Customer Reviews

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Where as Joyce's Masterpice takes place in one day proust's Masterpiece Swans Way is only the begining. In the first Part Swans way we have the world of le boheim Part 2 or Guermantes way Opens the world of the bougios. A world of the rich in which image is everything...sex, obssesion, grandmothers...ect ect.. If you are reading this then you are familar with the obsesive beatuty that is proust's writing. Equally great however, personally there is a satifaction after Swans way,(first time with Proust's writing)that make the first volume my favorite.

It really is between joyce and proust....