Swann's Way, Combray I, pp. 1-15

An hour with the book and my computer and that's all the farther I got before it was time to make dinner.

Overview:
The state of memory, space and time fluidity. Where is the narrator, and when? Is he young? Old? An invalid? Is he remembering his fear of his uncle or is he remembering the instance of that fear? Or are these things the same? (Ahhh...waking up and thinking you are somewhere else. But he describes it so much more eloquently.)

Our narrator (our Proust) is searching for his memories, and the narration seems confused and wild, but it's actually following a very careful order. He begins by reaching wildly and time and space are confused, then he slowly settles on more distinct places, times, and people, and we see him go from vague memories to more specific stories (and finally he tastes the madeleine cakes, which trigger the next set of memories, and so on, but I'm not there yet on this second read).

From within this twilight state he mentions place names and people, possibly in foreshadowing or a roadmap: locations such as Combray and Tansonville, Balbec (Is it a hilarity or a commercial ploy that someone named their anti-aging cream Combray?), and people like Swann.

My own, possibly silly, thoughts:
His grandmother reminds me of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that great French philosopher who embraced nature and believed children should be allowed to run around in downpours and go barefooted in winter.

Some things to pay attention to?
Travel or the train station (pp 2, 10)
the mother/son relationship (pp 6, 15)
the magic lantern (pp 9-10)
Genevieve de Brabant and Golo (pp 10-12)
The social triangle

The magic lantern was a new one on me, and so was the story of Genevieve de Brabant and Golo. I don't know if we'll see a return of the lantern later in the book, but I found it interesting as a tool melding the distant past (Merovingian) to the present. And Genevieve is the wife and mother, falsely accused by Golo of infidelity with him against her husband, who is to be put to death but escapes and is aided by a roe deer in caring for her son. Later she is cleared and re-accepted by her husband. There is an obvious link here to the mother/son relationship, and possibly also to that between mother and father/husband and wife, and our first example of the social triangle.

Then there is his grandmother whose sister keeps tempting his grandfather with liqueurs he shouldn't have, thus creating unrest between the husband and wife (p.13-14), another social triangle.

And the narrator's familial relationship, the son insinuating himself between the mother and father, and sometimes additional guests taking a place as well (pp.15+), more social triangles.

Passages/quotes worth noting:
p.1-2 "I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, showed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveler would be hurrying towards the nearby station; and the path he is taking will be engraved in his memory by the excitement induced by strange surroundings, by unaccustomed activities, by the conversation he has had and the farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp that will still echo in his ears amid the silence of the night, and by the happy prospect of being home again."

p.8 "Habit! That skilful but slow-moving arrranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable."

p.12 "...while my mother, keeping very quiet so as not to disturb [my father], looked at him with tender respect, but not too hard, not wishing to penetrate the mysteries of his superior mind."

p.15 "Sometimes when, after kissing me, [my mother] opened the door to go, I longed to call her back, to say to her 'Kiss me just once more,' but I knew that then she would at once look displeased, for the concession which she made to my wretchedness and agitation in coming up to give me this kiss of peace always annoyed my father, who thought such ceremonies absurd..."

A little background work

Marcel Proust lived in France from 1871-1922. The work is semi-autobiographical, with a degree of self awareness (pg. 291, "So Swann reasonsed with himself, for the young man whom he had failed, at first, to identify, was himself also; like certain novelists, he had distributed his own personality between two characters, him who was the 'first person' in the dream, and another...").

Proust is writing about France during the French Third Republic after the fall of the second empire and Napoleon III. It was a time of political uncertainty but artistic growth. Though the landed nobility was abolished during the French Revolution, use of French titles returned with Napoleon III, and Proust uses these titles often in "Swann's Way", where he has a lot to say about the class situation of the time.

Interesting stuff: The Infamous Proust Questionnaire

It's all about the mom.

First things first

I actually started reading In Search of Lost Time a few weeks ago, and finished the first volume, "Swann's Way", this weekend, but I'm going back to the beginning to try again. Why? Because when I started on this project I didn't really know what to expect. I knew I was entering the modernist era, I'd heard that it was among the first of those works to evade the constraints of linear time, and I'd read the Wikipedia article on Marcel Proust, but like taking Lamaze classes to prepare for childbirth, it wasn't until I got into the first throes of labor that I realized how little those preparations actually did for me. I was dull through the start, and I'm sure I missed a lot. It took me until about half way through "Swann's Way" to start appreciating the work, then I found myself falling in love with it and unless I go back I won't know for sure whether it was the book or myself that was slow to warm up. Plus I've come to the conclusion, after this first taste, that Lost Time is worth absorbing, not just reading. That's where the notes and the research come in.

The version I started reading is titled Remembrance of Things Past (a translation I understand Proust detested) and was published in 1934 by Random House, translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff (see note below). In this version the seven volumes have been condensed into just two. The copy I am reading actually belongs to the library, which will keep me reading at a steady pace since they will want it back (according to the obsolete borrowing card in the back it has been on their shelves since at least 1955, and I think that's pretty cool). In my own library I have a beautiful twelve volume set, the 1939 uniform edition published by Chatto & Windus in England, a gift from my husband and son that I can't quite bring myself to pour over or leaf through. Thankfully the library's copy was available (and has been sitting on the shelf waiting for attention for over a year, so I don't expect a lot of competition).

I believe this worth mentioning because this is a big work; it will take me a long to read and will generate a lot of posts and I will likely note page numbers often, making the version relevant.

I'm going to jot notes as I go. They will be anything from definitions of words to my own comments on the writing style or story, sometimes they'll be summaries, and now I can even link to comments found elsewhere on the web, something I couldn't do in my handwritten notes.

Proust will be a journey. I am aiming to finish In Search of Lost Time by the end of the year so that I can count it toward my reading goal. Time to get started.

**(7/10/11) The version I've switched to reading as of now, although I'm likely to compare the two from time to time, has the translated title In Search of Lost Time and is the 2003 Modern Library Paperback Edition, translated by Moncrieff and Terence Kilmart and revised by D. J. Enright. In this version the work is in six volumes. The page numbers I list will be from this version.

Finding time for Proust

About this blog
This blog is going to be about books. More specifically, it is going to be about the books that I read. I write about almost every book I take in. I have always kept reading journals, and some of my more loved paperbacks are mercilessly marked up. But there is only so much paper I can justify using in a year, plus the idea of tagging my thoughts for later access really appeals to me, and so I am starting this blog. I am not a writer, I did not study English or literature in college, and I am not a book critic, but for me reading is like eating, where ingesting a good book nourishes me and leaves me energized for the other parts of my life. And, like some foods, some books demand more attention, more enjoyment, than others, and some need to be chewed really, really well before anything can be gotten out of them at all. I like to do that with the books I read—to really chew them up and really taste them, and in doing so I write about them.

Reading 52
I set a goal for myself this year. Starting in March, because I'm always behind, I set out to read 52 books, an average of one book per week. I was once a voracious reader, and years ago this would have seemed like not much of a goal, but now I am a wife and a mother, I am homeschooling my five year old, and my time seems too often not to be my own. I read a lot with my son, and we review the books we read on our blog, but only too rarely was I reading for myself. So I set the read 52 goal to make myself take the time to read, even if sometimes that means less sleep, or a late dinner, or a messy house. Thankfully my family is understanding.

About the blog title
This isn't to be solely about Proust, but I just started reading In Search of Lost Time and, because I could already see the large volume of notes I'd be taking, it was my impetus for starting the blog. Proust isn't the beginning or the end, he's just where I happen to be right now.

9/1/2011—I have now added all my book reviews from earlier in the year to this blog, dated accordingly, so that I'd have them all in one place. Organization is good.

Review: The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs

I'm not really the right person the review this book—it's not really my type—but I picked it up for a little light reading break from Proust, and light reading it really was. Really a collection of three different stories, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs is absurdist humor of a dry English variety. What it lacks in depth it fails to make up in other arenas, except for maybe the relatively happy, if sappy, ending. I don't think I'll be trying any more of his books, but if I'm looking for another one-night read I just might.And I hear that if I'd picked it up as an audio track I'd be listening to Hugh Laurie as the reader, and that might have been funnier.

Book 24 on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: Day, By Elie Wiesel

I have now completed my tour through the trilogy that is not a trilogy. Day is the third of Elie Wiesel's books that are named with vague time references. As far as I can tell these books are lumped together because a) they are all written by the same auther, b) they are all about the same subject matter, and c) they do follow life chronologically even if they are not all about the same person growing older. Day is about a middle aged man (?) who has just been in a serious accident and is recovering. It is the symbolic final chapter in what is a loose story of life after concentration camps—the chapter in which our hero (who is different in every book) is struggling for a final time with his images and view of life and death. The accident itself brings this struggle to a head by almost, but not quite, ending his life, and then bringing him into contact with his antithesis: a doctor who loves life completely and without caveat. While I was not a big fan of Dawn, I was able to enjoy Day a little more, if enjoy is the right word for such a dark book.

Book 23 on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: Dawn, by Elie Wiesel

I have seen this book referred to as part of a trilogy, including Night, Dawn, and Day (also sometimes titled The Accident). Night, which I've already read and reviewed, is a memoir, so imagine my surprise at finding that the second book in the "trilogy" is a fiction. That was my first disappointment. The book spans just one night in time as the young man waits for morning, when he will have to kill a British officer in the name of the fight to free Palestine from British rule. During this time he is visited and spoken to by the ghosts of many people from his past. The story might have been fine—the struggle of a young man to come to terms with the sum of his existence—but for the use of trite symbolism and meaningless poetic text. Wiesel's clipped, contemporary writing style is what saved this from being a complete loss for me.

Book number 22 on my way to 52.

Review: Night, by Elie Wiesel

This book cannot truly be reviewed. I've read reviews calling it "poignant" and others calling "touching" while still others have complained either that it did not provide enough information or that it portrayed the inmates as "too much like animals", or too inhuman. Maybe these people failed to realize that this isn't a reference book on concentration camps, nor a literary work of death and survival. This is one man's memoir of a frightful history, the writing is completely human, the subjects drawn as he saw them then. Wiesel's writing is crisp, even terse sometimes, yet the language is poetic even when frightening. The story is told probably as it was lived—in a percussive fashion, jumping from one punctuating moment to the next, and yet it avoids becoming a collection of short anecdotes and remains a cohesive, depressing telling. Because it is a journey into a mind as much as a concentration camp the percussive style is authentic and natural. This book does not warrant a review because it is exactly what it should be, because it can only be exactly as Wiesel would write it.

Book 21 on my way to 52 in 2011