Rating: 
Summary: Get connected
Review: . . . . . fills up every aspect of your innermost susceptibility. Makes your mind feel rich and comfortable.
Rating: 
Summary: not for ears
Review: Don't get me wrong, Proust is a great writer, and many parts of this book are amazing. The problem is that his sentence structure and plot are poorly adapted for listening. He winds around and around the commas, parantheses, dashes, etc. to the point where you have no idea what he is referring to. I picked up a written copy of Swann's Way, and I the parts I remembered being bored and confused made sense to me and became very enjoyable.
Rating:
Summary: One of the great pleasures of middle age
Review: Fortunately, I was never assigned Proust in school and, prior to picking up Swann's Way, knew of Proust mainly through a Monty Python sketch. I thus came to the book with almost no preconceptions. It was, without exaggerration, one of the best reading experiences I have ever had. Proust is unlike any other novelist, somehow looking at life with both incredible analytical detachment and, at the same time, a neurotic coloring that is all his own. But, to fully appreciate this work, you have to take it at the right time. That time, for me at least, is middle age, when you begin to accept your own neuroses, when your own life consists of 50% memories, and when you can appreciate the relentless dissecting of the immortal "types" who inhabit every society. I have gone on to read the next two novels in Proust's series and now have to force myself not to consume the remainder too hastily. Even if Proust turns you off the first time around, wait ten years and try again.
Rating: 
Summary: excrutiating
Review: [O]ne must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself. -Marcel Proust Infirmity alone makes us take notice and learn, and enables us to analyze processes which we would otherwise know nothing about. -Marcel Proust Allow me to tell you that even though you are approaching fifty, you've stayed what you were when I first knew you, namely a spoilt child. -Lionel Hauser, Proust's stockbroker The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have a broken leg in order to have the opportunity to read In Search of Lost Time. -Robert Proust, Marcel's brother My dear friend, I may be dense, but I fail to see why a chap needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before sleep. -Alfred Humboldt, Ollendorf publishing house At the end of seven hundred and twelve pages of this manuscript, after innumerable griefs at being drowned in unfathomable developments and irritating impatience at never being able to rise above the surface--one doesn't have a single, but not a single clue of what this is about. What is the point of all this ? What does it all mean ? Where is it all leading ? Impossible to know anything about it ! Impossible to say anything about it ! -Jacques Madeleine, Fasquelle publishing house A mother's boy who never really grew up, a part-genuine, part-imaginary invalid totally incapable of looking after himself, a reluctant homosexual who may never have known genuine fulfilment, he spent his early manhood in Parisian high society and then retired, hermit-like, to his famous cork-lined room, where he turned day into night and night into day. -John Weightman, Books Unlimited review of Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life About a book published only a few months earlier, people never speak to me without mistakes proving either that they've forgotten it or that they haven't read it. -Marcel Proust GRADE : U (utterly unreadable)
Rating:
Summary: Very Difficult Read.
Review: Hopefully, a person picking up Proust knows what to expect, but remember his skills are in the act of writing, not in the story line itself. Not a lot happens, and it takes a long time to unfold. I did like the portion about the old ladies spying on their neighborhood, making judgements, analyzing activities, all from their windows. (Made me think of elderly relatives of my own in small towns.) Mostly, I found it difficult to keep reading, kept being tempted to put it down and find something a bit more exciting.
Rating:
Summary: The full flavor of life
Review: Everyone, from time to time, experiences the strangeness of having some momentary sensation recall something from the distant past. For example, the scent of a window screen after rain can still recall to me a moment from, probably, 1956, the year I was five. I stood at the back window of my grandmother's bedroom, arms on the sill--looking across her backyard, the alley, and the neighbor's back yard to the cars rolling along Midlothian Turnpike. It was a gloomy fall day. I can feel my forearms resting on the cool wood. I can see the white sill and the screen and the landscape in some detail, so that I know it was a real moment from my life, not something snatched from a dream. But the effect is fleeting. It's like a piece of film that runs for a few seconds and then disappears. I can't attach anything to it, before or behind, that would explain why this particular moment comes back to me, except the scent of wet screen. There are a few other such bits of my life that sometimes come back to me, but I have no connections between them. Now imagine that a similar experience happens to you, but one that is vastly larger. A sensation of taste or smell, not encountered for many years, brings back, not a single momentary impression, but the entire history of your childhood and of all the years since, so that you are finally able to contemplate your life in its completeness--so that you know fully who you are and how you came to be who you are. And imagine that you are an aspiring writer, that you've sought all your life for the right subject, the right thing to share with the world--and now you have finally found it. And you are gifted with a kindhearted nature, high intelligence, psychological insight, irony and humor, along with the power of precise description, so that you can convey in words anything you think or feel. And this sudden discovery, which brings you all of your life and all of your gifts, comes with such force that you devote nearly all your energy, for the remaining years of your life, to sharing the fullness of your remembered and re-imagined experience with those who will read your work--so that you and your life, to an extent that reaches the edge of human possibility, are delivered from the limitations of time and language and death. And the resulting work brings readers so deeply into your head and heart, and they find your humanity and understanding so rich, that it is read with delight and gratitude by millions throughout the world. This fortunate person, of course, is Marcel Proust, whose novel In Search of Lost Time (of which this is the first volume) is one of the greatest achievements in the history of creativity.
Rating:
Summary: Clearly not for everyone
Review: Proust wrote about the mystery of human existence. His gift was in finding the most ordinary occurrences of everyday life - walking, talking, breathing - magically textured and beautiful. That's why so many people read his books and complain, "Nothing happens." or "This is boring." These people would be better off reading a storyteller like Dickens, but don't put others down because they appreciate what Proust did and tried to convey.
Rating:
Summary: Proust's way is to be followed!
Review: This book is like a great kaleidoscope where the characters are the cristals of the myriad scenes depicted page after page. Proust creates a delighful new world from every little thing that surrounds him. His childhood is a mean to give birth to a gallery of charming characters and strong sensations that flow in a continuous stream. His exquisite and delicate prose transports us to our own childhood. He lets us perceive the beauty of simple things stimulating all our senses. (It is strange how a simple translation can give a book's title more than its original sense. "Du coté de chez Swann" or "Por el camino de Swann" -the former being the original title and the later the spanish translation- tell us simply that we are going to introduce ourselves in a beautiful promenade along a little ville called Combray. However, the english tittle "Swann's way" creates in the reader's mind an expectation about the main character that does not come up even in the original tittle.)
Rating:
Summary: Puh-leez!
Review: Remembrance of Things Past is undoubtably one of the greatest works in the history of literature. Proust's literary technique almost surpasses his profound content in beauty and elegance, yet throughout the work maintains a humorous and entertaining tone. This wonderful balance of philosophical complexity and personal warmth will speak to every reader regardless of ethnic background, thereby transcending insignificant differences and addressing humanity as a collective whole with it's documentation of memory, emotion, happiness and grief, all of which tie us together as human beings rather than separate groups. What makes it a masterpiece of the written word is it's ability to pinpoint the oridinary, minute details of everyday life without narrowly isolating itself to a particular nationality, religion, or social position. This is achieved through the meticulous craftsmanship and perceptiveness of Proust, whose unqiue observation and attention to detail is unprecedented and has set the towering standard which has yet to be topped. There have been few critics to disagree with the above, yet I was taken back when I found so many negative, uninformed reviews... it's art. You can hate good food, for example, but don't say it isn't healthy! That shows a great deal of arrogance and extreme ignorance on the part of the critic. Now I realize some of you are high schoolers or between the ages of 18-24, and because of this you being naive is forgivable. But as someone wise once said, "If you don't have anything nice [or in this case INFORMED or INTELLIGENT] to say, don't say anything at all." This work is a masterpiece, pure and simple.
Rating:
Summary: Exquisite and execrable
Review: Marcel Proust's SWANN'S WAY at first dazzles the reader with its exquisitely written prose and sharp jabs at the pretentiousness of the narrator's society. Nonetheless, the work is ultimately a failure because it offers no rewards. One can imagine the asthmatic Proust lying in bed for days on end writing his work in place of an occupation. The reader is not so lucky as to have so much time to spend in pursuit of Proust's point. Reading Proust feels like a tedious full-time job, instead of a diversion or glimpse of great art. Even worse is that so much of Proust's novel is empty of plot. The characterizations, however clever, do not redeem the novel's 600-page thesis on simple memory. There does exist literature that functions autobiographically and deserves praise in spite of the lack of plot, such as Anthony Powell's A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME or even Raymond Schwartz's KIEL AKVO DE L' RIVERO, but those works are much more compact and offer a wealth of fascinating setting and characters along the way. SWANN'S WAY is simply void. For those who have the energy to tackle this work, and the five novels after it which continue "In Search of Lost Time," SWANN'S WAY might present an attractive challenge. But for those of us who cannot spend whole days reading, SWANN'S WAY is a frustrating work.
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