Details Books In Pursuance Of Remembrance of Things Past: Volume II - The Guermantes Way & Cities of the Plain (Remembrance of Things Past #2)
| Original Title: | Remembrance of Things Past: Volume II - The Guermantes Way & Cities of the Plain |
| ISBN: | 0394711831 (ISBN13: 9780394711836) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Series: | Remembrance of Things Past #2, À la recherche du temps perdu #3-4, A la busca del tiempo perdido #2 , more |
Marcel Proust
Paperback | Pages: 1216 pages Rating: 4.53 | 990 Users | 51 Reviews
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If the cares of this world have grown far too painful and you're thinking of becoming a junkie or born-again Christian, I'd suggest that you take a less drastic step, and consider trying out Proust first, just to see how it grabs you. This is what's known in my business as a "harm reduction" approach: like addiction and religious conversion, hardcore Proust reading will suck up your time, alter your character, transform your life, and cause all your friends to hate you. You'll become completely obnoxious and will find yourself thinking and doing things you'd never have thought you would, now that this single force dominates your whole life. But in the final analysis, the toll that recherching temps perdu will take on your functioning and personal relationships is considerably less than those associated with heroin addiction or Christian fundamentalism. Besides, reading Proust probably won't make you puke the first time, and it's not incompatible with an abiding love of homosexuality or Darwin's theory of evolution.... So if you're casting around, please, at least think of giving this it a shot. If the Proust doesn't do it, that other stuff'll still be there for you to fall back on.Okay, so Swann's Way blew my fuses (in a good way) when I read it a bit over a year ago, then i really struggled with A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs, which took me a really, really long time to read because I kept putting it down. So here's what I have to say about reading Proust: Don't put it down!! The reason I'm comparing this to heroin addiction and Christian fundamentalism is that -- in my own personal experience, anyway -- one can't just casually read Proust. It's a real commitment. It's not an activity, it's a lifestyle. Because if you put the guy down then come back after a few days, you're at risk of noticing all sorts of things that hadn't occurred to you before, like, "The narrator of this novel is an odious fucktard!"; or, "The sentence I'm reading is twelve pages long!"; or, "I've just spent the last four weeks of my summer reading about fictional French aristocrats making asinine smalltalk!" Total immersion in Proust really helps one maintain the fairy spell by ignoring all this, and keeps one safely rapt in the world of salons and carriages. That's why I'm glad I was lucky enough to spend May and part of June all alone in a luxurious cork-lined room, with a servant at hand to bring me cookies and little beet and celery root salads whenever I rang.... Okay, so once in awhile I did have to go out. However, I maintained an exclusive relationship with my darling Marcel by refusing to interact with the people I knew, and on rare occasions when duty did compel me to attend social events, embarrassing my friends by working compulsive Proust references into every conversation. The end result being: no one likes me anymore. But is this so terrible? I've still got three more volumes!!! More time to read!
Fine, okay: so why do I love this book so much?
I remember there was a certain point in my development as a little person when I realized that magic just did not exist. I had to confront the fact that I'd never be able to fly, and this first harsh reality was just the beginning. Each year I get older there's some new form of magic whose impossibility I'm forced to wrestle with and ultimately submit to. These "you just can't fly" reality checks come in the form of lost opportunities, lost possibilities, and of course -- most crushingly and irrefutably -- lost time.
For me, that's what this book is about. It's both the law and the loophole, brilliantly and impossibly the barred entrance and secret back door in, because what Proust is saying is that you cannot go back, but then just as he says that he does send you there, and that's why it's great, that's the main reason. This book flung me back into time, into someone and someplace else, and in doing so lifted me out of my life and its sad limitations. I just read Brad's review of Lord of the Rings, books I've never read but which I know people love for Tolkien's success in creating a self-contained, separate world. In Search of Lost Time is a similar thing, though instead of elves and orcs, you've got homosexual barons and bourgeois strivers, and instead of Middle Earth there's Paris and hotels and the inside of Proust's brain. This is fantasy in the best possible sense of the term, a kind of transcendent escapism I could never get from opiates or speaking in tongues.
Also, did I mention all the GAY SEX???? I never realized before reading this that I'm actually an extremely snobby, rich, asthmatic gay man, but I really must be, since this all totally resonated and proved so fascinating. Another thing I really liked here and am not ashamed to admit is that since moving to New York I've developed a lot of very expensive cravings that I'll never be able to satisfy; to me, Proust is the haute couture of literature, and it gratifies me enormously that while the tragic course of my life has doomed me to unglamorous schlumping around in H&M drudgery, nothing prevents me from hobnobbing in salons with the Duchesse de Guermantes while contemplating the rays of the setting sun against a gently gleaming seascape.... This is the book version of a priceless Parisian ballgown from the turn of the last century, and I got my copy for $1.50 at the Woodstock library book fair! Okay, so the previous owner had gone through and underlined all the gay stuff, but that's still a steal (and the timing was incredible: I came across it just as I was finishing Part II!). Literature really does have some democratic qualities....
I can only give a book five stars if I honestly feel like it transformed my life. Reading this installed a new application in my brain which causes me now during idle moments to consider, WWPT ("What Would Proust Think?")? This is probably most entertaining during social gatherings, but it's a device that can entertain me in almost any situation. I will never be the same again, mostly in ways that are enjoyable to me (though again, and I can't emphasize this enough, possibly not to the people I know).
I cannot in good conscience recommend this book to everyone across the board, because I'm highly aware that there's a lot to hate here. I can actually think of more reasons why someone would loathe this than why someone would love it, and I'm not entirely sure how I wound up in the latter instead of the former camp. I do think this is one of the greatest things ever written, though I don't know that I'd especially want to argue that point with anyone. All I'm really sure about is that I love it, and though I can name some appealing qualities, I'm still not completely sure why this love is so strong. Maybe it's because I'm a ridiculous, pretentious snob who gets a kick out of reading something hilariously long and generally considered rarified? Or because I understand the pain of suspecting one's "straight" significant other of being secretly homosexual (hi, Brian!)? Maybe it's because I really appreciate novels that couldn't be movies, that truly exploit the form to its limits? Or because I enjoy loving something I know I could hate, that wouldn't appeal to a lot of other people, or even to me at an earlier point in my life...? Or maybe because it's so totally unlike anything else I've ever read or loved? Yet so deeply engaging and astounding that I sometimes feel my whole life's just prepared me to read and to relish this book...? Well, I don't rightly know! I just know that I love it, and that I cannot stop reading these things, despite their deleterious effects on my personal life. All I really want to do these days is read Proust, think about Proust, talk about Proust, etc.... somehow this hasn't really translated into an interest in writing about Proust, but I thought I should account for the last month of my life.
Proust! AAGHH! FUCK!!!! He's the greatest!!! One of the glorious tragedies of reading this is that it's really destroyed my capacity to read anything else, because whenever I try I'm just completely preoccupied by the knowledge that I'm wasting precious time I could spend reading Proust instead. So I guess I've got no choice at this point but to get through the rest of this, so that hopefully after that I can move on with my life... And by move on with my life I obviously mean, learn to read French?
Onto the next one! Yeeeeehaw!
Particularize Regarding Books Remembrance of Things Past: Volume II - The Guermantes Way & Cities of the Plain (Remembrance of Things Past #2)
| Title | : | Remembrance of Things Past: Volume II - The Guermantes Way & Cities of the Plain (Remembrance of Things Past #2) |
| Author | : | Marcel Proust |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 1216 pages |
| Published | : | August 27th 1982 by Vintage (first published 1922) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Classics. Literature. Cultural. France |
Rating Regarding Books Remembrance of Things Past: Volume II - The Guermantes Way & Cities of the Plain (Remembrance of Things Past #2)
Ratings: 4.53 From 990 Users | 51 ReviewsCriticism Regarding Books Remembrance of Things Past: Volume II - The Guermantes Way & Cities of the Plain (Remembrance of Things Past #2)
Originally published on my blog here in February and March 1999.The Guermantes WayIn the third volume of Remembrance of Things Past, the subject changes. From boyhood in Swann's Way, through adolescent lovesickness in Within A Budding Grove, Proust's narrator now emerges into Parisian society. The Guermantes are one of the oldest noble families in France, and he gradually becomes involved in their circle. (The title of this part also balances that of the first one, in that the two walks taken byAs disconcerting as it can be to painstakingly grind one's way through a thousand pages of an extraordinarily dense novel and realize that you're only a third of the way through it, it actually does get easier once you pass that first volume (admittedly quite the hurdle) and move into the second volume. A combination of me slowly getting used to Proust's knotted sentence structures (seriously, they're not just like a snake attempting to eat themselves but like a snake going back in time to eat
Yes, verily, over the course of 27 years, my husband and I did promenade through all three massive volumes of this First Vintage Books Edition. Our habit was to sit together in the evening, usually for fifteen minutes around 10pm, one of us reading aloud to the other. Finishing the last page left me with mixed feelings: a sense of triumph at our completed marathon, admiration for Proust whose sweeping arc of narrative came to an eloquent close, and sadness that our journey through his pages had
If the cares of this world have grown far too painful and you're thinking of becoming a junkie or born-again Christian, I'd suggest that you take a less drastic step, and consider trying out Proust first, just to see how it grabs you. This is what's known in my business as a "harm reduction" approach: like addiction and religious conversion, hardcore Proust reading will suck up your time, alter your character, transform your life, and cause all your friends to hate you. You'll become completely
Just part two same routine
More from the Master. A long time since I read this, but it must be the one with the reflection of the sea in the panes of glass in the bookcase...
What I felt after reading this? Relief! Finally it's over. But I save a few good quotes.
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