Swann's Way

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'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.