Rating: 
Summary: The pleasure of reading Proust (Volume II).
Review: "Alas!" Proust writes in the second volume of his attempts to recapture his lost childhood and long-forgotten feelings, "in the freshest flower it is possible to discern those just perceptible signs which the instructed mind already betray what will, by the dessication or fructification of the flesh that is today in bloom, be the ultimate form, immutable and already predestined, of the autumnal seed" (p. 643).Having just finished reading WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE for the fourth time, it remains (with SWANN'S WAY) at the top of my list of favorite novels. 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). I most recently returned to Proust's BUDDING GROVE through the Modern Library's 2003 edition of the Montcrieff/Kilmartin translation of Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, Volumes I through VI. Through a continued series of what Walter Pater has called "privileged moments," or what James Joyce might call "epiphanies," the narrative of WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE gracefully transitions away from the childhood recollections of SWANN'S WAY, to the narrator's exquisite memories of his adolescence spent with his grandmother in the seaside setting of Balbec. We find that Charles Swann's turbulent affair with the "illiterate courtesan" (p. 124), Odette de Crecy, has resulted in marriage; and although the narrator's "enchantment" with Swann's daughter, Gilberte, gradually fades, he soon encounters unrequited love once again upon meeting the "charming, pretty, intelligent" and "quite witty" (p. 116) Albertine Simonet. In Volume II, Proust further develops his notion that human love is synonymous with suffering, failure, exhaustion, ruin, and despair. To love and believe in a woman completely becomes the "cause of the greatest suffering" (p. 713). "There can be no peace of mind in love," Proust's narrator reflects, "since what one has obtained is never anything but a new starting-point for future desires" (p. 213). "In reality," he adds, "there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralises, makes potential only, postpones, but which may at any moment become, what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted, excrutiating" (p. 214). WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE, much like SWANN'S WAY, is by no means a feel-good novel. Proust reveals that while love may allow us to touch the sublime, it also teaches us that there are no limits to human suffering.
In Volume II of Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, Proust introduces us to all the major characters of his subsequent volumes. Serious readers will experience uncommon pleasure in reading Proust. SWANN'S WAY and WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE are perfect examples of why it's worth one's time to read "a good book." In fact, a life without experiencing the rich pleasures of reading Proust would be real poverty. G. Merritt
Rating:
Summary: The pleasure of reading Proust (Volume II).
Review: "Alas!" Proust writes in the second volume of his attempts to recapture his lost childhood and long-forgotten feelings, "in the freshest flower it is possible to discern those just perceptible signs which the instructed mind already betray what will, by the dessication or fructification of the flesh that is today in bloom, be the ultimate form, immutable and already predestined, of the autumnal seed" (p. 643). Having just finished reading WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE for the fourth time, it remains (with SWANN'S WAY) at the top of my list of favorite novels. 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). I most recently returned to Proust's BUDDING GROVE through the Modern Library's 2003 edition of the Montcrieff/Kilmartin translation of Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, Volumes I through VI. Through a continued series of what Walter Pater has called "privileged moments," or what James Joyce might call "epiphanies," the narrative of WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE gracefully transitions away from the childhood recollections of SWANN'S WAY, to the narrator's exquisite memories of his adolescence spent with his grandmother in the seaside setting of Balbec. We find that Charles Swann's turbulent affair with the "illiterate courtesan" (p. 124), Odette de Crecy, has resulted in marriage; and although the narrator's "enchantment" with Swann's daughter, Gilberte, gradually fades, he soon encounters unrequited love once again upon meeting the "charming, pretty, intelligent" and "quite witty" (p. 116) Albertine Simonet. In Volume II, Proust further develops his notion that human love is synonymous with suffering, failure, exhaustion, ruin, and despair. To love and believe in a woman completely becomes the "cause of the greatest suffering" (p. 713). "There can be no peace of mind in love," Proust's narrator reflects, "since what one has obtained is never anything but a new starting-point for future desires" (p. 213). "In reality," he adds, "there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralises, makes potential only, postpones, but which may at any moment become, what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted, excrutiating" (p. 214). WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE, much like SWANN'S WAY, is by no means a feel-good novel. Proust reveals that while love may allow us to touch the sublime, it also teaches us that there are no limits to human suffering.
In Volume II of Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, Proust introduces us to all the major characters of his subsequent volumes. Serious readers will experience uncommon pleasure in reading Proust. SWANN'S WAY and WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE are perfect examples of why it's worth one's time to read "a good book." In fact, a life without experiencing the rich pleasures of reading Proust would be real poverty. G. Merritt
Rating:
Summary: *****
Review: Beautiful writing, and brilliant observations and well-drawn characters. Some caveats are the often labyrinthine sentences and multi-page paragraphs. Most people read SWANN'S WAY and no further, so those who make it through the 2nd volume might praise it excessively out of a slight superiority complex. Also, "Marcel" is also a little bitchy in his tone, and his "happiest when I'm alone" philosophy is kind of sad and self-absorbed, and his visiting whore houses is jolting after you've been reading graceful sentences and events. And some of his anthropological and psychological observations are trite and nothing most readers haven't concluded for themselves, and Proust sounds like he believes he's letting you in on some insights of which you're undoubtedly ignorant. But, yes, many of his insights are brilliant and eye-opening. And the sentences that are over-loaded actually are the exception, and the rest are doubtless among the most beautiful sentences ever written. Proust must have been extremely introspective to have thought so extensively about the most minute of moments...and good for us he was, since we get to enjoy the fruits of his introspection in this book. The humor that comes across is delightful, too. Proust has one thing you can't learn in any MFA creative writing program, and that is CHARM!
Rating:
Summary: ART: Applied Research & Technology
Review: I would not want to live in a world where Proust had not written, and am more than a bit hung-up and disaffected by my peer-group's (twentysomething) near-total indifference to this great, inescapable Book of Life. Who, indeed, still reads Proust with any degree of passion, dedication, obsession, LOVE...? (Out of the many French exchange-students I've encountered, not one of them has gotten past page thirty of the Overture. Ah, Apocalypse!) As Walter Benjamin prophesized, this indifference may be rooted in the "economic" distancing that is at the heart of Proust's universe. The rarefied sexual cosmos of the Champs-Elysees and its labyrinth of drawing-rooms, exhibitions, cathedrals, museums, theaters, and brothels may seem aeons away from the gritty precincts of our own postmodern metropolis. Proust demands a reader and surrogate who can identify with the intellectual cosmic suffering of long patience and reflection, interwoven worlds of delay, subterfuge, scheming, plotting, obsession, puzzlecraft, contracts, aestheticism, conspiracy-theory, art history, archaeopsychic hysterical jealousy(!), against the overblown instant-gratification that characterizes our televisual culture, watered by an ever-flowing Lethe of technological distraction. But to the extent that Life actually *does* track that way (and is still vulnerable to Proustian analysis), the novel's galactic intuition and painterly artifice will strike home as they never did before, even if it means reading *Within a Budding Grove* as retroactive science-fiction, the encyclopedic exploration of an alien planet distantly mirroring our own.(?) As the novel opens, Proust's narrator/doppelganger is still hung up on Gilberte Swann, though his asthma restricts him from the erotic games of tag and castle-keep on the Champ-Elysses (in turn-of-the-century France, there was no such thing as "adolescence"; one was cavorting around in short-pants one day, taking a lover the next). Where previously he had immersed himself in the vicarious inferno of Charles Swann and his disastrous passion for Odette, so now the burning candle-ends of love and death are dripping hot wax on the narrator himself, the pain fibers of paranoid hyper-interpretation, the crypt lists of post-despair Ruskinian analysis, maps revealing patterns that generate questions for further research.... At the beach-resort of Balbec, the obsession shifts to the deliciously polyphonic Albertine, who, over the next five volumes, will become the gender-bending montage of Proust's numerous *male* lovers spanning *Search*'s fifteen-year composition (but now we're getting ahead of ourselves). Albertine will come to embody the funhouse trajectory of ecstasy and confusion, bitter annulment and ulcer-inducing betrayal, glaring insight into how perversely we behave towards each other (amplified in the leisure-seeking world of the French upper-class), sending the narrator skipping to Hell on many an occasion. But even more hair-raising is Proust's introduction of M. de Charlus, one of the most shattering (and hilarious) representations of mental illness in 20th-century literature. One could construct an entire novel around this outrageously self-obsessed nut-job; he alone is worth the price of admission. Proust was one of Schopenhauer's deepest readers, and contributed a more thrilling justification of the latter's world than even Thomas Mann could achieve. As such, he was much too intelligent to ever allow himself to hope, to pray, to feel "redeemed" by anything less than a canonical work of art, the book of his life, one of the key texts available to help us reinvent (and rehabilitate) literary studies for the 21st-century. Proust's depth of insight and soul-crushing l'amour can be regained in our own technologized Earth Crisis, so soon as we learn to resurrect his canonical Patience against the morass of aesthetic shortcuts overwhelmingly available to young readers and writers. As Harold Bloom noted, it may be possible to maintain an authentic literary culture this late in history, even as this movement is forced to go underground.... Much like Tolstoy, Flaubert, and George Eliot in the 19th-century, Proust will forever remain a luminary is this fight for our (grotesquely postmodernized) souls.
Rating:
Summary: Don't stop with Swann's Way!
Review: If you're looking at reviews of this volume, then I assume you've read Swann's Way and are considering buying more Proust. Within a Budding Grove continues the brilliance of Swann's Way, applying Proust's unequaled powers of observation to such experiences as struggling to be with his childhood idol, staying at a seaside resort, glimpsing and ultimately working his way into a clique of teenage girls, developing a friendship with an aristocratic youth, and visiting the studio of a great painter. As with Swann's Way, you will have frequent "aha!" moments when Proust's narrator opens your eyes to the previously overlooked drama at your elbow (and within your own mind).
Rating:
Summary: Evolving feelings
Review: In this second volume of "In search of lost time", Marcel shows the evolution of his feelings towards women. The book starts off with his encounters with Gilberte, the daughter of Swann and Odette, in which the enjoy playing with other kids. Marcel finds misterious and fascinating the perspective of being admitted in Gilberte's intimate spaces: her house, the lobby, the rooms. His fascination includes Gilberte's mother, Odette; as well as he finds resistence in Swann's figure. But soon his passion for Gilberte disappears and he forces himself not to see her, in an attempt to make himself more interesting to her. But the unforseen result of his tactics is that his feelings for Gilberte fall into oblivion. Then, Marcel focuses in the meetings of the Swanns with the high society, in which Oddette is not completely well received (given her past as a "cocotte"); but she enters in the circles gradually.
Marcel travels to the beaches of Balbec with his grandmother and that's where he meets Albertine and her circle of colorfull and charming young friends. It is also noticeable the character of Norpois, whose words to Marcel are full of double meaning and hidden intentions. Marcel meets his friends Saint-Luop, too. After a few sightings he seems a bit pretentious, but through an aunt of Saint-Loup's (who he meets through his grandmother) he gets to know this young man and they stablish a close friendship. An uncle of his is Charlus, who will turn out to be a very important character.
By the end of the book the reader have met the circle of friends that Marcel has stablished as a result of his travel. He has taken the first step to his later relation with Albertine. Proust rejoices in describing things and one has to understand why is that. His references to the Dreyfuss affair serve as a way to show the behaviour of the high society and the snobism, which seems to rule the relationships between the different circles. Everything serves a purpose with Proust, even though an incautious reader may think that it is a long dissapointing book, I find it to be one of the great literary endeavours of the past century. His way of looking in detail the simple and most trivial life in all its seemingly meaningless details, turns such details in evidence of the connection between the big destinies and the low and selfish passions. A great example of this is when he discovers his own place in time, after considering how he relates to Gilberte and with his hobbies. This second volume of "In search of lost time" constitutes an honest, unidealistic view of love and how its nature is actually connected to the low passions that rule societies.
Rating:
Summary: Very beautiful
Review: One of the seven volumes of The Remembrance of Things Past, Within a Budding Grove is my favorite. Proust was of course infinitely more than a narcissist and a snob, but it is perhaps this volume which shows this more than the others. In terms of pure sensousness this volume contains Proust's most purely "beautiful" passages. Here we see the beginning and the ebbing of Marcel's attraction to Gilbertte Swanne and his new attraction to Albertine. Here the elaborate and elegantly structured sentences are easier to appreciate than in the long passages about the unpleasantness of the Guermantes or Marcel's elaborate comments on the ebbing memory in The Fugitive. Consider one passage which Theodor Adorno admired very much, where Marcel encounters Madame Swann wearing a lovely dress: "And I learned that these canons according to which she dressed, it was for her own satisfaction that she obeyed them, as though yielding to a Superior Wisdom of which she herself was High Priestess: for if it should happen that, feeling too warm, she threw open or even took off altogether and gave me to carry the jacket which she had intended to keep button up, I would discover in the blouse beneath it a thousand details of execution which had had every chance of remaining unperceived, like those parts of an orchestral score to which the composer had devoted infinte labor albeit they may never reach the ears of the public: or in the sleeves of the jacket that lay folded across my arm I would see, I would drink in slowly, for my own pleasure of from affection for its wearer, some exquisite detail, a deliciously tinted strip, a lining of mauve satinette which, ordinarily concealed from every eye, was yet just as deliciously fashioned as the outer parts, like those gothic carvings on a cathedral, hidden on the inside of a balustrade eighty feet from the ground, as perfect as are the bas-reliefs over the main porch, yet never seen by any living man until, happening to pass that way upon his travels, an artist obtains leave to climb up there among them, to stoll in the open air, sweeping the whole town with a comprehensive gaze, between the soaring towers." Adorno's comments on this passage are far more profound than anything I could say. (They are availabe in the second volume of Notes to Literature) What is so striking, says Adorno, about this passage is not its enraptured precision but the way Proust preserves the unmediated experience of childhood that is so easily destroyed by our conformist society. In showing that this experience can be retrieved Proust's writing is profoundly liberating, not filled with "the false maturity of resignation." Though Proust was physically weak, the iron discipline of Proust's art reveals the deepest and most heroic discipline. Proust, in the end, is a martyr to happiness.
Rating:
Summary: Adolescence narrated with supreme artistry
Review: Reading Proust presents the challenge of understanding his complex method of conveying the impressions made upon him by various people, places, and things, impressions which are so deeply personal and unique that they can be very difficult for the detached reader to relate to. Proust can recall the torrid emotions of a teenage crush with the articulate language and clarity of an extremely intellectual adult with a literary voice so distinctive it practically exists in a genre of its own; and in "Within a Budding Grove," the second volume of "In Search of Lost Time," he subjects his narrator, now in his young teens, to the charms of two girls who will define for him a youthful ideal by which he standardizes love and beauty. Searching for ideals seems to be the young Marcel's goal in life. Whether he is enamored with the actress Berma at the theater, the writings of his literary model Bergotte, or the paintings of the artist Elstir, he immerses himself headlong into what he believes to be the supreme examples of artistic experience and absorbs the impressions so that he may reflect them in his own future writing. Oddly enough, his feminine ideal is no girl of his own age but Odette, the courtesan who was the obsession of his parents' friend Swann in the previous volume and is now Swann's wife, and whose checkered past casts a lingering shadow over her husband's social status, excluding them from the higher strata of Paris society (the Faubourg Saint-Germain) and keeping Swann suspicious about her behavior with other men. Marcel is trying to develop a relationship with the Swanns' lovely, lively red-haired daughter Gilberte, and he agonizes over the fear that he will not succeed in impressing upon her parents that he is good enough for her. It may seem strange that an adolescent Marcel should spend so much time talking about the Swanns, as though they were potential in-laws, rather than his own parents, but this is an indication of his preoccupying desire for Gilberte's company. Finally he comes to the realization that she does not feel the same way about him as he does about her, which accompanies his bitter shock at seeing her with another boy. Long after his passion for her has faded, however, he still treasures his memories of the time he has spent in Odette's salon.
The second half of this volume concerns Marcel's summer sojourn with his grandmother in Balbec, a seaside resort. There he meets his grandmother's friend Madame de Villeparisis, whose father spent the nineteenth century hobnobbing with all the great French writers of the era, and befriends her grandnephew Robert de Saint-Loup, a young man a little older than himself, who is embarking on a military career. One day he notices a remarkably attractive girl walking a bicycle with a group of her friends; this turns out to be Albertine, with whom he forms a relationship that is more playful than the tense one he had with the frigid Gilberte but ends sourly with a refused kiss and a confused Marcel pondering her intentions. Marcel's hypersensitive nature grants him many advantages as a narrator, giving him the ability to overanalyze every situation that shapes his consciousness, but arguably limits his lifestyle. His parents coddle him about his health, even supposing an evening at the theater will debilitate him, and, as we see at Balbec, he accustoms himself to a new setting in an abnormally awkward manner. But perhaps his awkwardness, in love as in life, can be explained partly by the nymphic philosophy by which Odette guides her life: "You can do anything with men when they're in love with you, they're such idiots!" The truth hurts.
Rating:
Summary: so delicious!
Review: the beauty of these novels is unmatched with the possible exception of thomas wolfe. come with me and dance til dawn
Rating:
Summary: Memories of Youth, and far-off Balbec
Review: This book was such a joy to read, I was genuinely sorry to see it end. And of course, it doesn't really end; it just goes on into the Guermantes Way. Rarely does one come across a novel that seems so completely pleasing and visionary in its effects upon the reader. Apart from the general relief one feels in seeing the author finally emerge from his prolonged sojourn in the shadow of his mother, there is also the vicarious pleasure derived from experiencing a long-ago summer at the mythical sea-side resort of Balbec, in the shadow of young women in the flower of youth. You feel as if you are truly there with him, walking the promenade, gazing out to sea, hearing the sea-gulls cry, feeling the sand between your toes, and being nineteen again and living carelessly. Two great characters emerge from this novel who will exercise a profound influence on the young narrator as he matures in future volumes. The first is Robert de Saint-Loup, a dashing young soldier-playboy, whom Marcel clearly adores as a soul mate of sorts. This gives the reader pause; for considering how close the two young men become they manage to still consider themselves straight! Never mind, however, for we eventually learn that Saint-Loup is indeed bisexual, as are so many of the characters in this novel. Secondly we meet the playful, flirty Albertine whom Marcel decides is the one girl in the little band of jeunes filles whom he most wants as his female sexual conquest. Unfortunately, he does not have the capability of relating to her except in the most self-absorbed of ways.
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