De kant van Swann

Reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is less like reading a novel and more like stepping into a vast, labyrinthine world where time bends, memory whispers, and even the smallest moments carry infinite weight. Across its seven volumes, this monumental work traces the narrator’s journey from childhood to adulthood, offering not just a story, but a meditation on art, society, love, jealousy, illness, and — most of all — time itself.

At its heart, the novel is not about grand events but about how we experience life. The famous scene of the madeleine dipped in tea becomes a metaphor for involuntary memory: the idea that a forgotten moment can resurface with startling clarity and pull us back into the past, making it present again. This is not nostalgia; it’s an exploration of how memory shapes identity and perception.

Proust’s narrator moves through the salons of Paris, the landscapes of Combray and Balbec, the complexities of friendship and desire, always searching for meaning in the ephemeral. Characters like Swann, Odette, Albertine, and the Duc de Guermantes become more than figures — they are reflections of human frailty, vanity, and hope.

What struck me most is Proust’s style: long, winding sentences that refuse haste, demanding the reader slow down, notice, and reflect. It’s a challenge, but also a gift. His writing teaches you to read differently — and perhaps to live differently, more attuned to the texture of time.

In Search of Lost Time is not a novel you finish and forget. It lingers. It changes the way you think about your own memories, your past, and the moments you overlook. For me, it was not just literature; it was an experience in paying attention, in learning to listen to time itself.

It's Proust and I made it through it.
But by the end I wanted to reach into the novel and slap the main character over his increasing ridiculous relationship with his girlfriend.

Oh gawd, I'm probably eight-hundred pages in, and he's STILL lying in bed thinking wet thoughts about his mom.

Today I imagined myself having a son, say a teenager, well into his love of books, perusing my bookshelf for a new read, and idly reaching for Swann's Way. I would take an action then that I would probably not for any other book--I would stop him from reading it.

I would explain to him that, if he were to read it now, he would quickly grow bored with it and put it down, and perhaps as a result never return to it the rest of his life, and therefore never know an exquisite kind of joy, a pleasure completely ineffable, sublime, on a higher plane than the other pleasures of life, consuming them with its scope, because this work takes a certain pleasure, which is most like pleasure itself, a pleasure of taking certain things in our minds, such as the constructs of memory, love, consciousness, and human experience, and enjoying those pleasures themselves rather than merely the various manifestations of them.

(That was a Proustian sentence right there--not as elegant, but demonstrating the length. He was famous for valuing long sentences, painstakingly crafting them until they conveyed exactly what he wished, not a word more or less.)

I would tell my son, no, please, do not read it yet, please wait. Let the anticipation of it build itself up in your mind for years, and then, when you are ready, read it and experience what I experienced at 30, which I never could have experienced if I had read it at 15 or even 20. I want you to have that experience.

This book isn't for you if you get annoyed at books for not having a quick enough pace. One of the publishers that Proust submitted his manuscript turned it down, saying that his readers couldn't be bothered to read things where it takes 30 pages for the narrator to turn over in bed.

I find that quip humorous because it is true. This isn't a book about lots of things happening. This is a book about memory more than anything else, but also largely about love and about how we relate to experiences and people and ideas in our minds, and the differences between our conceptions of a thing or person and what that thing or person truly is.

I've never read anything like this. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever read. If you are a veteran reader and you haven't read this yet, you are about to encounter something powerful in its refinement, heady in its depth. Enjoy having your life changed. And if you want a recommendation of something to listen to while you read this, try the Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes by Erik Satie. He was part of the same school of piano compositions as Debussy, and his music was highly esteemed by Marcel Proust.

I cannot bring myself to rate this book.

It's like a saying I read somewhere - Proust is for life - which I think I'm able to understand now. The term "Proustian" had such an enigmatic character to itself for me, much like the word "Kafkaesque" would be for people who haven't read Kafka, that the more and more I encountered it, more and more I became intrigued and perhaps a bit afraid as well of getting disillusioned when I finally do make its acquaintance. There were a lot of moments in the book where I questioned why exactly was I reading it, followed by an intense love for the sheer pages in front of me, and sometimes ending with an indifference to an entire chapter. This ebb and flow of emotions continued throughout the book, and I'm afraid in the end, it still remains an enigma for me.

Proust cannot be conquered. Although if someone has come close to doing it, it would be this guy.

I dream of the day when I would be able to read it the way it was written - and the way it was meant to be read - in its original French. Until then, I'd have to live with the pain of losing things in translation and be content with it.

It wasn't a total wash. I had to push through to the end, but it wasn't as if I was picking up the book with dread or putting it off.

The book is very boring. There are some beautiful moments of introspection, but there are pages and pages, sentences and sentences of rather dull introspection that weigh everything down. It's relentlessly descriptive. I think this was the style of the time. It reminded me of Henry James, who I found similarly dense and long winded but more interesting (in Portrait of a Lady at least). The parts in Combray were the most difficult whereas reading about Swann was mostly tolerable until the latter part of his section - then he became, in the language of the Verdurins, a bore.

I suspect part of the difficulty is the translation, as I often do when reading anything in translation. I believe the Moncrieff version is supposed to be faithful, but while the passages of artistic introspection are occasionally interesting and thought provoking, they're rarely breath taking. Maybe it's better in the original French. I have liked (and liked a lot!) other modernists in Joyce Faulkner, Woolf, Nabokov - but those were written in and meant to be read in English (mostly).

I don't know what I'm supposed to get from Proust - I failed to read that book a few years ago - but here's how it damaged me:

Well, scrap that colon, too. I can't share it. I've just written my longest review and deleted it for being a bit way too personal.

I've been using books to fill spaces that shouldn't be filled, smothering an internal monologue that needs to have its say. It's time for a break.

I've been putting off reading Rememberance of Things Past for, um, 33 years. My neighbor in my dorm in college, who was magnificent, and who now, curiously, is a corporate takeover artist in the City of London, said that Proust was the. Greatest. Novelist. Ever. Such words from SL I took seriously. Anyway. It is odd that this is marketed with the title In Search of Lost Time As far as I can tell it is C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation, and therefor should probably be called "Remembrance of Things Past." (The book racket is not scholarly; it is about marketing books.) Anyway, this seems to be an competent, and sometimes beautiful, translation. I think I detect Moncrieff's Scottish cadences, perhaps; I think this is a good thing. It is also really cheap, and the Kindlization is better than acceptable. The other point is that Proust is perhaps at his very best in a Kindle. I would love to have a paper copy of this in a series of seven or ten little comfy little paperbacks; all the paper editions now are ponderous trade paperbacks that look like a handful. I read this from 3 to 5 in the morning when my sleep was damaged for many enjoyable months. I looked on the internet to keep the characters straight, and used the Oxford Dictionary of English on my Kindle to scope out the occasional truly eccentric bit of vocabulary. I should use this to mention Germaine Greer's completely rotten article about Proust. Before I noticed who had written it, the voice reminded me of William F. Buckley in that late period where he was this senile and rather stupid elder statesman, and would just dash off completely lousy writing. I guess that was where she is in her career, as well.

I didn't actually finish this, I have abandoned it and may read it some other time.

The best work of fiction of the 20th century (that I've read). If you are having trouble reading it, you need to relax.