enraptured was I. For a month, all I did was lie on my bed or, alternately, on the sofa downstairs and read, putting a dash mark at the end of one of the two-page paragraphs when I had to get up to eat or to check the mail or to feed my dog or to answer the phone or to get some shuteye, and then dive back in as soon as possible. - I don't use the term "dive" lightly - That's the only metaphor that comes close to expressing what it's like to read this book. You dive in and plunge deeper and deeper than you thought any Art could ever take you and, if you make it to the end, arise out of the deep cadences of philosophical reverie that constitute Proust's spellbinding meditations on love and time to behold a world rich and strange. - Proust truly does change your life. One never really recovers from reading him.
A few comments on what some of the other (serious) reviewers have said: 1) A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is not untranslatable and I don't know why exactly the English translation wasn't In Search of Lost Time instead of Remembrance of Things Past, taken, of course from the Shakespearian sonnet. But there it is. 2) I am in complete agreement with the reviewer who avers that unless you have been in love and suffered, which critic Harold Bloom remarks, commenting on Proust, means, eventually, everyone who has ever been in love, you will miss Proust's deepest apercus and regard them (as one reviewer does) as "silly."
I'm not sure what else I can say. I've probably go on too much already. If you are a true lover of Art in its highest sense, please pick up this Holy Grail of literature, even if you are intimidated, as many reviewers admit to being at first. For, as Proust says:
"Thus, it is in states of mind destined not to last that we make the irrevocable decisions of our lives."
Reading Proust is one of these decisions you won't regret
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| A Worthy Investment |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Yes, it is long. Yes, the sentences are complex. Nonetheless, this novel is a worthy investment of one's efforts, because it isolates events that are so innately human that anyone who reads this novel will relate to it. Beyond just reading it because one feels obligated to do so as bibliophile, enjoy the greatest achievement of 20th-century France because it is witty, insightful, daring, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.
I recommend reading this novel quickly, rather than being bogged down by details that result in confusion or distraction. I read the novel in 15 weeks in a class at UC Berkeley, and have concluded that it must be read twice--once, to understand the plot and big ideas, and a second time to linger over the concepts that piqued one's interest the most. However, even if only reading it once, it is worth an investment of one's time and emotion.
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| Begin with Swann's Way, go from there |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Proust's great novel does not need to be read all at one time. I read it one volume at a time and usually took six months to a year off between volumes. I was always able to pick up right where I left off with nothing lost, like visiting old friends. I think it is OK to think of Remembrance of Things Past as a series of novels. I know Proust would disagree with this. It was very important to him that his readers consider carefully the unifying theme and symmetry to which he aspired in the novel, but I think that aspect became less and less tangible as his manuscript grew from 1000 pages originally to 2000, and then from 2000 to the 4000 odd pages it ended up being (he continued to expand the manuscript right up until the time of his death). In any event, the grand theme he designed will not be lost on you if you stay with the novel until the end and it is wonderful when you consider it, but it is not the reason I love the novel so well. Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove, and The Guermantes Way are decisively the best volumes and, fortunately, they are the first three in that order. If you like Swann's Way but are intimidated by the gargantuan size of the entire series, then plan to read at least the first three volumes. In this way you will have experienced Proust's best material. The entire novel is essentially a fictional autobiography or memoir. It is narrated by a man whose name we are never given, although he does hypothetically suggest the name "Marcel" for himself on one occasion about three-fourths of the way through. The story is inspired by events and people from Proust's life, but it is strictly a fiction. Swann's Way is the only volume in which the narrator is not the central figure in the story. It is, ultimately, a conventional story with several fascinating characters and humorous, razor sharp dialogue. There are several recurring, ingeniously depicted themes in the novel, not the least of which is involuntary memory, and it often reads like a deeply philosophical essay, with Proust wandering off on one of his famous digressions. The philosophical digressions are the best part for me, but I could see why they could be distracting or tedious to some. Proust's sentences quite frequently stretch to 10, 20, or even 30 lines, with multiple subordinating clauses. It can be dizzying. Some have claimed that this makes him a stream-of-consciousness writer. I flat out reject this notion. It is never, ever pretentious or unnecessarily wordy. Literary historians love to bracket Proust in the same category as Joyce (like art historians like to couple, for example, Van Gough and Gauguin), but the two writers are as different as night and day. Every sentence is worth the time in Proust, there are no word games, there is no obscurity, and it is all essential and rewarding. The only complaint I have is that he spends too much time on the theme of jealousy in the later volumes, a theme he covered quite well in Swann's way. Those volumes are worth reading too, but they have a tendency to drag out in a way that the first three volumes don't. Things do pick up a bit with the final volume, Time Regained, where everything comes full circle.
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| The Best Work of "Fiction" Ever Written |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Moncrieff/Kilmartin's translation is still the best. Proust's life-work is the most psychologically acute novel ever written, and a perfect match between form and content. His form is the memoir, conceived as a piece of music, with themes and variations, codas and recapitulations. The content is a list of evolving concerns, from love (in all its forms) to aesthetic creation and appreciation, as well as a sort of living autopsy of the aristocracy of his time. His motives were manifold, but it seems Proust primarily wanted to get in the final word on those people he knew throughout his life, and show he both understood them (better than they themselves) and that they had little inkling of his amazing inner life. For all his encounters with and criticisms of snobs and poseurs throughout the work, and his tendency to fully absorb himself in his experiences, Marcel the narrator risks coming off as a snob himself; but quite the opposite, he denigrates himself constantly with reference to his own writing abilities, up into the very last section of "Time Regained" when the structural idea for the novel we have just read comes to him. He's disappointed many times by his own experiences, when they are is measured and conditioned by the background of his keen aesthetic imagination. His salvation is both the Idea for the novel, and a theory of time/identity which has been "calling out" to him with his famous episodes of "involuntary memory" (the most famous of which is the tea-dipped madeleine). As one reads on, there are times when it seems Proust has suspended all action and narrative in favor of impressions which resonate against one another. It may seem gratuitous or self-indulgent, but he is "performing" his theory at the same time he's telling you about it. They each have a purpose, and it seems he's trying to enact a philosophical theory of identity and experience: as if we the subject are nodes of activity that blend memory and present conscious experience.
"Remembrance of Things Past" can be a difficult work to read, but it is so very much worth it. One needs no guide to read this work; it's not as allusive as "Ulysses" nor esoteric like "Gravity's Rainbow". Proust's style is very reader-friendly (albeit he spins very long sentences). He respects the reader, and wants her to understand exactly where he's coming from, for this novel is like the map Borges once described in one of his "Ficciones": it's a representation so large and subtle and complex that it is as big as what it depicts. If Proust were alive today, he'd probably be kibbitzing with Hollywood stars or the world's billionaire elites...And not much of this book would change!
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