Customer Reviews

Time Regained

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Though it bears the title of Proust's seven-volume masterpiece, this is actually just the final volume, called "Finding Time Again" in this new translation. This particular book would be the British paperback edition, for the American press run has so far only given us four volumes, all of which are for sale on Amazon in a uniform style.

There are small but real differences between the British and American editions. With their greater tolerance for continental foibles, the Brits retained French punctuation, using dashes instead of quotation marks for conversation. They also retained the French wherever Proust makes a literary reference, providing a translation in the notes; in the American edition, this policy is reversed.

In reading the first two volumes ("Swanns' Way" and "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower") I noticed typographical errors that might well have resulted in converting the British to the American languages, rather than from French to English. For example, on page 95 of "In the Shadow" there is the phrase "Professor Cottard and his wife were not to partake of the pleasure" when the sentence should actually read "NOW to partake," since Swann has decided to introduce the Cottards to the Duchesse! Not earthshaking, but it does rather spoil Proust's little joke.

In short, these British paperbacks will serve very nicely if the American reader is in a hurry to complete the novel, and they may also be more free of errors. But I will probably wait for the uniform hardcover Viking volumes.

I haven't read Mr. Patterson's translation of volume seven, but I give it five stars based on the company it keeps.

Alright, so I'm a cheat. I never thought I'd get beyond admiring the bright spanking six volumes of A la recherche (3700 pages! Phew!) on my bookshelves, but when it was announced that Raul Ruiz had made a film of the last book, I seized my chance. Thanks to this brilliant edition you can, because at the end is an exhaustive guide to Proust, listing every character, historical person, place and theme of the whole work, so that just by referring regularly to this you quickly catch up with what's going on. Of course this isn't the same as living with characters and events through literature, but this volume is so amazing you can't fail to want to begin the whole thing and experience them from the start.

This is, as I expected, one of the most beautiful and exciting books I have ever read, as well as one of the most frustrating and irritating. What is most surprising, for a book claimed as one of the two greatest of the century, is how old-fashioned it is (compared to the still startlingly modern and socially relevant ULYSSES).

It has two types of narrative. One, about a young middle class boy who penetrates society, is a mixture of social comedy and tortured romance familiar to anyone who has read a great Victorian novel - there is the same social analysis of an outmoded caste, wide range of characters, poetic evocation of place.

The language, once you get used to the involved, elaborate sentences, is very accessible in a Jamesian kind of way, intricately psychological and analytical, yet supremely elegant and radiant, with a verve and lightness remarkable for such a heavy book.

The translation is, for once, remarkable - it can never be the original, I guess, but you rarely feel that you are getting only half the work like you usually do.

The second half is less satisfactory. As is appropriate to a book concerned with time, the book's forward progress is constantly impeded, by degressions, flashbacks, fastforwards, explanations. The book, like those of Anthony Powell (if you loved THE DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME, you'll adore this) is less straight plotting, than a series of monumental set-pieces.

This novel is 450 pages long, but has only about three events - the narrator going back to the country to stay with friends; the first world war; a huge party. These are mini-novels in themselves and are extraordinary as social observation, character comedy and amusing incident, as well as profoundly moving meditations on the inexorable power of history and old age.

Imagine the narrator has a remote control as he is walking through the film of his life. He freezes the screen every three seconds and discusses in detail the tableaux vivants before him, bending time and experience back and forwards with ease as he does so.

In between these are ruminations on the art of writing. This is a remarkably self-reflexive book, the narrator suddenly starts talking about how he came to write it, what he intended to achieve and what tools he was going to use. The volume becomes less the conclusion of a vast work than the record of its inception; you have to go back then and read it again (believe me, 3700 pages won't seem enough).

This section, a book-length manifesto, is fascinating and thrilling, but also repetitive, difficult, frustrating, and sometimes obscure - it gets in the way of the brilliant descriptive passages - the meeting with Baron de Charlus is possibly the most extraordinary thing I have read, until the remarkable coup of the closing party, where people the narrator hasn't seen for years have grown horribly old and form a grotesque, funereal fancy dress party - you want him to shut up talking about Time and impressionism and get back to the fun.

Two other things: Evelyn Waugh was wrong - Proust is hilarious, both with subtle ironies and more obvious satiric abuse; with risible character traits and wider social events.

Secondly, the narrator is not some unbearable omnisicient know-all as those of Victorian novels - he is deeply unreliable - a prig, hypocrite, voyeur, homophobic, intolerant, puritan, snob, deeply contradictory and cripplingly ill; in earlier volumes he is apparently obsessional, jealous and brutal to the point of insanity. No wonder Nabokov adored him - he is, in his ravishingly aesthetic unreliability, the first Humbert.

If you've read the first four volumes of the Penguin Modern Classic, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, then don't let the publication restriction in the US stop you from buying the British text versions. Except for minor presentation, they are exactly the same that will be published in the US when the copyrights expire. The only differences (which are hardly a great obstacle to the enjoyment of reading the novel), are the footnotes in back and the original French lyrics which Proust occasionally quotes from in the body of the work -- apparently the British assume we colonial philistines do not know as much French as they do.

The introduction to The Fugitive I found hugely welcome -- British translator Carol Clark is unapologetically direct in summing up for us what the previous 4 volumes have been about -- a long wished for insight as I have been dying to know up to this point whether or not I have been truly getting Proust all along.

The curse and the blessing is that Proust died before he could give the final sign off on these manuscripts before publication. A curse because he most certainly would have removed or resolved many errors, and extended or rewritten many parts which are its weakest sections. A blessing in that, to be sure, there are in this and the next volume several obvious errors which a good copy editor would have detected and eliminated, but with time have become such a part of Proustian lore that they can no more be removed than say Jimmy Durante's nose shortened or Richard Burton's pockmarks removed or Marilyn Manson's makeup wiped clean.

And if one has lasted this long, the addiction to Proust's peregrinations from the plot to discuss seemingly unrelated topics and issues in minute detail - as seen from the other end of binoculars, as Roger Shattuck writes in Proust's Binoculars- one will not be at all bothered about any perceived sloppiness in these last two volumes. On the contrary, one will feel proud to detect them for oneself, and have a private chuckle about it as Proust is forgiven for what would be unacceptable by today's publishing standards.

SO don't wait four more years - you'll not care by then or have forgotten much of the threads of the protean plot which keeps all volumes tied into one - for most of what is written in these last volumes is the rich reward the reader deserves after having hung in there until the end, to discover the final fate and full identities of all the rich and lively characters we have come to love - Charlus and St Loup, Albertine and Gilberte, oh, and Mme Potbus' maid - remember her?

The Prisoner and the Fugitive translated by Carol Clark

This is almost a novel within the novel as it deals in two parts with the final resolution of the narrator's relationship to Albertine, this character who, more so than any other, the narrator has kept directly from the reader's curious view and desire to know her in her own voice.

Finding Time Again translated by Ian Patterson

The fates of the rest of the characters are revealed, and the narrator in this last volume himself ages (or catches up to the age at which he began telling this long story -- and we will learn why he had to write it all before his death, as the line between fiction and reality between Marcel the narrator and Marcel the famed French writer nearly disappears). This is the volume where, winding down at last from what was always a nebulous plot to one last social scene,like a curtain call, all the characters take their final bows together in old age (either still alive or in the narrator's memory of them). And there are some great surprises left to discover, which hopefully too much reading of Proustian criticism, biographies, and reviews hasn't already revealed to the `well informed but too reluctant to read A la Recherché du Temps Perdu for themselves' lover of literature.

In this final life's work of Proust on the theme of the passage of Time it's clear that the author is riper, near to death and concerned about the lasting impact of his writing. "Eternal duration is promised no more to men's works than to men." Yet there is so much beauty and substance and lyricism in his 4,300 pages clearly his volumes are, both individually and collectively, a masterwork for the ages. The novel seems more like an autobiography in which the names of persons and places have been changed to protect the innocent (and the gulity). Because of his theme, Marcel constantly returns to the events of his life to gain some semblance of understanding of them. In this volume he is concerned with the effect of the world war upon Paris. The familiar characters of Gilberte and Bloch happily emerge again to center stage and, as always, Charlus and Morel. Because of his failing health and self-exile from society, he must have known that he had little Time to tie up all the loose ends and that another volume would not be in the offing after this one. Indeed, he never lived to see this volume in print. By virtue of his failing health the pressing nature of his last years lend a poignancy to the themes of this volume so that it stands out among the other works when Time was full of budding possibilities and had not ultimately become a dreaded adversary. In this volume Proust picks up the leitmotifs that thread their way through this remarkable tapestry in his walks down various ways and he brings them all to a meaningful end. The story lines are surprisingly simple and easy to follow and there is so much enduring value in his masterfully articulated "impressions." I decided to commit Time a few months ago to read all of Proust's work --it was Time well spent. I can't encourage you enough to make a similar investment. The work is truly a Timeless masterpiece from one of the real geniuses of his day and through it Proust has justly earned his immortality, his worthy prominence among the best literary minds of all Time.

"Time Regained" is a dark ending to the "In Search of Lost Time" cycle, as Proust, sickly like his fictional narrator, unknowingly nears the end of his own life but senses its imminence. France, like the most of the rest of the world, is now a very different place. The Dreyfus affair is receding into the past under the shadow of the new war that has descended upon Europe, with Germany having ravaged Belgium and threatening to destroy London and Paris.

Many of the people with whom Marcel has associated throughout his life and whom we came to know so intimately through the pages of his chronicle are now dead, whether by disease, accident, old age, or the war. Those among the living include the Baron de Charlus, who sympathizes with the Germans and frequents a hotel that serves as a male brothel; Bloch, who has de-Judaicized his name and has assumed an English chic; and Odette and her daughter Gilberte, the latter now herself a mother, who have not so gracefully weathered the effects of aging.

Marcel himself is now an adult of at least middle age, and, as far as he is concerned, still no closer to achieving his goal of becoming a writer as he was in his youth. He has, however, started writing articles and comes to realize, as he reflects on the course of his life, that the intricate web of contacts he has made can serve as grist for his literary mill, should he decide in his waning days to take up a pen and make some contribution to letters. And, of course, over the past four thousand pages that is exactly what his author has done. Marcel muses on Time (capitalization intended), memory, and dreams as necessary elements in the creation of art, a product of so much personal pain and suffering that death can seem like a welcome reprieve.

Judging the novel as a whole now that I've finished all six volumes, I affirm that there is nothing like it, or even close to it, in literature; like "Moby Dick" or "Don Quixote" it resides in its own impenetrable legendary world of oneness. In my review of "Swann's Way," I compared Proust to Henry James, but I see now that I was way off the mark. James writes like he's throwing his weight around, imperiously demanding intellectual respect and forcing his reader into submission with his intentionally inscrutable compositions; Proust's prose, conversely, calmly and warmly invites the reader into Marcel's society and caresses him with the most delicate sensations and deepest emotions. Proust is closer to Henry Adams than he is to Henry James, but even this attempted juxtaposition is buffered by a wide margin.

Proust's style is so ornate that it is the most difficult of any writer's to describe, yet paradoxically there is nothing affected about it; he is quite possibly the most unpretentious writer in literature. He never tries to impress the reader with his erudition, even though he evidently has much, or make himself out to be something he's not; one gets the sense that what he writes is exactly what and how he thinks, as incredible as that seems. He uses humor without trying to be a comedian, sorrow without trying to be a tragedian. He is employing language simply to illustrate life and the world, and I think language has no higher calling than that.

The melancholy atmosphere that pervaded the close of The Fugitive is carried over into this final part of Proust's huge work. Whereas, in the preceding part, Marcel laments the loss of Albertine and his changed relationship with his long time friend, Saint Loup, the author's concerns are now much greater. France is in the midst of World War I, Paris experiencing night time air raids; and the distinction between the Guermantes' Way and Swann's Way has become even more blurred as both Gilberte, the daughter of a courtesan, and Mme. Verdurin, the insufferable salon hostess, have become members of the mystic Guermantes family. Furthermore, Saint Loup is killed in action and Marcel's hometown is occupied by the Germans. But in spite of the gravity of the events surrounding him, Marcel becomes even more self-absorbed. He still holds onto his drean of becoming a writer, but this desire begins to wane as he becomes convinced that he has neither the temperament, the knowledge nor the fortitude to follow a literary career. Then the pivotal event of the whole novel takes place: he is invited to a matinee at the new home of the Prince de Guermantes.

While waiting in an anteroom for admission to the Guermantes' reception, the author is beset by a series of sensory experiences that bring back several happy memories from his past. These recollections, both powerful and joyous, convince him that he has the ability to undertake a literary career, to be able to communicate those ecstatic moments from the past to readers of the present day. His melancholy lifted, he enters the reception to discover that his recent epiphany is only bolstered by what he finds. All around him are the decaying remnants of a fast fading aristocracy. Many of the characters that have been introduced to the reader throughout the course of the novel are met again, but now in the final years of their lives: the proud Charlus, now an obsequious old man; the Duc de Guermantes, described as a "magnificent ruin"; Gilberte, now confused with her aging mother; even Marcel becomes aware that he, too, is quickly getting old. But now seeing things with an artist's eye, Marcel becomes aware that each of these characters, as well as all those people remembered from his life, are "like giants plunged into the years, [touching] the distant epochs through which they have lived, between which so many days have come to range themeselves - in Time." Marcel's goal is clear. He will spend the rest of his life carefully bringing these giants back to life. In other words, he is ready to embark on the huge task of writing the book that the reader has just finished reading.

This part of the novel was published five years after the author's death and suffers from a lack of editing. There are many ellipses, contradictions, and time and place juxtapostion mistakes, errors that Proust would surely have tidied up if he had lived to see his work published in full. But these are paltry criticisms wthen compared to the brilliance of the total work. Unfortunately, Proust is little read these days, and many of those who attempt to read the novel are motivated by the challenge of a literary marathon more than from an awareness of the intrinsic value of the work (as I was). But regardless of the motivation, the effort (and it is an effort) is totally rewarding as the reader sees in Proust's world reflections of his own. It took me a part of seven years to read the complete novel, a period of time in which Proust's search for lost time and my own reminiscences often became linked together as the author's characters shared my own thoughts regarding things past, the specious present, and the eventual fate that awaits us all.

Kilmartin's A Guide to Proust, which is included in this volume is well worth the price of the book by itself. The guide consists of four distinct inexes to Proust's novel: characters, historical persons, places and themes. The scholarship that went into compliling these indexes is outstanding and makes it possible for the reader to spend several years (if he so wishes) in working his way through the novel without losing track of the hundreds of characters and personages included therein. One reviewer remarked, "buy this volume first"; I would only modify this advice by suggesting that the prospective reader get this volume when he purchases Swann's Way.

I attach this review of Proust's cycle of novels to the last novel in the cycle because things are calmer here than over at Swann's Way. The crowd here seems to have thinned out a little. Contrary to what some reveiwers claim, plenty happens in the seven novels comprising In Search of Lost Time. Plenty happens, but it happens "over time" - as in real life. In "Marcel's" case, it's a life during which the exalted are brought low and the base are exalted. Proust's novelistic enterprise, which early-on might be dismissed as nothing more than the effete self-absorption of a Parisian dilettante who's "not worth the rope to hang him" (as one character maintains in Vol. III), turns out, by the final volume, to be a good deal grittier than first appeared.

The choice of translation matters. The older, Moncrieff translation comes across as precious and sentimental, while the newer Mayor/Enright/Kilmartin edition seems less so. Compare the title Moncrieff chose, Remembrance of Things Past, (a phrase lifted out of Shakespeare's Sonnet 30) to the literally-translated title used in the newer edition: In Search of Lost Time. Also compare, "I would ask myself what o'clock it could be" (Moncrieff) with "I would ask myself what time it could be" (Enright). Though the differences may be minor, I had a much better experience with the newer translation.

The cycle of seven novels in six volumes takes considerable TIME to read. I spent the slack year between early retirement and late graduate school reading it. Thus, I modestly propose that every American who has not already done so should quit his or her job immediately and carefully read all seven novels before proceeding any further with thier lives. Not that I'm an enthusiast. My proposal follows from an opinion that we Americans need to spend more time thinking and less time doing. That way we'd do less harm. Even so, readers should be prepared for a certain Proustian indifference to minor matters of proportion. They may find a single sentence that occupies an entire page, or a single paragraph that goes on for eight pages. A chapter of 300 or more pages may be follwed by a chapter of 25 pages. "Marcel" may go on for fifteen pages about what he experiences while trying to remember a name that's on "the tip of his tongue." But if you don't enjoy lengthy examinations of inner experiencings, you probably shouldn't be reading Proust. There were also occasional long stretches of such drek that I wanted to gag. "Marcel's" sojourn with soldiers in Doncieres in Vol. III was one such. Readers must be prepared to simply forge ahead when encountering these. It gets better.

Which leads me to Vol. VI, Time Regained, a tour de force, without a doubt. If the "tea and madeleine" segment in Swann's Way forms the left bookend for In Search of Lost Time, Time Regained forms the right one. I wouldn't want to give too much away about Proust's final volume. William Empson claimed to have expected an apocalypse and accordingly lamented (or pretended to lament) the apparent insignificance of what Proust actually provided. I'd hate to give away more than Empson did, but I think that by the final volume "Marcel's" fruitless pursuit of Madame Putbus' maid has been abandoned at last. Even the face of Mme de Guermantes, admired by "Marcel" through seven novels, has begun to resemble "nougat" with traces of verdigris and fragmentary shell-work on which grew "a little growth of an indefinable character, smaller than a mistletoe berry and less transparent than a glass bead." Volume VI shows "Marcel" at his funniest, and most misanthropic, as attached as ever to his own follies, yet as quick as ever to dissect those of his friends - a decidedly tragic vision. It made the long read worthwhile. After I finished Time Regained I went back to Vol. I and began all over again.

By the time I reached this final volume of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" I was exhausted. I had steadfastly followed the advice given in my college French Literature course: I would go into a quiet room with no distractions and loose myself in the beauty of the language and the images.

I did find myself referring to this final volume frequently while reading the others. The "Guide to Proust" is a great tool for remaining focused and maintaining the unity of the work.

While I am no scholar, I can say that I do appreciate Kilmartin's Translation. The language is beautiful and musical. As with any masterpiece, the original is beyond compare.

"A la recherche du temps perdu" begins with the word "longtemps" ("For a long time") and ends several thousand pages later with the word "temps" ("Time"). How's that for unity!

Time Regained is the splendid payoff of Proust's plot development, so carefully built up over the course of the
preceding six volumes of his novel. It is here that it all comes together, and he integrates his concept of involuntary memory with time and creativity, demonstrating the joy of escaping
the coils of time to relive the past unencumbered by the accumulated intervening thoughts and feelings. This liberation
enables creativity and suggests metaphors. He describes how this has inspired his vocation, his dedication to writing the book you have been reading, and hands to the reader the same gift of regaining time.

The final installment of Proust's grand `a la recherche du temps perdu' is a masterful and eloquent meditation on art, on the loss of love, and on the complex and enigmatic quality of experiencing relationships over the course of a lifetime. This is the period, the final breath of literary genius from the great Marcel Proust, who devoted his life to this great novel.

In `Time Regained,' the reader is permitted an extraordinary prolegomena on the writer's craft, a self-reflexive exposition of the literary form that prefigures post-modernity and the works of Brecht, Breton, Beckett, and all the rest of them. Proust creates a work that is more exacting, more precise and perspicacious than any work of aesthetic philosophy in the western tradition. He discloses that the art of writing is, in its essence, an act or translation.The artistic content is already contained within the mind and soul of the artist and the act of writing is an act of transporting the content to form.

This is a novel about time, and it requires time to read. In this way, Proust the reader develops a relationship with the work within the register of a temporal horizon, which mirrors the register of temporality internal to the characters and unfolding of the fictional universe that Proust has created. It is a joy to read.

Also included in this volume is Kilmartin's guide to Proust, a summation of all the central characters, events, and allusions in a la recherché for readers who (inevitably) get lost in Proust's complex literary web.