Remembrance of Things Past: Within a Budding Grove

Rating:
Summary: Truth and Reality
Review: I first picked up the first volume way back in 1987, and now (2001, Oct), I finally finished the entire works.

In the last book ("Time Regained") Proust lucidly laid out his philosophy of Truth and Reality. In doing so, he contrasted the traditional Plato's sense of objective-reality as "things in themselves", Truth as a notion independent of any human observation, to what will be the precursor of Modern Analytic Philosophy (of latter Wittgenstein's and American Pragmatism) in which reality and truth are defined as "things that are experienced". For Proust, reality and truth are embedded in the way we remember the past. What makes the church in Combray real, is my rememberance of it, and all of my sensation, emotion, and feeling that comes with that memory. This is an extremely radical view of reality and truth for his time, since it amounts to say that truth and reality are subjective, not objective. Proust, however, wanted to go further that this. He made the connection between reality/truth and arts. For him, arts is a unique way of remembering and experiencing the past. Only by remembering and conjuring all of your past memory of the past, can arts be borned.

Rating:
Summary: Well written but longer than it should be
Review: I had been intrigued by Proust since early age, for one of my favourite books is Gold and Fizdale's "Misia" and his name crops up all the time in it. I bought the Scott Moncrieff's English version in Paris over ten years ago and I know that many soi-dissant more authoritative versions have come out eversince. Yet, a few years ago I read the version in French as organized by Jean-Yves Tadié -possibly the best known pundit on Proust's work to date- and I have to say Moncrieff's translation doesn't stray that far from the original. "A La Recherche" is to me the most important book in the history of literature. Compellingly philosophical, psychological, soul-searching and esthetic, no details of life go amiss. I am alternately moved, stirred and surprised at Proust's dexterity in describing the wide range of human emotions and the complexity of human interactions. He talks about art, love, jealousy, nostalgy, ambition, social climbing, politics and you cannot fail to empathise with his prose or finding new moot questions with each new reading of his work. His book is as relevant to life as life itself.

Rating:
Summary: wow!
Review: I just finished. This is the most amazing thing I've ever read.

Rating:
Summary: The Ne Plus Ultra Of Literature
Review: I tend on the whole to be quite skeptical of the notion that one may with confidence posit any single creative work as the "greatest" of its genre, but with Proust's novel I am forced to make an exception; "Remembrance" is not simply the greatest achievement of 20th century French literature, but is, in my opinion, THE greatest literary work of all time, period.

Yes, Mann is a master of irony, and yes, I grant that Musil's "Man Without Qualities" is a work of genius, but no work that I am aware of - not The Magic Mountain, not Doctor Faustus, not Moby Dick, not The Brothers Karamazov - can match Proust's novel for readability, for its' sheer richness of imagery, for the profound understanding of human nature, with all its weaknesses and contradictions, displayed in the pages of the book, for the beauty of its' prose (a beauty that comes across quite clearly even in translation), and for the vast terrain of ideas covered in the course of those 3,000+ pages of text.

That Proust is so little read today (supposedly, only 15,000 copies of "Swann's Way" were sold last year in France, of all places) speaks poorly of our age, and it is impossible to take any living American writer (not excepting Thomas Pynchon) seriously after experiencing (for "reading" is not the appropriate term to use here) this masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: The Best Work of "Fiction" Ever Written
Review: Moncrieff/Kilmartin's translation is still the best. Proust's life-work is the most psychologically acute novel ever written, and a perfect match between form and content. His form is the memoir, conceived as a piece of music, with themes and variations, codas and recapitulations. The content is a list of evolving concerns, from love (in all its forms) to aesthetic creation and appreciation, as well as a sort of living autopsy of the aristocracy of his time. His motives were manifold, but it seems Proust primarily wanted to get in the final word on those people he knew throughout his life, and show he both understood them (better than they themselves) and that they had little inkling of his amazing inner life. For all his encounters with and criticisms of snobs and poseurs throughout the work, and his tendency to fully absorb himself in his experiences, Marcel the narrator risks coming off as a snob himself; but quite the opposite, he denigrates himself constantly with reference to his own writing abilities, up into the very last section of "Time Regained" when the structural idea for the novel we have just read comes to him. He's disappointed many times by his own experiences, when they are is measured and conditioned by the background of his keen aesthetic imagination. His salvation is both the Idea for the novel, and a theory of time/identity which has been "calling out" to him with his famous episodes of "involuntary memory" (the most famous of which is the tea-dipped madeleine). As one reads on, there are times when it seems Proust has suspended all action and narrative in favor of impressions which resonate against one another. It may seem gratuitous or self-indulgent, but he is "performing" his theory at the same time he's telling you about it. They each have a purpose, and it seems he's trying to enact a philosophical theory of identity and experience: as if we the subject are nodes of activity that blend memory and present conscious experience.
"Remembrance of Things Past" can be a difficult work to read, but it is so very much worth it. One needs no guide to read this work; it's not as allusive as "Ulysses" nor esoteric like "Gravity's Rainbow". Proust's style is very reader-friendly (albeit he spins very long sentences). He respects the reader, and wants her to understand exactly where he's coming from, for this novel is like the map Borges once described in one of his "Ficciones": it's a representation so large and subtle and complex that it is as big as what it depicts.

If Proust were alive today, he'd probably be kibbitzing with Hollywood stars or the world's billionaire elites...And not much of this book would change!

Rating:
Summary: ...
Review: Of course for something so revered you have to read it. The same reverence that made me read it also made me extremely uneasy reading it, as it does with many other things (it especially makes me hesistant to see supposedly "good" movies, driving me to the insipid).

Obviously I don't want anyone else to experience the same hesitation, so read Remembrance of Things Past asap, and don't allow its status and other reviews to give you expectations for it. You may hate it, but you might also love it.

I've loved it (have only read the first volume- Swann's Way and Within a Budding Groove... eagerly approaching the rest). I would sing the praises of Proust's prose, but, of course, I'm reading a translation. But, the translation ovbiously communicates enough for me to love it. For all its absurdly dense sentence strucutres and five page paragraphs, it took me a while to get used to, reading 5 pages at a time and taking half an hour for just that. I loved the 5 pages, but couldn't read much more without getting a migrane, but, after a couple months of hatcheting my way through it, I managed to discard the spectre of its reputation and slowly move my way through increasingly elegant tools, eventually consuming dozens of pages at a time.

You have to read Remembrance of Things Past... for me it's taken loads of patience... so I'll recommend the same course for any other fairly inexperienced reader - even if it's slow at first, keep on reading, and don't allow your expectations or its reputation to drive you too much - it's better to honestly dislike something and retry it later than to allow reputation to ruin enjoyment and enslave you into finishing it (conversely, it might be reputation that drives you on until you begin to enjoy it... which is what kept me reading for the first 50 pages, but also drove me into not reading it for a month).

Rating:
Summary: Not a Waste at all !
Review: Proust's great novel does not need to be read all at one time. I read it one volume at a time and usually took six months to a year off between volumes. I was always able to pick up right where I left off with nothing lost, like visiting old friends. I think it is OK to think of Remembrance of Things Past as a series of novels. I know Proust would disagree with this. It was very important to him that his readers consider carefully the unifying theme and symmetry to which he aspired in the novel, but I think that aspect became less and less tangible as his manuscript grew from 1000 pages originally to 2000, and then from 2000 to the 4000 odd pages it ended up being (he continued to expand the manuscript right up until the time of his death). In any event, the grand theme he designed will not be lost on you if you stay with the novel until the end and it is wonderful when you consider it, but it is not the reason I love the novel so well. Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove, and The Guermantes Way are decisively the best volumes and, fortunately, they are the first three in that order. If you like Swann's Way but are intimidated by the gargantuan size of the entire series, then plan to read at least the first three volumes. In this way you will have experienced Proust's best material. The entire novel is essentially a fictional autobiography or memoir. It is narrated by a man whose name we are never given, although he does hypothetically suggest the name "Marcel" for himself on one occasion about three-fourth of the way through. The story is inspired by events and people from Proust's life, but it is strictly a fiction. Swann's Way is the only volume in which the narrator is not the central figure in the story. It is, ultimately, a conventional story with several fascinating characters and humorous, razor sharp dialogue. There are several recurring, ingeniously depicted themes in the novel, not the least of which is involuntary memory, and it often reads like a deeply philosophical essay, with Proust wandering off on one of his famous digressions. The philosophical digressions are the best part for me, but I could see why they could be distracting or tedious to some. Proust's sentences quite frequently stretch to 10, 20, or even 30 lines, with multiple subordinating clauses. It can be dizzying. Some have claimed that this makes him a stream-of-consciousness writer. I flat out reject this notion. The sentences are long for the sole purpose of conveying their intended meaning, nothing else. The text is never, ever pretentious or unnecessarily wordy. Literary historians love to bracket Proust in the same category as Joyce (like art historians like to couple, for example, Van Gough and Gauguin), but the two writers are as different as night and day. Every sentence is worth the time in Proust, there are no word games, there is no obscurity, and it is all essential and rewarding. The only complaint I have is that he spends too much time on the theme of jealousy in the later volumes, a theme he covered quite well in Swann's way. Those volumes are worth reading too, but they do have a tendency to drag out in a way that the first three volumes don't. Things do tend to pick up a bit with the final volume, Time Regained, where everything comes full circle.

Rating:
Summary: Prose like floating
Review: Since I don't read French, I don't know if the qualities of prose this book exhibits are Proust's or Moncrieff's. Probably a little of each. This story is an investment, but a rewarding one. A classic of the 20th Century.

Rating:
Summary: Rebuking Ontario
Review: You know, I read the reviews here and was surprised someone actually wrote, "don't confuse quantity with quality."

This is rediculous.

If you want authors who don't understand punctuation and grammatical agreement, try the trash of JOHN SAUL or STEVEN KING. They write books by the minute and make a fortune on crap.

There are some authors, like Proust, who haven't written that much during their lives, but they convey everything in the small amounts they've left behind for us.

When one compares contemporary writers to those in the past, we aren't evolving.

What it shows is that we've moved backwards.

Michael Godfrey