EPTA la recherche du temps perdu (In search of lost time or Remembrance of things past if you are more poetic and less precise) is a french novel usually published in 7 volumes : Swan's way, Within a Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way, The Prisoner, The Fugitive and time regained. According to wikipedia, it is the longest novel in world litterature with about 1.5 million words. To give you an idea, this is about three times War and Peace, a novel not exactly known for being short.
The novel contains more than 200 characters, and as the last three books were published posthumously, they contain quite a few mistakes, the most usual being that a character is said to be dead only to talk a few pages later. So Kwark, if you're reading me,the story isn't very coherent + Show Spoiler +
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My story with the novel
6 years ago, the year after I finished high school, I went to a MP classe préparatoire, which is something close to what I think Americans call prep school with Maths major and Physics minors. Fortunately, I had two hours of French a week, which consisted of studying three books on a theme which happened to be "The powers of imagination" that year. the three books were a bit a philosophy which utterly sucked, Don Quixote, an amazingly funny book, and Un amour de Swann (A love of Swann). This reading is one of the few which changed my life.
I had a lot of work though, so if I managed to finish the fist volume during the summer, I gave up on the second volume, partly because the main character can be a bit annoying as he is very peculiar.
But 3 months ago I decided to start my reading over with the second book. After about 80 days of reading, I reached the dreaded word "Fin".
Some music to listen to
Music is much discussed within the books, so I'll give you two of Proust's favorite works :
Main characters
The narrator : is has a nervous disease which makes his life a bit scluded. He's also hypersensitive and hyperimaginative, the two traits that define his talents and personnality.
Charles Swann : he is the role model of the caracter. they share a lot of tratis, like their jealousy and their artistic talents. Nevertheless, Swann never manages to put himself to work. He's very high society and jewish, which is of some importance.
Albertine Simonet : the narrator's great love.
Robert de Saint-Loup : the narrator's best friend. He is a Guermantes (a very important imaginary aristocratic family), nephew of Oriane, but he's more interested in art and has liberal opinion.
Baron de Charlus : another Guermantes, brother-in-law of Oriane. He's also a friend of Swann. He has a legendary tempers, artistic talents and he is the model of the homosexual in the novel.
Oriane de Guermantes : The center of the narrator's reveries on aristocracy and high society. He breifly falls in love with her before being received.
Mme Verdurin : she has a "little clan" in which Swann meets Odette, his future wife. She's very authoritarian, and her professed love for arts seems to be just for snobish purposes.
Summary :
Fun version :
Short version : the narrator becomes a writer.
Longer version : (I actually wrote a really long version in French but I don't really think it's of any interest, it was more a personnal summary)
The first volume opens with the narrator remembering his childhood, his trouble getting asleep, his love for his mother and his life in Combray, the countryside little city where he walked so much. Then we are told the story of Charles Swann and Odette de Crécy's love story, in particular of Swann's jealousy.
The end of the first volume and the beginning of the second one tell the story os the narrator's first love, Gilberte Swann, and of some artistic deception. The second part of the volume tells of the beginnings of his high society encounters with Robert de Saint-Loup and Mme de Villeparisis, the continuation of his teenage love life with the group a teanage girl he meets along the beach, which inludes Albertine, and his of his artistic formation with the meeting of the painter Elstir.
The third volume more or less deals with the narrator's first experience with high society, and his deceptions of it.
The fourth one is a continutaion of the third one of some sort, but changed by the revelation that homosexuality exists. It is also a transition toward the fifth and sixth volume as the narrator start to suspect that Albertine likes women.
The fifth and sixth volume more or less stand together as Albertine's novel, the story of the narrator's great love and of his jealousy.
The seventh volume opens with a description of the life in Paris during World War I. then the narrator has the revelation that he is indeed a writer. We then have a description of the society we knew from the other volumes years later, after Time made his work, before a short and sweet wonclusion on the life of the writing narrator.
Proust's writing style
In France at least, Proust is mainly known for the lenght of hte book, the madeleine, and the length of his sentences. It is not unusual that they take a whole paragraph (not mine, you know, about two-third of a page), and I quite distincly remeber reading one that was about two pages long. It is also not unusual to see metaphor's into a metaphor into a metaphore.
It means that getting into Proust's novel can be quite difficult. It took me about 50 pages to get used to. Once I was though, I never looked back. Its style is a pleasure to read, the sentences flow easily, are musical and poetic.
Plus you can find an objective reasons why such long sentences were used : indeed, In Search of Lost Time is also a book about what is art and litterature, and those never ending sentences correspond perfectly to Proust idea's that you can find the most accute general ideas by thouroughly examining the mast particular persona.
Appreciation or Why you might want to read it
It's hard to say everything that is good about this novel, first because of its length, second because as it is considered as one of the great masterpiece of the XXth century, many people have written much smarter things than I can hope to write.
First of all, the themes in the novel are both extremely varied and deep, and are more or less all linked together in the novel. The novel can be said social, psychological, a analysis of love, jealousy and separation, a treaty of memory and time, a search of what is art and beauty, an esthetic treaty or a trety on imagination, which the novel would be an application of. The "lost time" of the title might just be the focus point of all those ideas.
There are several tones in the novel. Often descriptive, mainly of feelings and sensations, almost always searching a psychological truth, each situation is examined from all angles possible, and often a latter revelation will bring a new meaning to a scene. proust is really one of the best psychological writer, for m only Dostoïevski is in the same league.
Proust can also be acid, and even funny, especially in his description of high society; i've laughed to some of Charlus' monologues or to Oriane de Gurmantes' jokes, or to the mockeries of some of the characters (there is a very incisive portrait of M. de Norpois, an embassador who has a very pompous language, full of clichés).
At the same time, Proust doesn't fall in the trap of the snob who mocks other snob, and explain his taste for high society, and all those ridiculous characters have their sincerity and their loyal moments. Charlus in particular is one of the strangest and nicest character in the novel.
While the novel may first look like it's going in every direction, Proust obviously gave lots of thought to the composition. Each main characters has its different sides, are painted diffrently numerous times throughout the novel, because there are several revelations, often really surprising. proust likes to link very different ideas. Moreover, the main question of the novel ("How is the narrator finally going to get to write this book?") ends up being a reason to read the novel in itself, by the end I wanted to know that like I'd want to know who the culprit is in a whodunnit. Except the answer is a lot more satisfactory.
By the way, the hero of the nove, which in my eyes really is a hero, is very peculiar. His perception and sesibility makes him the perfect writer in the yeys of Proust, which means that Proust is in a way trying to write his ideal novel... that's ambition !
That doesn't stop him from an extreme modesty too, and the narrator has many bad sides and can be quite annoying... If his qualities are exceptionnals, so are his bad sides.
There are a lot of ery beautiful pages, I cannot recall them all, but here's a few : the realisation that the grandmother is really dead, the dialogue with Gilberte at the end of the sixth volume, the theory of what is a novel in the last volume, the scene were Swann tells Oriane that he is going to die in a few months, the madeleine of course, the regrets of time lost at the end of the first volume, the end of Swann's love for Odette, the+ Show Spoiler +
death of Albertine
The narrative system is extremely complex despite the appearances (at first it looks like a regular first person novel told in chronological order, with a few exceptions). It is inspired by Sylvie by Gérard de Nerval (a very short short story that I have to recommend, simply some of the most beautiful pages in French litterature) : Proust writes, the narrator writes sometimes what he knows at the end of his life, sometimes what he know at the time of the scene, sometimes what he knew at a time in between. Once or twice, the narrator speaks to the reader, and it is very strange in this narrative setting.
Sometimes, it feels like Proust and the narrator are very different peple, sometimes it feels like they are the same person, in the last pages of the novel for instance, you even wonder ho is really speaking. And there's this strange paradox of a narrator telling us that he'll write a book about his life but different, which is what Proust is doing, as if there were infinitely many narrators between Proust and his main character.
Finally, the novel is an incredible aesthetic success. I feel like when you've finished the book, you undesrtand a lot better what art is about, and you want to write, because what the novel tells us is that litterary life is the most important of all, as it is by definition the one which axtracts from life all beauty and meaning...
Conclusion : Way too short of a blog, or way too long, I don't know. There might be quite a lot of English mistake, especially as in some parts I translated what I already wrote in French... You can tell me, especially if I'm confusing !
But more importantly, this is without a doubt my favorite writing work, and I hope I gave some of you the desire to try Proust, or at least that I interested some of you. Rarely have I been so fullfilled by on of my activities =)
PS : this reding took me quite some times from bw recently, especially with all my film watching, so shoutout to everyone I love in this community, especially 2pac, harem, pie, other people in sgs chat, Game, Bakuryu, and I'm forgetting many people !
