Review: Red Mist, by Patricia Cornwell

The Kay Scarpetta series is my guilty pleasure. My book candy. It has no seriously redeeming value, but I have always enjoyed the characters. As it seems to be with all series, the first books were the best, and her 2010 release left much to be desired, so I was a little apprehensive about the newest book, Red Mist, which came out on Tuesday. Actually, though, this newest additon to the series was a return to many of the things I loved in her earlier books. Scarpetta is in South Carolina for this one, looking further into the death of her deputy chief Fielding. There is plenty in this episode that harks back to the previous one, but our old Scarpetta is back—clear thinking and organized. All our usual characters are here as well, and we get our triumphant ending. There are some slow parts, and the book seems to take a while to get started, but Cornwell's writing is familiar once again, and the story is enjoyable.

Book 49 on my way to 52.

Review: The House I loved, by Tatiana de Rosnay

This is the first preview book I've read that I truly didn't enjoy. I didn't care for de Rosnay's writing in Sarah's Key, and this was far less sophisticated. Rose has spent all of her married life in the home on rue Childebert, and though Napoleon’s Prefect now plans to tear the neighborhood down in the name of progress, she is unwilling to part with it. While she doggedly awaits the impending destruction she writes letters to her beloved late husband, sharing memories from their past, both good and bad, and building up to a final confession that she has kept as her secret for thirty years. Set in nineteenth century Paris during the Haussmann reconstructions of the Second Empire, this story is as much about that iconic city and its legacy as it is about the strength of its citizens. Those who enjoyed Sarah’s Key will recognize de Rosnay’s love for France and trend toward poignancy and tenacity in her characters, but this newest novel is more one dimensional than her earlier work. Told entirely through letters, the story tends to feel choppy and forced, and events are not related in chronological order, leaving the tale disrupted and at times hard to follow.

Book 49 on my way to 52.

Review: Sarah's Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay

I picked this one up because I received de Rosnay's newest novel as a review book from Book List and I figured I'd better brush up a bit on the author's previous work. In Sarah's Key, a woman in current Paris seeks information about the round-up of the Jews during the WWII occupation, specifically about a Jewish girl and her family who once lived in the same apartment. Throughout her search she is faced with the dark facts about the round-up while also dealing with problems in her own life.
I think book was warmly received, and it's hard to speak against it because of the subject matter—the roundup of Jews in Paris, France, is not a well known piece of history and deserves some highlighting, but I found this book tedious and depressing. Granted, the subject matter is depressing, but tackling it from the view point of a repressed woman in current times just added to the heaviness of the story. I see that parallels are being drawn between the time periods—repression then, repression now, and de Rosnay does a fine job of drawing the character of the French citizens, both now and then, but I expected something that felt uplifting, and never really found it. What I did find was florid and overly dramatic writing, and my attention waned about half way through.

Book 48 on my way to 53.

Review: Wild Abandon, by Joe Dunthorne

Blaen-y-Llyn, founded by Don and his wife, Freya, among others, is a commune dedicated to a natural way of life. Though once a thriving community of like-minded individuals, over the years membership has dwindled and now even Patrick, one of the founding members, has left to escape Don’s controlling nature. With Freya thinking of doing the same, Don’s marriage is faltering as well. In search of stability his teenage daughter, Kate, escapes to college, but living with her boyfriend’s family isn’t the haven of normalcy she was hoping for, and she left her beloved younger brother behind in her hasty retreat. As each of the characters comes to terms with the reality of their lives and relationships, a story unfolds that is about midlife crises, adolescent dramas, and self-discovery. With well developed characters and a dark humor reminiscent of that in his first novel Submarine, Dunthorne delivers hilarity and heart-break while redefining the essence of normal in this story about what makes a family, and what makes a family dysfunctional.
This was a great read.

Book 47 on my way to 52.

Review: The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides

I really enjoyed The Virgin Suicides, and loved Middlesex, both by Jeffrey Eugenides, so when I caught wind of this release I preordered the book. I'm shameless that way. Unfortunately I found it not as good as Middlesex, but that isn't actually saying a whole lot because I was such a big fan of Middlesex. The Marriage Plot is almost a modern (eighties anyway) version of The Portrait of a Lady, an intelligent young college senior torn between worldliness and two different men makes a difficult decision, and finds herself wrong and trapped in the end. Told from three different view points, the young lady's and each of the young men in turn, the story is engaging and enjoyable. Being set in the eighties, this will be especially enjoyabe for anyone who lived through that decade. Eek. So I didn't find it as good as Middlesex, it was still a fantastic read.

Book 46 on my way to 52.

Review: One Moment, One Morning, by Sarah Rayner

I had a really hard time reading this one. Simon, only fifty-one years young, dies suddenly one morning on the train to work. He leaves behind a wife, Karen, and two young children (now you see why it was a tough read), but they are not the only people touched by his loss. Karen’s best friend, Anna, and Lou, a stranger who was also on the train that morning, find that their lives will also be forever changed. Though Karen, Anna, and Lou each have something different to learn from the loss, they ultimately find themselves bound together in a friendship forged during the most trying of times. While the subject matter tends toward the trite, Rayner’s writing is concise and contemporary, bringing her characters and their emotions to life in so realistic and believable a way as to avoid the cliche. Her portrayal of emotion is authentic, even to the point of being painful to read, but this story is as much about relationships, hope, and second chances as it is about death and loss, making the most valuable lesson of all that we each have only one life to live. A difficult read, but a worthwhile one for sure.

This was book 45 on my way to 52.

Review: Greasewood Creek, by Pamela Steele

This book was pure poetry. I started reading it like a standard novel and found myself a little befudled, but a few chapters in I caught on and really started to enjoy the language. The story was a bit depressing, though. Avery is just a child when her younger sister dies, followed close after by her father’s desertion and her mother’s slide into alcoholism. Surrounded by family and friends she is able to stay and grow up on the Oregon ranch where she was born. As an adult she finds constancy there, but cannot escape the guilt she feels over her sister’s death. She hopes for happiness finally in the child she is expecting with her life partner, Davis, but when their newborn son dies the same forces of grief that tore apart her childhood engulf her again. Avery’s inability to escape the past is palpable in this fragmented narrative that mixes the present with flashbacks to her childhood and teen years, and Steele’s poetic style brings the beautiful Oregon ranch setting to life. Steele has depicted the depression, grief, and guilt of living after a loss with expert clarity, making this a powerful and faithful story of finding the inner strength to move forward and be reborn.

Book 44 on my way to 52.

Review: The Millennium Series, by Stieg Larsson

I already reviewed the first book in this series, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but it took a while to get around to the other two books in the trillogy. I really enjoyed the first book, which was a stand-alone, but the second two fell a bit short of the mark for me. The Girl Who played With Fire picked up where Tattoo left off, then immediately started to delve into the past of the most intriguing character. The mystery that follows through both remaining books touches on the issue civil rights as they stand in the shadow of government power. As with his first book, Larsson approached the mystery from multiple angles so the point of view changes from time to time, setting the stage for plenty of dramatic irony. My complaint about these second two books is that they seem to spend an unfortunate amount of time going nowhere or reiterating information from too many directions. Still, the characters are true and enjoyable and the end delivers enough of a payoff to make the reading worth while.

Books 39 and 40 on my way to 52

Review: Married but Looking, by Daniel S. Libman

The short story can be a difficult thing to master. I was skeptical about this collection, but about the third story in I realized I was really enjoying myself, and Anaïs Nin came to mind more than once, and I love Anaïs Nin. The stories are definitely out there; a man using an escort service after the death of his wife, a couple reevaluating their basic belief system after being relocated to a different country and stumbling upon head harvesters, a best man attending a wedding solo, failed vasectomies, attempted affairs—these are just some of the subjects in this collection of short stories that center around relationships and sexuality. As in Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus, from the mundane to the surreal each story in this collection is a well written and intense character study, the main character being most often a relationship or marriage. Be they a suburban father who desires to possess a Tantric prostitute, or a couple riding a tandem bike together to overcome perceived infidelities, Libman’s characters are very real in their everyday lives and flaws. Yet Libman's tales are anything but predictable, and they keep the reader hooked from one story to the next. With tones that vary from dark to light, these stories are cynical examinations of life and relationships that make up a truly enjoyable read.

Book 43 on my way to 52.

Review: Broadway Baby, by Alan Shapiro

This is a debut novel. A somewhat depressing one at that.
Miriam wants nothing more than to become famous on Broadway. Her love for the stage begins during childhood, living with her grandparents in pre-World War II Boston, but it lasts all of her life. When she becomes distracted by marriage and then children she projects those dreams of stardom onto one of her sons instead. The struggle to achieve her goal through him, and the damage it does to herself and to the rest of her family, is painful to witness. Shapiro has written the story of Miriam’s life much like a true memoir, the focus being on Miriam, but he has also created a book full of caricatures that reflect back to the reader recognizable personalities. Though tedious at times the story has something to say to everyone who has ever had a goal and failed to reach it. Far from being just a life story, this novel is about dreams and their sometimes tragic intersections with reality.

Book 42 on my way to 52

Review: The Fallback Plan, by Leigh Stein

Thanks to an awesome friend I've gotten a gig reviewing books for the ALA's Book List magazine. They send me four or five books every month, I read them and write a short review that will be published in the print ad online version of their magazine. It doesn't bring in much money, but it's a dream project for me—checking out new books and getting to talk about them? Sign me up. I'm allowed to share my reviews here after they've been published in the magazine, so I'll be posting them here with a few changes.
The Fallback Plan was interesting. I found it hard to get into, but warmed up to it after a time. The book is about, Esther who graduates from Northwestern University and finds herself jobless, directionless, and moving back in with her parents. When her mother finds her a job caring for the four year old daughter of a neighboring family she grudgingly agrees. But the family lost an infant child earlier in the year, and Esther, struggling with her own depression, finds herself caring for both the girl and the grieving mother. As she also navigates through romantic relationships with the girl’s father and a friend her own age we witness her inner conflict and personal growth. Although too referential to be as timeless, this well developed coming of age story is in line with Judy Blume’s Are you There God? It’s Me, Margaret, and Forever. Esther’s struggle with clinical depression might alienate some readers, but like Blume’s characters she is authentic and likable. Written with witty humor and an informal, contemporary language, Stein’s debut novel will resonate with a new generation of students for whom college is no longer the final step on the road to adulthood.

Book 41 on my way to 52

Review: The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

I wasn't going to read this book. Something about its fast rise to popularity along with its quick step into the movie theater made me rather wary of it. It was only after numerous recommendations that I requested it from the library, and then I had to wait several weeks before it became available. All of that waiting, and I read it in two days. It's not a short book, and not overly easy read, I just couldn't put it down. My sleep suffered.

Told from three different view points, The Help is a fictional story set in Jackson, Mississippi during the civil rights era. Skeeter is a young white girl, just home from college and living with her family on their cotten farm. She is troubled by what she sees around her, but initially reluctant to become involved. Looking for a way to break into the publishing world, she sets her sights on annonymously writing a book from the point of view of the black domestic workers in Jackson. To do so she enlists the help of Aibileen and Minny, both black domestic maids working for white members of the country club set. It's their voices, rich in dialect, and their stories, full of the culture and history of the era, that make this book deserving of non-stop reading. Well devloped characters and strong writing filled with the hate, shame, pride and hope of an era, will make it an enduring hit.

Book 34 on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: The Secret Zoo, by Bryan Chick

Late one night Megan notices something strange about the animals in the next door zoo. Shortly after that she disappears. Her brother, Noah, is convinced that the zoo had something to do with her disappearance, and when he starts receiving strange visitations and communications from the animals there, he enlists the help of close friends Ella and Richie in getting her back. The kids are used to having adventures together, but they aren't at all prepared for the bizarre experience that awaits them at the zoo in their quest to rescue Megan. Told with humor and warmth, The Secret Zoo is a unique story of friendship and conservation, and in this capacity it was enjoyable read. But being a mystery, the element of suspense is strong, and a war at the end of the book brings fighting and death into the conversation, so this may not be the best read aloud for young children. Additionally I found the sarcastic tone of humor to be off-putting, especially in an example of young friendships.

Review: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, by Jaonne Greenberg

For most of her life Deborah has been slipping further and further into a world different from our own, a world richly created by her schizophrenia and existing only in her mind. As her illness becomes more apparent in adolescence, her parents finally recognize the need for treatment, and send her to a rest home to work with a renowned doctor. Over the next three years we witness Deborah's struggle to accept reality and close the door on the world of her illness. Told mostly from Deborah's view point, this is a semi-autobiographical novel, and Greenberg's telling is unsurprisingly expert. She has drawn the world from inside the mind of young Deborah with careful detail and well expressed emotion. Though dark at times, this is a beautiful book that escapes being too dense with an occasional lightness and humor found in its thread of hope and friendship.
Book 33 on my way to 52 in 2011

Swann In Love, pp.355-378: The beginning of Swann's fall

Swann falls out of favor with the Verdurins. He is usurped by the Comte de Forcheville, who is willing to lie in order to remain in their good graces. And so, Swann's integrity fails him. Mme. Verdurin is already trying to set Odette up with Forcheville, and edge Swann out (p.373). In fact, in comparing the two M. Verdurin declares that he dislikes Swann's continual reluctance to share an opinion, while he greatly appreciates Forcheville's willingness to "tell you straight out what he thinks" (p.376), ironic since Forcheville is merely performing lip service. But the Verdurins, no doubt, prefer the lie.

Also ironic...their claiming Swann to be "a failure, one of those small-minded individuals who are envious of anything that's at all big" (p.377). So obvious it's almost not worth noting.

But Swann's fall from grace is not due only to the appearance of Forcheville. The Verdurins are known to be jealous of their "faithful" having relationships, so Swann's pointed interest in Odette alone could put him out of favor (remember, he has wooed her away from the group on occassion), but he also fails to follow some of the hosts' rules regarding absolute worship of the faithful, especially Cottard and Brichot. Forcheville, on the other hand, shows proper adulation towards all the faithful present, and in fact says little that isn't simply honoring one of the other guests.

We meet Brichot. He is a professor of something at the Sorbonne. His speech is peppered not with English like Odette's, but with Latin and other traditional references. He is intelligent but would not be welcome in the salons of the upper class because he is incredibly boring, giving speeches without social awareness. This accentuates the satire drawn in the Verdurin's drawing room with reference to the upper class and noble salons. Then Swann has the audacity to critique him to Mme. Verdurin (p.375)

And M. Verdurin has now perfected his version of the fake laugh. No need for real merriment in this house. (p.372)

Cool stuff
Use of the article "de" in French names. Often, but not always, connected to nobility. Notably, though, in later years some people added it in order to appear noble born.

Vocabulary
Termagant (p.357) a violent, argumentative woman

demirep (p.375) a woman of ill repute

Swann in Love, pp.341-355: Vulgar Odette, and social commentary

Beginning with "Except when he asked her for Vinteuil's little phrase..."

A closer look at Odette. She does not understand Swann—he is so far superior to her intellectually that she can't see the forest for the trees and instead believes him "inferior, intellectually, to what she had supposed." At the same time "she was more impressed by his indifference to money, by his kindness to everyone, by his courtesy and tact," (p.342) which makes sense, if she is basically a courtesan.

Odette apparently also has her own sense of fashion which deviates from the classic definition of the word as given by Swann, saying that

"it emanates from a comparatively small number of individuals, who project it to a considerable distance—more and more faintly the further one is from their intimate centre—within the circle of their friends and the friends of their friends, whose names form a sort of tabulated index." (p.343)

Odette longs to be in fashion, but her fashion plight may be similar to her social plight, when she refuses Swann's invitations to take her into society, and that of the Verdurins, who declaim all the most popular salons to be boring, perhaps as a means of protecting themselves from the disappointment of social shunning.

She doesn't find Swann to be as in fashion as she would like. She is displeased with his choice of abode, as she believes the Quai d'Orleans to be "unworthy of him." Interestingly, the Quai d'Orleans was (and is) an established part of town, apparently called home by many artists and writers during the late 19th century. Odette's real beef with the place seems to be its age. She has more respect for the "sham-antique" and would not have him living "among a lot of broken-down chairs and threadbare carpets." She does greatly respect those who enjoyed "picking up antiques, who liked poetry, despised sordid calculations of profit and loss, and nourished ideals of honour and love," but believes "there was no need actually to have those tastes, as long as one proclaimed them." (p.247) So again we see Odette as duplicitous vulgar: not only does she fail to see established value, but again her speech is peppered with English phrases, like "rummaging," "bric-a-brac," and especially "smart," which implies she has traded French tradition for the vulgarity of contemporary English or even American.

Swann is in love with being in love, and he will do anything to keep that feeling alive, and to keep Odette in love with him, right down to lowering himself.

"But, now that he was in love with Odette, all this was changed; to share in her sympathies, to strive to be one with her in spirit, was a task so attractive that he tried to find enjoyment in the things that she liked, and did find a pleasure, not only in imitating her habits but in adopting her opinions, which was all the deeper because, as those habits and opinions had no roots in his own intelligence, they reminded him only of his love," (p.349)

He is seriously love sick, and Proust writes his plight very naturally and deeply. The mental journey makes me think of a D. H. Lawrence character or two.

But oh the social commentary. Odette is not really a likeable person. She is a twit at best, short of intelligence and identifiable values would seem a satire of the lower classes doing their best to move their way up—the proverbial social climber—but then Swann assigns no more value than Odette to the social establishment, and he is far more likeable and no less of a social climber, having once been more middle class along with M's family and now moving in the upper most social circles.

"the objects we admire have no absolute value in themselves, that the whole thing is a matter of period and class, is no more than a series of fashions, the most vulgar of which are worth just as much as those which are regarded as the most refined." (of Swann's opinion, p.350)

The late 19th century was a time of social mobility, and these are Proust's sketches of the times, but I'd like to read more about his position on the situation.

There are a lot of cool references in this section that I didn't research this time. Some of that information has been informative, and all of it has been fun, but I do want to finish this book during my lifetime.

Review: Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves, by Naomi Aldort

Respect, authenticity, and logic. Those are the three key ingredients to raising a healthy, happy, and productive child as I heard them in reading this book. Aldort presents a lot of good points and great suggestions here, but it wouldn't be a parenting book if it didn't come across as a little self-indulgent and didn't have some kind of agenda. For Aldort, who actually either falsified her credentials or is the biggest dope on the planet (source), the agenda begins with attachment parenting and moves smoothly into gentle parenting. That sounds good, but many of her expectations felt downright unrealistic to me, and the supposedly real dialogue is incredibly stilted. I did take a lot away from this book, but I was looking to it for general guidance and rough ideas, not as a parenting bible.

Swann in Love, pp.320-341: Odette, Swann, and blinding art

Beginning with "Thus the simple and regular manifestations of this social organism, the 'little clan,' automatically provided Swann with a daily rendezvous with Odette..."

Proust and character writing, delving right into Swann's psyche. The onset or growth of Swann's feelings for Odette, which are ultimately his downfall, is like an internal battle to which we have a first seat row. In fact we seem to have a better handle on what's happening to him than he does, and so do his friends and acquaintances, who felt that "indeed Swann was no longer the same man" (p.333). Even the Verdurins have decided "the man must be a prize idiot" (p.322)

Swann is too busy making love out of nothing at all. He recognizes that his recent behavior is "foreign to his nature" (p.323) but he imagines himself in love. He goes so far as to "cease to be able to even think of her, so busy would he be in the search for pretexts which would enable him not to leave her immediately" (p.324). He turns her into what he considers a classic beauty by continuing to imagine her as Botticelli's Zipporah, and when it comes to the final moment of consummation, he begs her not to speak but to give only signs, perhaps because her voice will give her away for what she is...not much different from the shadowy figures of women who approached him in the dark on the same street where later he finds her, Odette. Even the act itself is disguised as something else when they persist in referring to it (sex) as doing a cattleya (p.331). By giving it a different name he is convincing himself that this is a "pleasure which had never before existed" but it's also a pleasure which has to "create" (p.332).

Swann fights with himself. He knows in his mind that Odette is nothing special, that her "qualities were not such as to justify his setting so high a value on the hours he spent in her company" (p.335) but we see him losing the battle, and the first hints of jealousy when he thinks of her existing outside of the time they have together. He already recognizes, and we are warned, that this love is sinking like the moon (p.338), the only problem, which we find soon enough, is that he goes down with it.

Art and life: In a way Swann ruins his life because he isn't actually living it. Instead he is living in a reproduction of the art he loves so much. He has ceased to see the world at all for what it really is. This may be the exact opposite of art being a means of saving history, or moments in time, and of providing a more pure form of experiencing existence, now art is getting in the way of experiencing life as it really is.

Cool stuff

I love that, different from Combray, Paris being a real place Proust has peppered the text with references to real locations.
The Café Anglais, and the Maison Dorée and Tortoni's on the Boulevard des Italiens (p.327) where Swann searches for Odette


"and the life of Odette at all other times...appeared to him, with its neutral and colourless background, like those sheets of sketches by Wateau" (p.340)

Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson

An honest journalist is under fire for libel and must leave his post as editor of the magazine he founded. In the aftermath he is hired by a Swedish business magnate to ghost write his autobiography and to research the thirty-plus year old murder of his grand-niece. He is helped along the way by the hero and title-character.

The good mystery and a healthy dose of suspense kept me riveted, but the book's greatest strength is in its characters. I love an author who can draw characters without breaking out of the story and Larsson does this well. Even better the personas are believable and their decisions form fitting even while they stretch the definitions of morality, responsibility, and consequence. This is what I would call an enjoyable light read, but Larsson demands a little more of the reader as he lightly takes on corporate corruption, and more heavily tackles violence and abuse. What makes us who we are, and what responsibilities do we have are some of the questions we are left with in the end.

That, and a light romantic cliff hanger, will drag some of the curious, and the hooked, right into his next book.

Book 31 on my way to 52 in 2011

Swann in Love, pp.303-320: the sonata, Odette, and art

Beginning with "Greatly to Mme Verdurin's surprise, he never failed them."

Swann is already starting to lose his footing with the Verdurin's group because he is too well connected (dining with the president of the Third Republic and the prince of Wales).

The Sonata in F has become the symbol of the relationship between Swann and Odette, and as that changes, so does Swann's perception of the Sonata.

"but Swann thought that he could now discern in it some disenchantment. It seemed to be aware of how vain, how hollow was the happiness to which it showed the way." (p.308)

Swann would like to hear the other movements of the piece, but Odette urges him to be happy with what he has already heard. Having already read Swann in Love before I see this as foreshadowing of the difficulties he will ultimately face: Swann wanting more from her, Odette being unwilling to give him all of herself.

Swann visits Odette at home, where she lives on a street of cookie cutter row houses, an area with connections to prostitution at least in the past. She sets the stage with perfectly placed lamps and flowers and ornaments from the far east. Everything about her is fake or duplicitous. She likes the flowers only "because they had the supreme merit of not looking like flowers," (p.312) and by continually using English and decorating her home in the fashion of the Far East she is denying her French heritage. Even her handwriting is British, which hides its hint at "an untidiness of mind and will-power" (p.314).

Swann is being untruthful with himself, too, as he tries to convince himself that Odette is more attractive than he finds her. He compares her to figures in art, which he apparently does with many people he knows. About this M says:

"perhaps, also, he had so far succumbed to the prevailing frivolity of the world of fashion that he felt the need to find in an old masterpiece some such anticipatory and rejuvenating allusion to personalities of today." (p.315)

which makes me think of earlier references to art being the stabilizer and means of preservation in architecture and the like, and here we see it possibly as the stabilizer of moral character, especially as regards Odette.

In fact, while Odette seems to drown herself in the current fashionable, Swann is doing his best to align her with the classical art of the fresco of Zipporah, even to the point of denying the artist's, Alessandro de Mariano's, popularized and fashionable name—Botticelli—which he, or our narrator, does vehemently.

Cool stuff

"and what a nuisance it had been not having one on the day of Gambetta's funeral." (Mme Verdurin, p.304)
Léon Gambetta was a statesman of the French Third Republic from 1881 until his accidental death in 1882 (at 44 years old). He was a moderate Republican and a great orator whose funeral became a well attended event. Proust treats it here as just another show.

"You shall have it int ime for the 'Danicheff' revival. I happen to be lunching with the Prefectof Police tomorrow at the Elysée...at M. Grévy's" (Swann, p.304)
I will guess that Les Danicheff refers to the play by Alexandre Dumas, first performed in 1876.

The Elysée (Palace) is the current home of the French president. It came under government usage during Napoleon's reign in 1808, then passed through many stages of political use, becoming the official residence of the French president during the third republic.


Jules Grévy was president of the French Third Republic from 1879-1887.

Swann, regarding the Sonata: "as in those interiors by Pieter de Hooch which are deepened by the narrow frame of a half-opened door" (p.308)
Pieter de Hooch was another Dutch painter from the 17th century who focused on middle class life, like Vermeer.


"Swann remarked Odette's resemblance to the Zipporah of that Alessandro de Mariano, to whom people more willingly give his popular surname, Botticelli" (p.314)
Zipporah is depicted in two frescoes in the Sistine Chapel: one by Perugino, and this one by Botticelli:

Review: The Tale of Despereaux, by Kate DiCamillo

A mouse and a rat both fall in love with a princess and a story of chivalry, revenge, and heartbreak ensues. Despereaux is a misfit in his own mouse world and is banished to the dungeon where he expects to meet his death. Roscuro is a misfit in his own rat world, but finds only rejection in the world of light above, and returns to the dungeon thinking only of revenge. Mig, the unloved peasant who is too simple to either love or seek revenge, wishes only to trade places with the princess. We hear their stories separately first, then they all come together to finish the tale. The story is generally charming, but while the beginning seems promising DiCamillo continually interrupts the flow of the story either by jumping without warning to another time, place, and character, or by playing the interrupting narrator. With so many disruptions it can be hard to stay interested, but the underlying messages, such as "have courage" and "dare to be different", are obvious, and the rich language makes the book a pleasant enough read.
As a parent I think this is a fine book to read to a young child, but I was disappointed by the quality of the story and writing. At age five Calvin was completely capable of understanding the the story as read to him, but would not have been able to read it fluently enough on his own to make it worth while.

Swann in Love, pp. 281-304: Swann at the Verdurins, the satire of the salons

Beginning with "Dr. Cottard was never quite certain..."

More on the Verdurins' "little group".

Dr. Cottard is a hilarious caricature, completely lacking grace and confidence in any social setting ("he was no more confident of the manner in which he ought to conduct himself in the street, or indeed in life generally, than he was in a drawing-room" p.282), which is almost the opposite of Swann, who is comfortable everywhere.

Saniette has lost favor with the group and is soon to be booted, most likely because he is too deep and has too much of a soul, and thus does not fit in. He "burbles" his speech in a "delightful" way, which is the opposite of the pianist's aunt (the "concierge") who slurs her speech to hide the fact that she knows nothing.

Mme. Verdurin seems to feel more loyalty to (from?) the gifts in her home that came from the "faithful" members of her group. I can only assume that she has some gifts that are from "faithfuls" she has dropped or been dropped by. She even seems to have some sort of a love affair with the fruit carved on one of the chairs. The language is so sensual at that moment that there may be something I'm missing, or we may just be seeing a character trait of Mme. Verdurin. She can have more control over inanimate objects and without risking rejection?

Then Swann and the Sonata in F. Swann has become lazy in life: he refrains from forming opinions or taking part in society and has ceased to have any goal. On p.298 he is described as "morally barren", and he is not even working anymore, as he long ago gave up writing his paper on Vermeer. Now the Sonata in F has given him back some life, "indeed this passion for a phrase of music seemed, for a time, to open up before Swann the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation" (p.296), somewhat like the effect that viewing the three steeples has on young M and his struggle with writer's block.

The Sonata also serves well as an analogy for life and involuntary memory: difficult to assess the first time through, the impressions come on faster than they can be discovered, it leaves the listener the "architecture" by which it can be assessed on a second listen. Much like a second look at life through our memories, and Swann's immediate recollection of the strains in the Sonata bring to mind M's sudden flush of memory upon tasting the Madeleine cake.

"But the notes themselves have vanished before these sensations have developed sufficiently to escape submersion under those which the succeeding or even simultaneous notes have already begun to awaken in us."
•••
"And so scarcely had the exquisite sensation which Swann had experienced died away, beofre his memory had furnished him with an immediate transcript, sketchy, it is true, and provisional, which he had been able to glance at while the piece continued, so that, when teh same impression suddenly returned, it was no longer impossible to grasp." (p.295)

But while the "little clan" can tell him the name of the work and the composer, they are unable to discuss it beyond that. In reality the composer and piece are fictional, but there has been some discussion about their models.

Swann seems to have passed the test and been accepted into the little clan, although the Verdurins completely miss his character, believing him to be lacking depth. Mme. Verdurin does tell Odette that she may bring friends like that any time she wishes, though, implying a lack of respect for fidelity, an odd trait for a woman who demands complete loyalty from her "subjects" as she does now from Swann ("provided he doesn't fail us at the last moment." p.304), but this is not the first time we've seen her as the hypocrite.

Satire of the salon. Proust is poking fun at the Salon lifestyle in which he actually took part himself. The the members of the little clan can barely talk to each other, what with the aunt and Saniette mumbling, Mme Verdurin using one figure of speech after another while Cottard does not understand them in the least and misuses them on his own, and Odette sprinkling her speech with English. They neither understand nor care to understand art and music, even if they have their own artist and pianist among them. Since Salons were gatherings intended to inspire artistic endeavors and the exchange of knowledge, the Verdurins make a great satire.

Cool stuff:

Sarah Bernhardt was a French actress from the 19th century on into the 20th.

Swann in Love, pp.265-282: Swann, Odette, and the Verdurins

Beginning with the first sentence of Part Two, Swann in Love

I want to love everything about this work, but with this section I am at a loss. Since all the rest of the work so far feels justified, based on the truth of memories and the seeking of them, the transition to this section, which is the retelling of a story once told to our narrator, feels rather awkward to me. The story within a story has never been one of my favorite literary styles or tools, and I can only hope that the remainder of the work does not feel this clumsy.

The Verdurins and their friends are described a little later as being "among the riff-raff of Bohemia" (p.281), which is fitting with their patronage of the artist and pianist, with their acceptance of the "demi-monde" and the supposed "concierge", and with their disdain for the more conservative lifestyle of the upper class. Proust describes them as "the 'little nucleus' or 'little group' or 'little clan'," and they do make up their own society, with their own set of rules and hierarchy, and it's a group that would not be allowed to join the larger salons of higher French society. Disdain=jealousy?

Pages 265-269 are a richly comedic and ironic introduction to the "little set" of the Verdurins. Mme Verdurin declares that all other houses (salons) are boring, but at her own she keeps a tight reign over even what music can be played, evening dress is not allowed, and there "was never any programme for the evening's entertainment" (p.266). But for claiming so blasé an attitude, really Mme Verdurin is afraid of losing her "faithfuls" and this drives her to extremes. If I knew more about French society I might say that the Verdurin set was a caricature of the larger salons.

In a bit of foreshadowing, we are told that outsiders were allowed in only after being given a sort of test, and that "if he failed to pass, the faithful one who had introduced him would be taken on one side, and would be tactfully assisted to break with the friend or lover or mistress" (p.268)

We learn a lot more of Swann's character, mainly that he frequents, or at least is welcome in, the high society of the Faubourge Saint-Germain to which none of the Verdurin clan would be admitted, and that he is attracted to lower class women. Swann himself seems to be a dichotomy of good manners and vulgarity, since he is loved by so many and has been adopted by the nobility, yet is drawn to the lower classes, has no respect for class divisions, and has no scruples about asking for indecent favors from decent people.

Swann's taste in women appears to be exactly opposite his taste in art, "for the physical qualities which he instinctively sought were the direct opposite of those he admired in the women painted or sculpted by his favourite masters" (p.271). Again with the time, memory, art, and perception; a real person brings with them additional assaults on the senses and will alter perception even of physical beauty ("even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone" [p.23], see notes p.35-58), something which is illustrated well with Odette.

Odette, as we've already heard, is one step away from being a demi-monde. She is well dressed and lives life as she wishes, she is a faithful in the bohemian circle of the Verdurins. According to the notes in my book her speech in the original is peppered with phrases written in English, such as "fishing for compliments" on p.269, and when she refers to Swann as "smart" and mentions his "home" on p.276. In my printing these phrases are in italics.

When Swann meets Odette he does not immediately find her attractive, so for someone who picks his mistresses based entirely on their looks she is an odd choice. This brings to mind the discussion of reading versus living, and the stages of removal from the senses in order to achieve ideal perception versus perception of the truth (pp.110-121). Something is always in the way of our knowing the truth about anything—ourselves.

M blames Swann's odd choice on his stage of life at the moment of meeting Odette, a "time of life, tinged already with disenchantment" (p.277), because at this stage, in looking for love, "we come to its aid, we falsify it by memory and by suggestion. Recognising one of its symptoms, we remember and re-create the rest." (p.277). He is creating his own reality, and that give credence to Proust's search for lost time, because if we are different at different stages, then looking back at any moment in life our memories will be tainted by our current person and the effects that person has on our perceptions of those moments from our past. To really remember them we must go back and recapture them as they were.

Quotes
"If he was not going to play they talked, and one of the friends—usually the painter who was in favour there that year—would 'spin,' as M. Verdurin put it, ' a damned funny yarn that made 'em all split with laughter,' and especially Mme Verdurin, who had such an inveterate habit of taking literally the figurative descriptions of her emotions that Dr. Cottard (then a promising young practitioner) had once had to reset her jaw, which she has dislocated from laughing too much." (pp.266-267) Bring on the hilarity.

Cool stuff:
Vermeer of Delft, or Joannes Vermeer, was a 17th century Dutch painter who focused on domestic scenes from the middle class. No wonder, then, that he was a focus of Swann the art critic.

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.251-265

Beginning with "how often, after that day, in the course of my walks along the Guermantes Way"

These are the final pages in part I, Combray and they bring us almost full circle to the narrator's thoughts at the beginning of the work, as though backing out from the more focused view to the more general one at the beginning.

After seeing Mme Guermantes in the church M returns to lamenting his impotence as a writer. He is afraid that he has no talent for his chosen profession and can find nothing to write about. It isn't until a return trip from a walk along the Guermantes Way that his writers block is broken and he writes a snippet on steeples in his view (the steeples of which he writes, not of Combray, are a trio—originally just two, and then a third attempts joins them—bringing to my mind the social triangle). He is relieved to be able to write again. It is a writer's epiphany.

He finishes the description of the Guermantes Way by linking it to feelings of "melancholy" because on nights they take that route, being late after such a long walk his mother is not free to come put him to bed. This is a break in the night-time routine upon which his happiness is dependent. The Guremantes Way embodies the dichotomy between utter happiness and desperate melancholy.

Some meandering thoughts...
I see another difference between the walks now, too, the first (Méséglise or Swann's Way) being connected more with sensuality, the second (Guermantes) with his intellectual (and social?) pursuit, or at least that's how they were depicted in his descriptions. Méséglise is sensual, lower class, country, French, stormy. Guermantes is intellectual, upper class or nobility. So while the Méséglise Way is a confirmation of all that is French and home, the Guremantes Way is what separates him from home and mother and comfort.

And then we're out in his more vague memories and ideas again, with a reminder of the madeleine cake and tea, and a preface to the upcoming memory, "a story which, many years after I had left the little place, had been told me of a love affair in which Swann had been involved before I was born" (p.262).

And finally we leave his sleep walking mind through the same door by which we had entered it, only instead of his confusion over which room he is half asleep in, now the room's true features are coming into focus with day. He is awake and memory is dawning?

Review: His Dark Materials triology, by Philip Pullman (a review of sorts)

Setting all issues and agendas aside, this is a beautifully written young adult sci-fi story. I found myself falling in love with Lyra and her friends right from the beginning of this tale. Like many series I enjoyed the first book the most, but unlike others my interest had not seriously waned by the very last sentence, and now that I've finished I'm even looking into reading Pullman's additional works with these characters. They seemed so authentic, so believable, even in a universe acceptable only via suspension of disbelief, that I just fell in love with them each immediately.

The scenes, the suspense, the characters—all were rich and imagination grabbing throughout. The series is a calling together of many a myth and many a mystical culture, all given a physical meaning and existence. It is the story of an orphan who finds she has a purpose, and family, as she travels through an earth that is mostly foreign to us. Her journey is full of honor, magic, and love, and as she progresses we see her beginning to grow up. There is witchcraft, quantum mechanics, religion, death, sensuality. There is war, Armageddon style. There is love, there is a coming of age, but what could have become sappy or uncomfortable was written with sensitivity and authenticity so that it never crossed that line. The story is woven tightly and well, and it never let me drift away.

It has been said that Pullman's story is just shy of propaganda—the atheist's C. S. Lewis I think I've read—and with each successive book a message does become more obvious. It is with sharp literary skill that he doles out revelations of the symbolism and understory in carefully measured amounts. The final book is the most clear in terms of agenda, and not everyone will be comfortable with it, and The Golden Compass could conceivably be read as a stand alone, albeit with a rather plot hanging ending.

Books 28, 29, and 30 on my way to 52 in 2011

The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells (a review of sorts)

I am not a big reader of science fiction, and haven't had much of an introduction to nineteenth century science fiction. I picked up this book because I've always been curious about Wells, and after reading The Map of Time I thought now was as good a time as any to discover him. At just over a hundred small pages, it's a quick read, but there's a lot packed in, namely imagery and symbolism revealing the social stresses of a time when industrial advances were forcing the issue between socialism and capitalism. Though written in symbolism the social commentary is so obvious as to be almost distracting, and the hero makes so many leaps in his mental discovery that the story is increasingly discredited. But Wells is offering a good, light story, too, quick to read and enjoyable as just that—a brief story. In addition, reading it now felt almost like a sci-fi rite of iconic passage, and I'm glad I did it.

Book 27 on my way to 52

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.233-251: Guermantes Way,

(pp.233-234) M compares his remembering the town in its historic setting to art as a means of preservation. pp.54-56 of Proust in Venice, by Peter Collier is a great commentary on Proust's themes of art and memory. It brings us back to the grandmother's desire to buy art in a state as removed from the original as possible. I connected this to needing to be removed from reality in order for the senses not to get in the way (mentioned by M earlier when reading in the garden at Combray), but Collier treats it as a symbol for the preservation of memory—the original crumbles but is preserved in engravings (like those from the grandmother of The Last Supper) or paintings (St. Marks in Bellini's Procession In St. Mark's Square):

"The vertiginous spiral of Proust's metaphor presents the very substance of the Combray memory (the grandmother's artistic prejudice) as the spiral mental structure ensuring its own perpetuation, through transformation into a more lasting aesthetic form" (p.56, Proust in Venice)

Compare to the moment a little later on (p.236) when he is called by the ruins of old battlements to imagine Combray as "an historic city vastly different, gripping my imagination by the remote, incomprehensible features which it half-concealed beneath a spangled veil of buttercups", most specifically remote, half-concealed images. These ruins have not been preserved and he can only imagine them as they were, or take them now as they are, overrun by nature.

We are now traveling with M along the Guermantes way. It is strikingly different from the Méséglise way almost immediately: descriptions of the Méséglise way include peasant girls and general, wild landscapes, while the Guermantes way brings to M's mind "the rumble of the coaches of the Duchesses ode Montpensier, de Guermantes and de Montmorency" (p.234) and also the various counts and lords and abbots of long ago (p.236). And where the Méséglise way seems practically pornographic, or at least bawdy, by comparison the Guermantes way seems clean and refreshing with its views of THE steeple and the Vivonne (Loire).

Neurasthenia (p.238) is an archaic psychiatric diagnosis of nervous exhaustion. It was often associated with the upper classes, and was possibly psychosomatic. On p.238 M mentions it with reference to Léonie, but Proust is said to have had neurasthenia (see The Diseases of Marcel Proust in Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists, Part 2, by Bogousslavsky and Hennerici) and I'm starting to see a parallel drawn between them. When he mentions the illness it is with a desire to shake it, a feeling of helplessness, and later he says, of the Vivonne, "how often have I watched, and longed to imitate when I should be free to live as I chose" (p.240) giving a picture of a man who felt trapped in a sick body (which could be the asthma and neurasthenia, or could be the homosexuality, as viewed during that time).

M has two goals he wishes to reach along this walk: the source of the Vivonne, and Guermantes, itself, for a view of the noble family. The ancestry of the Guermantes family, is equally as impossible to find, but M attributes it to the legendary Geneviéve de Brabant (of the magic Lantern) and Gilbert the Bad, who, being legends, are timeless. He sees them in the tapestry and windows at the church of Combray, and it is at the church where he finally gets his first glimpse of the real Mme de Guermantes. He is disappointed, of course. She is too like a normal woman. But he reminds himself of her legendary heritage and looks for signs of her nobility and perfection, which of course he finds, and he "fell in love with her" and plants in his mind a connection between them, believing that she saw him and will think on him later.

Passages of note:
"satisfied with their modest horizon, rejoicing in the sunshine and the water's edge, faithful to their little glimpse of the railway-station, yet keeping none the less like some of our old paintings, in their plebeian simplicity, a poetic scintillation from the golden East." (p.237) he's talking about buttercups in the field, but I can't help noticing the railway-station reference, which I feel has some sort of significance in the work. Or maybe it doesn't.

Cool stuff:
Eugéne Viollet-le-Duc was the French architectural antithesis of John Ruskin. While Ruskin advocated restoration of buildings to their original states, Viollet-le-Duc restored buildings to a finished state, not caring whether they still resembled themselves at that point or not. Proust was a fan of Ruskin.

Gentile Bellini's Procession in St. Mark's Square


And of course DaVinci's The Last Supper

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.211-233:Méséglise: sensuality, sadism, and guilt

Begining with "Since the Méséglise way was the shorter of the two that we used to take on our walks round Combray..."

Several pages here are a description of Méséglise and reference to Roussainville. Méséglise is the walk that corresponds more to regular French life (as opposed to high society the Guermantes way). Proust gives us deep descriptions of the nature and architecture of the walk (of the church of Saint-André-des-Champs he says "how French that church was!" [p.212]) He describes for us the carvings of the church, relating them to the people of Françoise and Théodore (both of the lower French classes), and also to the "country-women of those parts" (p.213). The people, the countryside, the architecture are all immeasurably French.

Years have passed. Léonie has died and M is allowed to walk by himself while his parents handle her estate. If he was innocent or naive when he met Gilberte in the pink Hawthorns, he is now "in touch with" his sensuality ("my imagination drawing strength from contact with my sensuality, my sensuality expanding through all the realms of my imagination, my desire no longer had any bounds" [p.220]), and he seeks its fulfillment on this walk, looking for girls to hold behind every tree and ruin, but mostly in Roiussainville "into which I had long desired to penetrate," (p.220).

He begs Roussainville to send him a girl (from what I imagine to be a phallic "castle-keep" rising from the landscape) while he masturbates (for the first time) in his room at Combray.

"I could see nothing but its tower framed in the half-opened window as, with the heroic misgivings of a traveller setting out on a voyage of exploration or of a desperate wretch hesitating on the verge of self-destruction, faint with emotion, I explored, across the bounds of my own experience, an untrodden path which for all I knew was deadly—until the moment when a natural trail like that left by a snail smeared the leaves of hte flowering currant that drooped around me." (pp.222-223)

It's even better in the purely Moncreif translation:

"...an untrodden path which, I believed, might lead me to my death, even—until passion spent itself and left me shuddering among the sprays of flowering currant which, creeping in through the window, tumbled all about my body." (p.217 volume I, Chatto & Windus uniform edition)

But before these particular descriptions (of sensuality and masturbation) we are told that our narrator is now of age, but not yet disillusioned (pp.221-222), which is an intermediate step between the innocence of the earlier encounter with Gilberte in the hawthorns and the even that follows at Montjouvain.

Coming upon Montjouvain, the house of M. Venteuil, on one of these solo walks M witnesses a scene between Venteuil's newly bereaved daughter and her lesbian lover. He refers to this as the incident that formed his impression of sadism. Though he's talked about homosexuality before (in reference to the same girl), this would be his first witnessing of it, and here again a picture is drawn of homosexuality being a divide between the daughter and her father; she brings shame to his house and his memory, her willingness to take part in the affair is like spitting on his image.

But M is still certain that her father would have continued to love her, would have continued to see the good in her, and I can't help but hear a parallel between this and relationship Proust believed he had with his own family. At the same time he is certain that she wishes she could be different, or at least escape her connection to the good of her father, but she is too like him, and I wonder if here he (Proust) talks about himself, or if it is a reference to M's guilt over the masturbation, or both. Mlle Venteuil's, or M's, or Proust's, the guilt is there.

"It was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil. And as, each time she indulged in it, it was accompanied by evil thoughts such as ordinarily had no place in her virtuous mind, she came at length to see in pleasure itself something diabolical, to identify with Evil." (p.232)

Cool stuff:

An article about the different translations

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.204-211: M. Vinteuil and homosexuality

Beginning with: "Once in the fields, we never left them again during the rest of our Méséglise walk."

M. Vinteuil, whose daughter is a lesbian, has a house along the Méséglise Way. Proust himself was a closeted homosexual, but he has written his narrator as heterosexual, an arrangement that will allow Proust to explore the place of homosexuality in a wider social context.

Here the reference to homosexuality is with regards to parental shame, ruin, and death. But while society blamed the daughter for her father's death (due, they said, to a broken heart), they also admitted that M. Venteuil continued to love his daughter very much, even allowing her supposed lover to live in their home. This would seem to make society, and its harsh judgement, actually to blame for Venteuil's demise.

"And yet however much M. Vinteuil may have known of his daughter's conduct it did not follow that his adoration of her grew any less." (pp.208-209)

"But when M. Vinteuil thought of his daughter and himself from the point of view of society, fromt he point of view of their reputation, when he attempted to place himself by her side in the rank which they occupied in the general estimation of their neighbours, when he was bound to give judgment, to utter his own and her social condemnation in precisely the same terms as the most hostile inhabitant of Combary; he saw himself and his daughter in the lowest depths, and his manners had of late been tinged with that humility, that respect for persons who ranked above him and to whom he now looked up" (p.209)

There may also be a comparison drawn here between the fall of M. Vinteuil, due to his daughter being a lesbian, and the fall of Swann, due to his chosen wife being of dubious morals. Both have been cast out by a judgmental society.

Notable passages:
"On my right I could see across the cornfields the two chiselled rustic spires of Saint-André-des-Champs, themselves as tapering, scaly, chequered, honeycombed, yellowing and friable as two ears of wheat." (p.205) This makes me think of Proust's love for Ruskin, and Ruskin's fourth tenet, the one regarding beauty which says that architecture should draw from or reflect nature (post).

Cool stuff:
Xavier Boniface Saintine (p.206) was an 19th century French writer.

Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre (p.206) was a Swiss artist who spent much of his life in France. The piece to which M refers is probably Lost Illusions, with the moon "silhouetted against the sky in the form of a silver sickle."

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.192-204: Gilberte and sensuality

Gilberte is the daughter of Swann's his unsatisfactory marriage to Odette, and by all accounts she seems to be taking after her mother (but I didn't think about that that until my second read, actually).

M meets her by accident when his family is walking along "Swann's Way" by her house, but it begins with him practically conjuring her:

"I should have liked to see their reckoning proved false, to see, by a miracle, Mlle Swann appear with her father, so close to us that we should not have time to avoid her, and should therefore be obliged to make her acquaintance" (p.192)

because she was said to be out of town, so this almost makes her like a ghost, or a spirit, or a figment of his imagination.

The meeting of Gilberte is one of my favorite parts of this volume (Swann's Way). It is full of imagery, and a dichotomy of language that is stunning. M's description of the white hawthorns (p.194) draws a comparison with the church of Combray, which I believe we will find is a main point of comparison throughout the work. The terms are architectural, and religious, but become increasingly sensual, a "hedge that resembled a series of chapels," "flowers heaped upon altars," light passing "as through a stained glass window," melds with other references like "the Lady-altar," "glittering stamens," "delicate radiating veins," "fleshy whiteness."

M lingers near the hawthorns, "breathing in their invisible and unchanging odour, trying to fix it in [his] mind (which did not know what to do with it)." He is virginal, or at the very least naive. And the flowers are white and pure, teasing him almost, "offering [him] the same charm in inexhaustible profusion, but without letting [him] delve any more deeply".

But for sensuality that's nothing compared the pink hawthorns he finds, or the reference to pink sugar, or pink cream cheese. If white is the color of purity, and red of passion, then pink is the color of budding sexuality, of pubescence. It hints at the freshness of youth and virility found in rosy cheeks and good health, but also at the beginning of menstruation, or the loss of virginity. Keeping that in mind these pages read almost like a dirty joke.

"the most expensive biscuits were those whose sugar was pink. For my own part, I set a higher value on cream cheese when it was pink, when I had been allowed to tinge it with crushed strawberries." (p.196)

And my favorite, about the pink hawthorns:

"High up on the branches, like so many of those tiny rose-trees, their pots concealed in jackets of paper lace, whose slender shafts rose in a forest from the altar on major feast-days, a thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler in colour, but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a bowl of pink marble, its blood-red stain, and suggesting even more strongly than the full-blown flowers the special, irresistible quality of the thorn-brush which, wherever it budded, wherever it was about to blossom, could do so in pink alone. Embedded in the hedge, but as different from it as a young girl in festal attire among a crowd of dowdy women..." (p.197)

And the question comes to mind, is this as sensual as it is, the nature as laced with sex as it is, because these are memories, and M has already shown us that no memory is without our own imprint of emotion upon it, and M was, at this time, pubescent himself, his memories from the time all tainted by the first flush of his own sexual awakening?

After standing a while in these sensually pink flowers, he meets, or rather stumbles upon, Gilberte. His memory of her, too, is tainted by his thoughts at the time. She is pink—her hair is pink, her freckles are pink, and he admits he always remembered her blackeyes as bluer because he could not "reduce a strong impression to its objective elements" (p.198).

M is already impressed by Gilberte, and by her mother. He does not understand the social mores that make his family snub her, and he is in love with the idea that Gilberte shares dinner with is favorite author, Bergotte. Seeing her now he takes every movement of hers to be contempt for him and for his family. But Gilberte, by association with the pink Hawthorns, has been drawn as at least subtly sexual, and the "half-hidden smile" she gives him while trying to avoid notice by the adults, and the "indelicate gesture" she sends him may be less contempt, more flirtatious? Gilberte's mother, after all, is behind her on the lawn with her lover, while Swann is away in Paris.

M comes to feel an obsessive reverence for Swann and for Gilberte as for the Hawthorns, an attention that may mimic the obsession Swann feels for Odette (which we learn about later in the volume, but which obviously happened before the birth of either child).

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.186-195: The two ways

Beginning with "We used always to return from our walks in good time to pay aunt Léonie a visit before dinner" (after a break in the text).

Proust's descriptive language, drawing the picture of the setting sun, is remarkable.

The two ways to walk, the Guermantes Way and the Méséglise Way (Swann's Way), M says are "diametrically opposed" and are irreconcilable.

"But above all I set between them, far more than the mere distance in miles that separated one from the other, the distance that there was between the two parts of my brain in which I used to think of them, one of those distances of the mind which not only keep things apart, but cut them off from one another and put them on different planes." (p.189)

M sees them as ideals of their types (Méséglise as a plain view, Guermantes as river), and refers to them as sacred soil. They are also the namesakes of two volumes of the work, so I am looking to them as major symbols.

Guermantes way is the longer of the two walks, and Guermantes is also the old noble of the area. It is the walk they took the least. To M Guermantes "meant no more than the ultimate goal, ideal rather than real, of the 'Guermantes way,' a sort of abstract geographical term like the North Pole or the Equator or the Orient." And if the Guermantes way is intended as an ideal, perhaps a class ideal, then we get a bit of foreshadowing when M tells us "I was to know it well enough one day, but that day was still to come" (p.188)

Méséglise way, or "Swann's way," is a shorter walk that goes in the direction of Méséglise-la-Vineuse, and along which they pass by Swann's estate. It may be a commonly traveled road because M mentions seeing people in Combray whom they assume have come from Méséglise-la-Vineuse. Taking the Méséglise way is a relaxed walk, and they talk to people and tradesmen along the way.

With regards to Swann's estate: "My grandfather pointed out to my father in what respects the appearance of the place was still the same,, an dhow far it had altered since the walk that he had taken with old M. Swann on the day of his wife's death" (p.191)
On their first walk by the land in some time because they refuse to go near it when the young Swann's wife might be present (because of the bad marriage) M might mean a comparison here between the old regime, when the decidedly middle class elder Swann was respected and devoted to his wife, and the new regime, when the younger Swann has risen in status, but has married beneath him, making both a socially bad and an unhappy match. Each generation sees a dying off of their parents' morals, and this was a time of class mobility for the French.

Notable passages:

"Overshadowed by the tall trees which stood close around it, an ornamental pond had been dug by Swann's parents; but, even in his most artificial creations, nature is the material upon which man has to work; certain places persist in remaining surrounded by the vassals of their own special sovereignty, and will flaunt their immemorial insignia in the middle of a park, just as they would have done far from any human interference," (pp.191-192)
Man vs. nature?

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.165-186: Another Françoise, and M. Legrandin

Beginning with "One Sunday, when my aunt had received simultaneous visits from the Curé and Eulalie..." (bottom, p.165)

M. Legrandin. We met him back on pp.91-92, as the launcher of "furious tirades" "at the aristrocracy, at fashionable life, at snobbishness." Now we see "a Legrandin altogether different" (p.175), actually a social climber, it would seem. He snubs the family on a number of occasions. M dines with him alone and he claims to be a Jacobin, but M senses duplicity in him.

"But what I did understand was that Legrandin was not altogether truthful when he said tha the cared only for churches, moonlight, and youth; he cared also, he cared a very great deal, for people who lived in country houses, and in their presence was so overcome by fear of incurring their displeasure that he dared not let them see that he numbered among his friends middle-class people, the sons of solicitors and stockbrokers, preferring, if the truth must come to light, that it should do so in his absence, a long way away, and 'by default.' In a word, he was a snob." (p.180)

Legrandin is really playing two people, one for the middle class and one for the upper, landed, or noble class, and for each he pretends to hate the other. There is implication of social mobility here, a characteristic of these years in the third republic. This also harks back to M's earlier reflection: "even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people." (p.23).

Legrandin is also another example of the social triangle, this time a man caught between two classes of people, trying to maintain relationships with both while keeping the other unawares.


Françoise the cruel (p.170) Another view of Françoise, as the chicken brutalizer and insensitive head maid, except that she would apparently lay down her life for her own family, and really goes to great lengths for Léonie as well (although that could be said to be for her own family in the end).

And M brings things around so neatly, that the scads of asparagus mentioned earlier (several times, but most notably in an exchange with Léonie on p.79 "What, Françoise, more asparagus! It's a regular mania for asparagus you've got this year."), seemingly in passing, comes back on p.173 as a cunning plan of Françoise's to be rid of one of the kitchenmaids, who is allergic to it.


Cool stuff
Paul Desjardins (quoted by Legrandin on p.167) was a French philosopher who knew Proust and his family intimately.

Balbec is modeled off the real world Cabourg.


Notable (?) passages

"But what most enraptured me were the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and pink which shaded off from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible gradations to their white feet—still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed—with an iridescence that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form and who, through the disguise of their firm, comestible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting like on of Shakespeare's fairies) at transforming my chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume." (pp.168-169)

There is no ode to asparagus like this one, and perhaps Proust can be quite the humorist

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.151-165: habit, hawthorns, M. Venteuil

Habits/routines. The household at Combray lives by strict routine, the breaking of which leads Léonie to become very upset. In the situation of the kitchen maid's confinement, her crying out during the night disrupted Léonie's rest and led to nightmares that terrified her. The household is so dependent on routine that neighbors ask before they do things that will break in on it.

The Combray routines are so intricate as to have regular variations that become part of a "uniform pattern upon the great uniformity of [Léonie's] life." (p.153). Saturdays are an example of this because, being a market day, lunch is served an hour earlier. The family is dependent upon the routine which is not just lived, but greeted and discussed like an active presence in their lives, and even has the ability to seemingly alter time:

"The very face of the sky appeared to undergo a change. After lunch the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the zenith, and when someone, thinking that we were late in starting for our walk, said, 'What, only two o'clock!' on registering the passage of the twin strokes from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire...the whole family would respond in chorus: 'Why, you're forgetting we had lunch an hour earlier; you know very well it's Saturday.'" (p.154)

The Saturday change in routine has the effect of uniting the family against outsiders who know nothing of it. They refer to outsiders as "barbarians," speak to them with ridicule, make fun of them between themselves. This gives the characteristics of a group mentality, like a clique.

But there's a softer side of habit that makes it attractive. M defines this for us, humanizing it further, upon returning home from a long walk with his family:

"And from that instant I did not have to take another step; the ground moved forward under my feet in that garden where for so long my actions had ceased to require any control, or even attention, from my will. Habit had come to take me in her arms and carry me all the way up to my bed like a little child." (p.160)

And still it is as though Léonie wishes to be rid of her need for habit. Every week she longs for the variety that Saturday brings, and even more than that M implies that she has "exceptional moments when one thirsts for something other than what is" (p.161) even though she does not have the energy to bring it about. She is a slave to her habits. In fact, it is her habit of illness that is weakening her:

"And I have no doubt that then...she would extract from the accumulation of these monotonous days which she treasured so much a keen expectation of some domestic cataclysm, momentary in its duration but violent enough to compel her to put into effect, once for all, one of those changes which she knew would be beneficial to her health but to which she could never make up her mind without some such stimulus." (p.161)

Hawthorns. MP falls in love with them at the Month of Mary (May) devotions, when they are used to decorate the church. This, and their white color, gives them almost a holy meaning, but MP also recognizes their origin in nature:

"I could sense that this formal scheme was composed of living things, and that it was Nature herself who, by trimming the shape of the foliage, and by adding the crowning ornament of those snowy buds, had made the decorations worthy of what was at once a public rejoicing and a solemn mystery." (p.156)

And also sees in them "a swift and thoughtless movement of the head, with a provocative glance from her contracted pupils, by a young girl in white, insouciant and vivacious."
(p.156) a vision that, having read the volume once, I can say is foreshadowing of another young girl amongst the hawthorns.

M. Venteuil and daughter at church. M. Vinteuil is a piano teacher whose wife is now dead. He will not socialize with Swann because of Swann's "most unsuitable marriage" (p.156). His daughter is described as "boyish" and "robust" with a "mannish face" (p.156-157)

On their way home MP's father takes them on a detour. MP's mother has no sense of direction and relies entirely on his father to get them home. We have seen this before, her deference to his "superior mind" (on p.12).

On their walk M compares the gardens to the art of Hubert Robert (p.159). Perhaps I should have labeled this art and nature, but I'll file it under art in life.

And I see that Léonie is fueling the fire between Françoise and Eulalie by feeding each of them false fears about the other, which in turn goes to convince even her of Françoise's unfaithfulness. Although it would seem that it is all untrue, and that Léonie as a character is just full of a morbid quality that makes her imagine the death of her family so that she can morn them, and makes her imagine infidelity in her servants so that she can be cruel to them.

Cool stuff:
Hawthorn in flower (photo by David Hawgood on Geograph)


Hubert Robert (p.159) was an 18th century French artist. He painted "fashionably dilapidated gardens" for clients.