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279 of 287 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Don't Be Intimidated by the 3000 pages., November 25, 2005
Depending on how you look at it, this seven-volume masterpiece is the most beautiful work on human consciousness, or the most overstated piece on time and memory. Jorge Luis Borges might have had Proust in mind when, horrified at the time and effort required to write long novels, he instead decided to write short reviews of imagined long novels. Whatever the energy expended in the production, the reading is strangely without ardous labor. One does not "plough" through Proust; I would never have ploughed through anything for 12 long months. Instead, I found myself pleasurably swept along by Proust's meandering stream. Of all great novelists, Proust to me was the easiest to read, easy in the sense that, for most of the year, I was unconscious of the effort of reading. When pressing matters intruded into my life, I would leave Proust aside for many weeks at a time, but only to return to him as one returns to wearing one's favourite shirt. Perhaps this weird sense of effortlessness and, at the same time, finding it absolutely indispensible, is a function of its main concern, which is Time and Memory. There are no plot devices to push the reader forward. Instead the Time-Narrative is filled with the inanities of the quotidian. A shaft of sunlight falling into the bedroom can take up many pages. A smell, a taste, can open up enormous floodgates of memory. Of Proust it may be said that he could turn an egg upside down and write a book about it. His persistance with a certain image or an object is astonishing. It reminds me of one those famous Impressionist paintings of haystacks seen under different lights.
Among the first things that struck me about this novel is its paradoxical nature: It is both intimate and epic at the same time. It is limited in its milieu and vast in its treatment of that milieu. It is minute, delicate brain-surgery done on a Tolstoyan scale.
At the centre is the narrator Marcel (though, in all the 4000 pages, he is named only once or twice). He wants to be a writer, but finds that he cannot sit down and write because he is unable to recapture the Time-Memory of his life. His writer's block lasts through seven volumes. His tenacity in trying to pin down his sensations has much to do with his artistic ambitions. but all his efforts are in vain. At one point he decides to give up altogether. When in the end he does regain "his time", it is only because of memories and sensations coming back to him quite accidentally, despite himself. He is finally able to write. The delight here, however, is ambivalent and bittersweet, for, as he says in a memorable line: "The true paradises are those that we have lost." Literature has its limits. In calling his magnum opus itself into question, Proust is thoroughly a modern writer.
The book has pleasures aplenty, the most surprising of which being its humour. Proust has created a vast portrait gallery of characters, each one vividly imagined, and it is the interactions amongst them that provide the work's funniest moments. Proust's world is a world of fading dukes and duchesses, counts and barons, princesses and kings. It is a sort of caste system, ameliorated by an imperceptible upward or downward social mobility. Whichever way they go, none of them can abandon their pretensions of noblesse oblige, the most ironic example of which is the denigration of the aristocracy wherein they are firmly ensconced, and the pleasures and privileges of which they would not want to eschew for anything in the world.
Proust's frank treatment of male homosexuality and lesbianism is something I have not encountered in any other great writer. One entire volume is titled SODOM AND GOMORRAH. Here these "inverts" behave like regular couples: they love, they get jealous, they break up. But they are not treated kindly. They seem another reflection of the decadence of the upper classes. Is this self-chastisement by Proust, who was himself a homosexual ? The characters who are later discovered to be homosexuals are portrayed as descending to death (Albertine) or degradation (Saint Loup).
Great books seem somehow to attract great translators. This translation (Scott Moncrief, Terence Kilmartin) renders Proust's French into delightfully quaint, slightly archaic English. Proust's sentences are very long indeed, interlaced with subordinate clauses within clauses, which contributes to the breathless earnestness of the narrative. But it's all perfectly readable, once you get used to it, and positively addictive once you're well into it.
Need the novel have been this long ? Proust's mission is not so much to examine Time, but to look at how human beings change in relation to their past, how memory, reality, sensations all play upon human consciuosness. The reader, to appreciate Proust's super-sensibilities, ought to traverse the whole vast canvas that he has laid out. In this sense the novel's length is an invitation to us to invest a considerable part of our own Time to participate in this great Proustian odyssey, and in his quest to "regain" his own Time. The very act of reading, then, is part of the "story". There is only one other book that has given me a similar sensation: Thomas Mann's THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, which, interestingly enough, also deals with time. Time was great theme of the early 20th century (Einstein, Bergson), and so was the human consciousness(Freud, Jung). But it is best to appreciate Proust without the intrusions of any "isms", to love IN SEARCH for all its luminous qualities.
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136 of 139 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
On reading Proust., October 9, 2006
I've just finished reading The Search for Lost Time and I'd like to share a few thoughts.
First, commit to reading the whole thing, all seven volumes, all million+ words. However if the commitment frightens you (as it should) first read Swann's Love, the middle part of the first volume.
Second, if you commit don't be afraid to take a break and leave the book aside. I began reading it fifteen years ago, and read Swann's Love several times before finally getting a one volume omnibus and reading the whole thing. It took me eight months, during which I freely allowed myself to read other books.
Third, don't read Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life until you're reached the final volume. It's a wonderful book, but if you want to read the Search, then De Botton's little book is a "digestif" that will help you put Proust in perspective.
Fourth, you don't have to read Proust. No one does. If you don't enjoy reading the Search, leave it alone. Proust never liked the title "The Search for Lost Time" and I think he might have actually preferred the now discredited original English translation title "Remembrance of Things Past".* In French Lost Time (Temps Perdu) implies a waste of time, and Proust was very conscious of having wasted the first forty years of his life.
Lastly, I wouldn't worry too much about the translation. I read the Search in French and it struck me that translating Proust wouldn't be much harder than reading him. The essence of Proust's style is not dramatic rhetoric, it is patient and painstaking descriptions and explanations. He wants the reader to understand something very complex and subtle: his or her own self. You'll find the drama in his philosophy. His sentences are long, convoluted, dreamy, full of meandering turns, but Proust doesn't use French the way, for instance, La Fontaine or Hugo do. Most of Proust's meaning will survive the translation, very little will be lost.
Vincent Poirier, Tokyo
*I was wrong there, Proust hated the "Remembrance..." title. See the comments for details.
Vincent
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The most important literary work of the 20th century, January 22, 2008
I finished Proust's magnum opus a couple of years ago. I read SWANN'S WAY, then got about a quarter of the way through WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE, before stopping and taking a year's hiatus. When I returned to it I read straight through the remaining 6 volumes. Proust became for me, not so much a duty, or even a quest, but an addiction. There is really not much to add other than the fact that these books affected me more than any other books I have read. Once you are drawn in there is no escape. What one encounters within are some of the most fascinating and frustrating people one can imagine, and some of the most profound ideas and greatest insights on human nature ever recorded.
There are a number of themes explored here, each in unique and incisive fashion..the nature of memory, fidelity, love, obsession, jealousy, homosexuality, and the nature of art. It has been designated as semi autobiographical, but maybe it is the greatest autobiography ever written, since it portrays in detail, the truest possible representation of the author's heart, mind, and soul. It is perhaps, the most important and influential literary work of the 20th century.
IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME occupied the last 13 years of Proust's life, the last 3 of which he was confined to a cork lined bedroom due to deteriorating health. Unfortunately, Proust died before he was able to make final revisions of the drafts and proofs of the last volumes. IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME was the culmination of a lifetime spent critically observing his world, while absorbing important literary, artistic, philosophic, and cultural influences from the great minds of contemporaries and predecessors such as Henri Bergson, Schopenhauer, John Ruskin, Flaubert, Stendhal, Montaigne, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and George Eliot. Having processed all that information, through his genius Proust recreates in meticulous detail a late 19th century France where minds, hearts, and souls are at times lucid and painfully exposed, and at times hide perplexing mysteries, but always are as tangible as the architecture, landscapes, fashions, and diversions of an emerging bourgeoisie and a fading nobility.
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