Remembrance of Things Past: Volume II - The Guermantes Way & Cities of the Plain (Vintage) [Paperback]

Marcel Proust (Author), C. K. Scott Moncrieff (Translator), Terence Kilmartin (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 27, 1982

Including THE GUERMANTES WAY and CITIES OF THE PLAIN.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Before his death in 1922, Marcel Proust accomplished the monumental feat of recording Remembrance of Things Past, a fifteen-volume literary history, much of which was based upon his own adventures and minute observations. The Guermantes Way is an installation in this collection and recounts, among other things, his childhood in Combray and the relevance of grasping the importance of particular events and people from his past in his development as a writer. Although autobiographical, Proust employs suspense and the observation of minutiae to illustrate our own subjective existence.

Review

To read [Proust] thoroughly constitutes a mental discipline, more humane surely, but equal in rigor to Euclid. That is why, in spite of the piquant nature of much of his material, Proust will never be a widely popular writer. -- The New York Times Book Review, Rose Lee

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Product Details

• Paperback: 1216 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage Books ed edition (August 27, 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394711831
• ISBN-13: 978-0394711836
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #415,168 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Work of "Fiction" I've Ever Read, June 18, 2004

By 

C. Gardner (Washington D.C., D.C. United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Remembrance of Things Past: Volume II - The Guermantes Way & Cities of the Plain (Vintage) (Paperback)

Moncrieff/Kilmartin's translation is still the best. Proust's life-work is the most psychologically acute novel ever written, and a perfect match between form and content. His form is the memoir, conceived as a piece of music, with themes and variations, codas and recapitulations. The content is a list of evolving concerns, from love (in all its forms) to aesthetic creation and appreciation, as well as a sort of living autopsy of the aristocracy of his time. His motives were manifold, but it seems Proust primarily wanted to get in the final word on those people he knew throughout his life, and show he both understood them (better than they themselves) and that they had little inkling of his amazing inner life. For all his encounters with and criticisms of snobs and poseurs throughout the work, and his tendency to fully absorb himself in his experiences, Marcel the narrator risks coming off as a snob himself; but quite the opposite, he denigrates himself constantly with reference to his own writing abilities, up into the very last section of "Time Regained" when the structural idea for the novel we have just read comes to him. He's disappointed many times by his own experiences, when they are is measured and conditioned by the background of his keen aesthetic imagination. His salvation is both the Idea for the novel, and a theory of time/identity which has been "calling out" to him with his famous episodes of "involuntary memory" (the most famous of which is the tea-dipped madeleine). As one reads on, there are times when it seems Proust has suspended all action and narrative in favor of impressions which resonate against one another. It may seem gratuitous or self-indulgent, but he is "performing" his theory at the same time he's telling you about it. They each have a purpose, and it seems he's trying to enact a philosophical theory of identity and experience: as if we the subject are nodes of activity that blend memory and present conscious experience.

"Remembrance of Things Past" can be a difficult work to read, but it is so very much worth it. One needs no guide to read this work; it's not as allusive as "Ulysses" nor esoteric like "Gravity's Rainbow". Proust's style is very reader-friendly (albeit he spins very long sentences). He respects the reader, and wants her to understand exactly where he's coming from, for this novel is like the map Borges once described in one of his "Ficciones": it's a representation so large and subtle and complex that it is as big as what it depicts.

If Proust were alive today, he'd probably be kibbitzing with Hollywood stars or the world's billionaire elites...And not much of this book would change!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Continuing down the road., December 28, 2005

By 

frumiousb "frumiousb" (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Remembrance of Things Past: Volume II - The Guermantes Way & Cities of the Plain (Vintage) (Paperback)

Volume I of this Vintage series was a little bit overwhelming as a reading experience. Proust is dense, difficult and the diction takes quite a bit of getting used to. It was a relief for me that the reading experience got much easier by the time that I reached this volume. Nothing is going to leaven Remembrance or make it less dense, but if you make it as far as The Guermantes Way then you are bound to have come to some peace with the language.

The Guermantes Way and Cities of the Plain are full of both broad humor and deep sorrow. The treatment of the death of the Grandmother, particularly the way that she slowly retreats in dreams, is one of the most real and affecting sequences of its kind that I can remember in fiction. On the other hand, the comedy of manners at the society parties plays out like a kind of Belle Epoque Sex & the City. Proust skewers the foibles and fables of the relationships of the rich, and often left me chuckling to myself as I read.

The farther I go, the more I find these books to be one of the most memorable reading experiences of my life. Nothing in these books makes me lessen the recommendation that I read after reading Volume I. In fact, I find that my admiration is only increasing as I read.

If you can, try tackling Volume II as quickly as possible after finishing Volume I. It really helps a lot to treat Remembrance as a single book, rather than a series. It also avoids time re-learning the feeling of the Proust prose.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Remembrance of Things Past Vol II, November 21, 2009

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C. L. Van Note "C" (Naples, FL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Remembrance of Things Past: Volume II - The Guermantes Way & Cities of the Plain (Vintage) (Paperback)

Although it took me approx 12 years to make it to page 380 in volume I, it's now taken 2 months to finish this and volume II. There seems to be a vast difference in the tone between the two volumes: I is elegant, poetic, full of imagery (you can almost smell the flowers that he describes) and minutely detailed. Vol. II is "breezier" and in many ways, more humorous in his depictions and dialogues/conversations amongst the people that he writes about. Just as he did with M Swann and Odette, he creates full portraits of a number of individuals across all the "classes" of his society. In a way, Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities comes to mind as I am reading parts of Proust's Vol II. His style of writing, while once popular I imagine, is frustratingly gorgeous to us modern day readers, I find it a pleasant challenge and must read parts of it out loud so that I can distill the essence and thoughts as a complete. I look forward to reading Vol III to see where he takes us next and what happens to the individuals he's written about.