Rating: 
Summary: Proust Tastes the Madeleine
Review: Proust is one of my very favortite authors. "Swann's Way," the first book of A la recherche du temps perdu, is perhaps the most accessible and lyrical of the seven. Written in a hypnotic and mesmerizing style, "Swann's Way" begins by recreating life in a fictionalized 19th century French village, complete with gossipy aunts, church festivals and priests who "know too much.""Swann's Way" is also the volume in which Proust tastes the divine madeleine then goes on to link memory to memory to memory. Even the smallest detail is not overlooked: sights, sounds, smells, textures, the interplay of light and shadow; everything was a source of joy and connection for Proust and he records those connections in this fascinating book. While Joyce lived in the world of the present, Proust lived in the world of the past. So many people complain about the lack of plot in this book. But do we really need a plot in every book we read? Aren't some works of art beautiful enough to be read, or listened to or gazed upon for their beauty alone? Is anything truly "art for art's sake?" If your answer to this question is "Yes," then "Swann's Way" might be a book you'll come to treasure. Yes, it is dense and yes, it does take quite a bit of time to read, but it is time well spent and time that will never be forgotten. "Swann's Way" sets the tone for all the volumes that follow. Indeed, the final section of the final book is but an echo of the first section of "Swann's Way." Although Proust may have seemed to be wandering, he was not; A la recherche du temps perdu is one of the most structured works in any language. The fact that this structure is not immediately discernable is only further proof of the genius of Proust. The section, Swann in Love, is typical of Proust's obsession with repetition. Each time the tortured Swann meets Odette, he must re-enact the very first ritual of the cattleyas. They even come to speak of this as "doing a cattleya." The Swann in Love section also showcases Proust's wicked sense of humor, for Swann is both a character of high comedy and high tragedy, and Proust dissects French society in a most deliciously scathing manner. While it may be Proust's reputation that causes us to pick up this book, it is his prose that keeps us reading. Almost indescribable, it is luminous, poetic, magical, fascinating, ephemeral, gossamer, mesmerizing, elegant and, of course, sublime. I realize that "Swann's Way" is definitely not going to be a book for everyone. But those who love and appreciate fine literature and beautiful, crystalline prose, may find that "Swann's Way" will become nothing less than a lifetime treasure.
Rating:
Summary: Rewarding, but not an easy undertaking
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: There's nothing better than reading Proust.
Review: Having just finished reading SWANN'S WAY for the fourth time in my life, it remains at the top of my list of favorite novels. And my list is short. Influenced by John Ruskin, Henri Bergson, Wagner and the fiction of Anatole France, in his "universality and deep awareness of human nature," Proust (1871-1922) is considered "as primordial as Tolstoy," and "as wise as Shakespeare" (Harold Bloom, GENIUS, p. 218). Most recently, I re-experienced SWANN'S WAY through the Modern Library's new, 2003 revision of the Montcrieff/Kilmartin translation of Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, Volumes I through VI. Through an illuminating series of what Walter Pater has called "privileged moments," or what James Joyce might call "epiphanies," the narrative in SWANN'S WAY tells a dual story of unrequited love. The taste of a madeleine brings with it a flood of memories from the narrator's childhood spent in Combray and Paris, relating to his infatuation with Charles Swann's daughter, Gilberte, and Swann's obsessive affair with a courtesan, Odette de Crecy. Even though Swann realizes Odette is not his type (p. 543), his jealous love for her consumes him. Odette is unsophisticated, has lesbian tendencies, and is rumored to be a prostitute. Even after he realizes he has "wasted years of [his] life" on Odette (p. 543), Swann is nevertheless powerless to end their turbulent relationship. For Proust, human love is synonymous with suffering, failure, exhaustion, ruin, and despair (p. xviii), except, that is, for the love between a mother and son (symbolized in SWANN'S WAY by a memorable goodnight kiss, which leaves the young narrarator longing to tell his mother, "Kiss me just once more")(p. 15). SWANN'S WAY is not a feel-good novel, to be sure; for Proust there are no limits to human suffering. He believed that any intrusion upon one's solitude is damaging, that we can only understand our pain if we keep it at a distance, and that friendship is somewhere on a scale between fatigue and ennui (Bloom, GENIUS, p. 218). In the end, Volume I of Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME is about the lost and wasted years of human existence, and a preface of things to come in subsequent volumes. There is intellectual profit to be derived from the narrative of SWANN'S WAY. Proust teaches us that one may find rewards beyond the worldly ways of the human condition. Serious readers will experience uncommon pleasure in reading SWANN'S WAY. For me, SWANN'S WAY is a perfect example of why reading good books is worth the time spent from a limited human lifetime. G. Merritt
Rating:
Summary: The pleasure of reading Proust (Volume I).
Review: Having just finished reading SWANN'S WAY for the fourth time, it remains at the top of my short list of favorite novels. Influenced by John Ruskin, Henri Bergson, Wagner and the fiction of Anatole France, Proust (1871-1922), in his "universality and deep awareness of human nature," is considered by Harold Bloom to be "as primordial as Tolstoy," and "as wise as Shakespeare" (Bloom, GENIUS, p. 218). Most recently, I re-experienced SWANN'S WAY through the Modern Library's new, 2003 revision of the Montcrieff/Kilmartin translation of Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, Volumes I through VI. Through an illuminating series of what Walter Pater has called "privileged moments," or what James Joyce might call "epiphanies," the narrative in SWANN'S WAY tells a dual story of unrequited love. The taste of a madeleine pastry brings with it a flood of childhood memories from the narrator's youth spent in Combray and Paris, mostly relating to his infatuation with Charles Swann's daughter, Gilberte, and Swann's obsessive affair with a courtesan, Odette de Crecy. Although Swann realizes Odette is not his type (p. 543) and suspects she is a liar, his jealous love for her consumes him. Odette is unsophisticated, has lesbian tendencies, and is rumored to be a prostitute. Even after he acknowledges he has "wasted years of [his] life" on Odette (p. 543), Swann is nevertheless powerless to end their turbulent relationship. For Proust, human love becomes synonymous with suffering, failure, exhaustion, ruin, and despair (p. xviii) except, that is, for the love between a mother and son (symbolized in SWANN'S WAY by a memorable goodnight kiss, which leaves the young narrarator longing to tell his mother, "Kiss me just once more")(p. 15). SWANN'S WAY is not a feel-good novel, to be sure; for Proust, there are no limits to human suffering. He believed that any intrusion upon one's solitude is damaging, that we can only understand our pain if we approach it from a distance, and that friendship is somewhere on a scale between fatigue and ennui (Bloom, GENIUS, p. 218). In the end, Volume I of Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME is about the lost and wasted years of human existence, and it prefaces things to come in subsequent volumes. There is a satisfying intellectual profit to be derived from the narrative of SWANN'S WAY. Proust reveals through his use of small illuminations that one may find rewards beyond the worldly ways of the human condition. Serious readers will find uncommon pleasure in the experience of reading SWANN'S WAY. For me, reading SWANN'S WAY is the best example of what it means to read "a good book." G. Merritt
Rating: 
Summary: Another classic disappointment...
Review: This is the "Seinfeld" of literature: a long, drawn-out narrative about *nothing*. There are, however, other infinitely more enjoyable books that deal with memories and non-linear time. In my opinion, if a person is going to write a 3,000+ page self-reflective epic, he better be an interesting person, and this narrator is simply not one. At least not on any page of this introductory volume. Maybe he becomes interesting in a subsequent volume, but this one does not inspire me to attempt to find this out. I can appreciate the fact that this work was revolutionary in Proust's time, but I submit that in ours, it is more of a cure for insomnia than the literary masterpience it is cracked up to be.
Rating: 
Summary: Duelling Translations
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Sensitive and profound...
Review: Proust plunges the reader into the world of his vivid imagination, traversing between memory, image and objective reality. His work is truly a reflection or refraction of perception, to then be reconstructed in descriptive prose that conjures enchanting visuals of paradisaical landscapes, childhood wishes and dreams, and a time forgotten or lost as the modern age came crashing in with the arrival of the twentieth century. In the last pages of ~Swann's Way~, one cannot help but feel his lament of times passed, when women dressed with unconscious elegance, the French countryside remained pure, and the sheer simplicity and sophistication of the horse drawn carriage. These times are truly lost, however the narrator speculates, '...remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment...held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life.' When the narrator remembers, he realises that what he has known no longer exists, or possibly never existed, but they most certainly exist in his memories. This constant play between perception through the senses, the idealized image, and their interaction, and the character's responses to this constant flux of the real and the imagined, is the central theme of this text. The central character of the second chapter, Swann in Love, is hopelessly seduced by the coquettish, Odette. She draws Swann into her world and, over time, her indifference and listlessness, her unpredictable irritability and at times chilly manner towards him, causes Swann to suffer. But the reader gets the impression that Swann tends towards masochism, and in a perverse way, enjoys the pain. Swann's taste in women has always tended towards those below his social station - the shopgirl, the worker's daughter or the prostitute. These liaisons are always carried out in secret for the obvious reasons. However, in spite of Odette's lack of education and birthright, the aristocratic male finds her extremely attractive. She is a mistress with natural class and possesses that necessary skill of discretion. But is Swann actually in love with Odette, or the idealized image? When the actual woman and the idealized one do not meet, his expectations are dashed and he continues to suffer. Swann's friends anonymously attempt to tell him about Odette's seedy past, but this action only further embeds him into his reserve to somehow return to the pure love they once shared. And so the tale continues... This is the first book of Proust's seven-volume magnum opus, A la recherché du temps perdu. To my mind, the second section, 'Combray', is the most sensitive and beautiful description of early youth in modern literature. The last chapter is a kind of poetic lament of that innocent time period before the ravages of the Great War, which irrevocably changed the world forever. One cannot sing the praises of this novel enough.
Rating:
Summary: Proust's way
Review: I wish I hadn't waited so long to experience Proust, for now having read "Swann's Way," I see that his deeply sensitive prose is a reference point for almost all of the introspective literature of the twentieth century. As the story of a boy's adolescent conscience and aspirations to become a writer, the book's only artistic peer is James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." The narrator is presumably the young Marcel Proust who divides his recollections between his boyhood at his family's country house at Combray and his parents' friend Charles Swann, an art connoisseur. In fact, the path that passes Swann's house, being one of two ways the narrator's family likes to take when they go for walks, gives the book its title. Proust uses the theme of unrequited love to draw a parallel between his young narrator's infatuation with Swann's red-haired daughter Gilberte and Swann's turbulent affair with a woman named Odette de Crecy. Intense romantic obsessions are a Proustian forte. Swann falls for Odette even though she is unsophisticated and frivolous and does not appear to love him nearly as much as he loves her. He is desperate for her, always sending her gifts, giving her money when she needs it, and hoping she will become dependent on him. It comes as no surprise that he is consumed with jealousy when he notices her spending time with his romantic rival, the snobbish Comte de Forcheville, and he is shocked by her lesbian tendencies and rumors of her prostitution. He finally realizes with chagrin that he has wasted years of his life pursuing a woman who wasn't his "type" -- but even this resignation is not yet the conclusion of their relationship. Proust's extraordinary sensitivity allows him to explore uncommon areas of poignancy, perversity, and the human condition. One example is the young narrator's childish insistence on getting a goodnight kiss from his mother at the cost of wresting her attention away from the visiting Swann. Another remarkable instance is the scene in which a girl's female lover spits on the photograph of the girl's deceased father in disrespectful defiance of his wishes for his daughter's decency. And I myself identified with Legrandin, the engineer whose passion for literature and art grants his professional career no advantages but makes him an excellent conversationalist. Few writers can claim Proust's level of elegance and imagery. The long and convoluted sentences, with multiple subordinate clauses tangled together like tendrils of ivy, remind me of Henry James; but Proust is much warmer and more intimate although admittedly he is just as difficult to read. The narration of "Swann's Way" is a loosely connected flow of thoughts which go off on tangents to introduce new ideas and scenes; the effect is similar to wandering through a gallery of Impressionist paintings. And, as though channeling Monet literarily, Proust displays a very poetical understanding of and communication with nature, infusing his text with pastoral motifs and floral metaphors that suggest the world is always in bloom.
Rating:
Summary: search with Marcel
Review: This is the first of the seven volumes of the widely known but not always read "A la recherche du temps perdu". I particularly like that in this edition the translator chose the term: In search, and not remembrance. The novel is not about remembering, it is about searching the truth in the past. The past was a time in which Marcel was not able to understand what rested underneath the social conventions, personal passions and random emotions. What Marcel does when he writes is to explore those depths of human behavior and worldly condition.
In this first volume of "In search of Lost time" we get to see three parts. In the first one, Marcel shows us how he came to remember the time he spent in Combray with his parents, grandparents and aunts. We get to see here for the first time a very important character: Charles Swann, in whom Marcel sees an obstacle between him and the good night kiss of his mother. Vinteul appears as well. In the events surrounding his death Marcel finds for the first time the perversions of love and the human disposition towards evil and cruelty.
The second part revolvs around Swann and how he falls in love with Odette, a cocotte. A dark secret eventaully tortures Swann: Has Odette had unholy relations with other women? What is it that she does while he is not with her? Is she with other men?
The third part is a reflection on how names, things, experience of things themselves and the remembrance of them are separated by an abyss, which is only surpassed by the idea of the subject.
What is the best way to give unity to all these things? Through writing and art, seems to be final answer of "In Search of Lost time". But "Swann's way" leaves us with the sense of having lost something in the act of remembering.
This is one of the novels everyone should read.
Rating:
Summary: One of the great masterworks of world literature
Review: We apply "classic" and "masterpiece" too liberally, but regardless of how loosely or strictly we deploy the terms, Marcel's Proust's extraordinary novel belongs to the shortest of short lists deserving such description. At the risk of hyperbole (though I do not thing it is hyperbolic), Proust is the one writer of the 20th century who perhaps belongs to the ages more than to his own time, who belongs with Shakespeare and Dante and Homer. Many are put off Proust by not understanding the structure of his work and his writing strategy. The book, to many, seems to have no point and no plot. The novel actually does have a plot, albeit a simple and not easy to discern one: Will the narrator (usually termed "Marcel") become a writer? Through seven long volumes, we watch Marcel variously resolve to write and then forsake his resolve, we see him even forget for enormous lengths of time his intent to write. Through love affairs, through events with his friends, through reflections on all matter of subjects and experiences of every kind, Marcel finally comes in the final volume to rediscover his vocation and the subject of his work. This first volume in the series contains many of the most famous episodes in all of Proust. The famous passage in which the Narrator tells of his not being able to fall asleep as a child is found in the first pages. The most famous section in all of Proust, that of his eating as an adult a madeleine that first creates an inexplicable sense of joy and then engenders a plethora of involuntary memories of his childhood, is also found in this volume. The second half is the remarkable story of "Swann in Love," in which family friend Charles Swann falls in love, much to his surprise, with the courtesan Odette. This first volume glitters for the same reason that subsequent volumes do: Proust's remarkable sentences, in which he heaps phrase upon apt phrase on top of a carefully concealed central idea; Proust's extraordinarily complex, interesting, believable, and brilliant characters (I personally think he handles character better than any other author); and the wonderful passion and sensibility that permeates every page. I will end with a piece of advice: Proust, more than any writer I know, gives back as much as you point into him. If you expend a great deal of effort in working through his masterpiece, you will be comparably rewarded. If, on the other hand, you pick up SWANN'S WAY casually, expecting a relaxed, entertaining read, you will be profoundly disappointed. But if you approach him with an open mind, a great deal of patience, and a willingness to work your way carefully through each sentence, you just might believe this to be the most remarkable thing you have ever read.
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