Customer Reviews

In Search of Lost Time: Vol 1 (In Search of Lost Time 1) (v. 1)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Those of us who love Proust - either from long acquaintance, or from reading him for the very first time - can count ourselves fortunate in now having two very fine English translations to work from: the classic Moncrieff/Kilmartin rendition of the complete novel, and the new Lydia Davis translation of "Swann's Way." I've read and enjoyed both, because each brings something special and valuable to the work.

Davis is a breath of fresh air, being more literal (while still literary!) in that she follows the original French syntax and meaning more closely. I liked her translation, and applaud it. Normally, such a fine translation would be my first choice. However - and I admit this is a very subjective judgement - I was long ago seduced by the sheer beauty of Moncrieff/Kilmartin, and therefore cannot love the Davis translation quite so much. Of all authors, Proust requires us to surrender to the beauty of his language. Davis' translation is, for me, more likeable than loveable.

Really, it's an old (and impossible to resolve!) conflict between the more literal and the more "poetic" type of translation. I've dealt with this myself, in trying to translate Baudelaire, and there's no perfect answer. One thing I'd suggest (if you haven't read MK) is to get the MK translation of Swann's Way, now available in a very inexpensive paperback, along with Davis so that you can get a feel for both ways of appreciating Proust's great and magnificent work.

With the famous dipping of the madeleine into his tea, Proust begins his fictional/auto-biographical journey through memory and time, alternately seeing his world through the eyes of a younger, more innocent Proust and the weary old man he has become. Random comments on people or places morph into paragraph- and page-long memories, coloured with the rosy tint of time and age, or not, as sometimes is the case. Throughout the novel we are generally confined to the time period of Proust's childhood, but the narrator is very loose with the time frame, effortlessly jumping back and forth through the memories of his boyhood, from the thrill of a mother's kiss to the beauty of flowers and grass along the way by Swann's.

The writing is flowery and beautiful, with long, flowing sentences that seem to evoke places and times buried within us all. Proust is a master of mental imagery, and through the mostly universal experience of his childhood - and while the particulars will not be identical for us all, the thoughts and ideas certainly will - we are able to relive our own childhood, our own desires and dreams, our own gradual awakening and loss of innocence.

While reading Proust, there is a sense that we have settled ourselves within his skin. The writing is so personal and intimate that we, for just a moment, become the little boy Proust, we share his feelings, we understand his pains. This can be uncomfortable at times, but the pleasure of such an intense journey far outweighs the 'warts and all' intimacy. While reading, it seems that nothing - not one thought or feeling - has been held back, and that Proust is willing and almost joyous at the prospect of baring his soul to the world in his six book masterpiece.

Halfway through the first volume, there is a short novella describing one of his father's friends, Swann, and his jealous courtship of the woman who would later become his wife. The change from an intimate 'I' to a less personal 'he' is at first dis-orienting, but thanks to the strength of the writing, this worry is soon dispelled. Of course, by the end of the novel, the purpose of Swann's interlude has become clearer, and it can be imagined that later volumes will shed more light on these mysteries.

There is not much to be said about Proust that hasn't been already, except that the sheer size and density of his work should not be an intimidating factor when reading. Take your time, be slow about it, and read him as the mood takes you. The rewards are there, on every single page, but they will also be there a year from now. And perhaps, when you are that one year older, the search for memory will be that much more desperate, and Proust's own search will be all the more rewarding.

I admit that Proust is not for everyone. I admit that some of Proust's sentences, paragraphs, and even pages are inscrutable (and not genius, but self-indulgent rambling). I admit that Proust was not familiar with the term "plot."

But one cannot shake the feeling that In Search of Lost Time (beginning with this great translation of Swann's Way) is the ultimate written work about what it means to live. Existence iself, in all its forms (time, love, beauty, self, and the other) is the subject Proust holds forth on.

If you love great books, and have spent years isolating what it is at the very essence that makes you love and remember a novel, Swann's Way is for you. It will reward you if you fight through the times you feel like putting it down.

I discovered Proust on my own, or from someplace I can't now remember, because I inexplicably recognized the title "Swann's Way" while lazily walking through a used bookstore. Without knowing how to even pronounce the author's name, I bought the book and went home. I hadn't any idea what I held, and so had no preconceptions about the precious quality of Proust's work. I began reading it that night, in my room at the top of the house, in cool retreat from the hot summer evening. Before I finished the second page, I realized what I had done. Mistakenly stumbled upon a genius. No one had mentioned this man to me. I couldn't believe it.

I can't comment upon the translation for two reasons: I don't read French, and this is the only version I've read. But I'm happy in my narrow ignorance; I choose to believe that those are Proust's very words, and I see him in every sentence. In an age of succinct and imageless writing, where everyone is suspicious of sounding too pretentious or distant, I subsist on on his beautiful, metaphor-laden, and verbose prose. Proust is a master at what modern writers fear, dwelling on a sentence for pages without losing sight of meaning or the reader.

Yes, it does require some effort at first: this is no potboiler. And what is it about, exactly? The most succinct answer I can conjure is: nostalgia. That is, an old man trying to recapture his past, himself, and the significance of everything. I suppose that makes this also rather autobiographical, since Proust noted that he only began to write, really, once he had acquired enough experience.

This is the first installment of what would become a 3,000 page epic, so it probably shouldn't be entered into lightly. But it will not be regretted.

Obviously, Swann's Way is a classic piece of literature, one of the most vital works of fiction of the 20th Century. The prose, whether in the original French or in the beautifully translated English, is lush, evocative and deliriously prolix--from the moment the narrator takes a bite of that famous pastry, the reader is swept up into a world so tangibly realized and, at the same time, so hallucinatory in its lushness that he or she cannot fail to be drawn in, quite despite the fact that there's not much of a "plot" to carry the thing along. Instead, we are given intimate access to the minds of Swann, Odette and Proust himself and they are unbelievably fascinating people--so complex, so "real" that one is actually quite sorry when the book ends. Which brings me to my main point: Don't stop here. If Swann's Way is the most famous volume in the monumental "In Search of Lost Time" series, it is not necessarily the best. It is, in fact, something of an extended prologue to the later books, gracefully and movingly setting the scene for the far more dramatic twists and turns that will culminate in the mind-blowing final volume "Time Regained." While Swann's Way is a most compelling and satisfying read on its own, you'll miss out on so much beauty, drama and passion if you don't follow up and read through the full series, rich as it is with intrigue, consuming love, staggering insights into the human mind and outright entertainment value. So, Swann's Way is a must read, but one has to come to it realizing that the end of the novel is only the beginning of Proust's enormous, all-consuming magnum opus. No one will tell you that committing to Proust's fictional world is a slight undertaking, but it is a deeply rewarding one and a required one for all serious readers.

I have been planning for some years to read IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, and finally started in March with Lydia Davis' translation of SWANN'S WAY.

Proust is one of the most empathetic authors that I have ever encountered. To tell the story of his youth, to describe his fears and joys and loves, he turns inward, and in doing so, gives a strikingly accurate portrayal of the human heart, and human folly.

SWANN'S WAY is diveded into four sections, too long to be called chapters: Combray, Combray II, Swann in Love, Place-Names:The Name.

Combray and Combray II tell of the summers of Marcel's youth, his grandmother and great-aunt Leonie (who never got out of her bed), Francoise, the maid, walks with his parents, meeting M. Swann, their neighbor, meeting M. Swann's daughter for the first time and falling in love with her. It is very difficult for an author to write from the perspective of a child and do it convicingly, but Proust succeeds here. I loved little Marcel, a sensitive, naive little boy who absorbs everything around him.

'Swann in Love' tells the story of M. Swann and how he fell in love with one Odette d'Crecy, a woman not of his class who seduces him and then breaks his heart.

In 'Place-Names: The Name' we read about a slightly older Marcel, and his first attempts at winning the heart of Gilberte, the daughter of M. Swann. My favorite image in SWANN'S WAY comes from 'Place Names' - an image of Odette d'Crecy strolling down the Avenue of the Acacias alone, which Proust includes in his diatribe against the death of elegance.

As the purpose of writing IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME was to recover his forgotten memories, Proust's tale is not told as a series of interconnected events, but as a collection of interwoven memories - some of them incomplete. [The short novella, 'Swann in Love', that is contained in the novel is an exception - though still told from an internalized perspective, that of M. Swann.]

In this format, description trumps plotline and dialogue. His descriptions - of tapestries in cathedrals, of a child's longing for his mother, of the beauty of words and the pain of falling in love - are first rate. I found many times that reading this book was a lot like looking at a great painting, or a sunset - soothing, [also with the exception of 'Swann in Love', where I found myself completely aggravated with M. Swann and hating Odette. An author that can calm you but also create characters capable of arousing passionate anger must be great.]

SWANN'S WAY is highly recommended.

I started "Swann's Way" a few times before a friend suggested that we read the whole of "Remembrance of Things Past" together. Every Wednesday on his way to the office, he'd stop by my room (it wasn't really an apartment) and we'd drink coffee, smoke(!), and talk about the book. Encouraged in this way, we both finished the novel. I read it again, and aloud, to my wife over the course of two winters. When Kilmartin's reworking came out, I acquired that but only read the final part ("The Past Recaptured"), which Scott-Montcrief died before translating, and which in my 1950s edition was the subject of a pedestrian translation by Frederick Blossom.

After reading a rave review of vol. 2 ("In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower") in this new translation, I decided to acquire it, and then I thought better of the decision and got "Swann's Way" as well. It was the right move. Lydia Davis does a wonderful job with this first volume. (It also helps that I am familiar with the text: I know what comes next and sometimes can quote from memory.) It's been criticized here as too literal, but my own impression is rather different. Finding a typo in the Davis translation, I compared the sentence with the Montcrief/Kilmartin version, and I thought Davis's was better. They were actually almost the same, word for word, except that Davis uses "said" where the previous translation has "exclaimed." I will always go with the writer who uses the simpler verb!

Just as each generation of readers gets its new translation of Homer, so Viking/Penguin has given us a Proust for the 21st century. It is technically more accurate than the earlier versions, because it incorporates the latest French scholarship on Proust. More to the point, for the American reader, Davis and her colleagues have freshened up Scott Montcrief's rather dusty prose. And by employing seven translators instead of just one, they avoid the tragedy of having the translator die before the job is done, as Scott Montcrief did.

As noted, there are a few typographical errors in the American edition of the new "Swann's Way." Except for the one cited above ("O" for "An"), they won't cause any confusion.

Clearly, Proust has a remarkable gift for perception, as if he is able to see human experience, circumstance, and even plain objects, in exploded detail, and distill them for the reader. Particularly in the first and third parts of the book, he frequently drops gems of absolute truth, in much the same way that Shakespearean couplets remarkably capture the essence of love or revenge. To me, this is the reward of reading the book, and what makes the challenge worth undertaking.

At first, you may be overwhelmed by his very complex sentences, as others have noted. It is important to Proust to express an entire thought in one sentence; a lofty objective with sometimes dire consequences, but Proust adheres to it admirably. You soon learn to maintain the subject of the sentence in your head while Proust explores two or three tangents to the original thought before he comes back to it. What works in the reader's favor is that Proust is very regular with his sentence structure, so once you develop a feel for it, it ceases to intimidate.

The book is divided into three parts: The first and third parts recount experiences of Proust's early childhood, while the second part details the love affair of Charles Swann. To me, the first part is the most beautiful, followed by the third part. You will be able to tell within the first 50 or so pages whether or not Proust will suit you. The second part of the book becomes plodding and monotonous, as Proust narrates even a simple set of circumstances in many layers of redundancy, each recounted in exhaustive detail, in his complex style which begins to feel formulaic, wordy, and indulgent. Here's the subject of the sentence, tangent number one, the tangent to tangent number one, tangent number two, and then it ends with yet another metaphor about invalids. The regularity of sentence structure is much easier to tolerate in the first and third parts because Proust flits between several ideas or subjects, whereas in the second part, he drills to the very core of the earth on one or two subjects with a few variations. I found myself feeling pretty burned out, counting down pages to the end of Part 2. My advice is to pick up your reading speed if it starts to become boring or if you lose your concentration.

If Proust were not quite so overly thorough in Part 2, or if he had varied his cadence or sentence structure a bit more, I could recommend this book without hesitation. As it is, it will require an unusual investment of concentration and patience, but I believe it is worth it.

I've read many a great novel, both classic and contemporary, but until I read Swann's Way, I had never before been tempted to take a highlighter to a book. Never has an author been able to squeeze so much out of so little. Like Shakespeare, so much of Proust's genius lies in observing and explaining complex human emotion. Unlike Shakespeare, though, Proust believes in using everyday events for this purpose. And rather than explaining thoughts and emotions through action on a stage, Proust takes the reader directly into his characters' thoughts. While the plot may not take you away, his insights are genius. Yes, sometimes he describes scenery in too much detail for my tastes (don't get him started on flowers, music or architecture), but his understanding of the human heart is peerless. This is all the more astounding when you consider how much of his life Proust spent bedridden. Swann's Way is an absolute miracle of literature, but having said that, I must also admit that it's not for most readers. Most people will not have the patience to decipher Proust's excessively long and complex sentences before they simply throw the book into the fireplace. Most people will not be impressed by how much detail Proust uses to describe something as seemingly simple, on the surface at least, as neighborhood gossip, dipping cake into a cup of tea or the architecture of a church steeple. I'll give it five stars, but most people won't get past the first 25 pages. I also struggled with some of the lengthy descriptions, and had to set it aside or force myself through parts of it. So when I say most people won't enjoy it, that's not to congratulate myself, it's just being honest. I can't imagine the millions who enjoy watching "Survivor" or WWE wrestling or who love "People Magazine" ever even hearing about Proust, let alone buying Swann's Way. And how many of those that do dare to buy it on this or any other recommendation, will get past the Combray section and continue reading? Very few, indeed. That's really a shame, because this is one of the greatest works of literature ever published anywhere.

Although Proust was most obviously indulging himself when he wrote this book, he was also brilliant. If the book doesn't speak to you, so be it. It doesn't mean you're stupid, so you don't have to be defensive and call the people who enjoyed the book pretentious. They like what they like, and if they're pretending, that's their problem. There were a few moments when I was bored, but more moments in which I was absolutely breathless, touched, pierced. If you feel like the book is talking directly to you, then you got what you were supposed to. If you enjoy the language, enjoy it to your heart's content, it's pretty (though translated, so I don't know why people complain as if it was intended for english syntax). If you want to tear you eyeballs out, put it down.

I would recommend it wholeheartedly.