In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1: Swann's Way [Hardcover]

Many times as I read this book, I found myself pausing, almost pained at the beauty of the language. I have read many authors, and have never read such beautiful words; his descriptions seem so divine, and yet he spends the first part of the book saying that he himself can't write! It's one of those moments where you want to shake the author with mental fists, but it's okay; it adds flavour.

Proust is probably among the greatest novelists of history (probably one down after Dostoevsky). The title of the series "In Search of Lost Time," immediately gives you the clue of what the theme shall be; moments of wasted time, moments of bliss that you wish to recapture, memories long gone that you wish you could recapture. But, that is the essense of life.

Most recently, I re-experienced SWANN'S WAY through the Modern Library's new, 2003 revision of the Montcrieff/Kilmartin translation of Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, Volumes I through VI. Through an illuminating series of what Walter Pater has called "privileged moments," or what James Joyce might call "epiphanies," the narrative in SWANN'S WAY tells a dual story of unrequited love. The taste of a madeleine pastry brings with it a flood of childhood memories from the narrator's youth spent in Combray and Paris, mostly relating to his infatuation with Charles Swann's daughter, Gilberte, and Swann's obsessive affair with a courtesan, Odette de Crecy. Although Swann realizes Odette is not his type (p. 543) and suspects she is a liar, his jealous love for her consumes him. Odette is unsophisticated, has lesbian tendencies, and is rumored to be a prostitute. Even after he acknowledges he has "wasted years of [his] life" on Odette (p. 543), Swann is nevertheless powerless to end their turbulent relationship. For Proust, human love becomes synonymous with suffering, failure, exhaustion, ruin, and despair (p. xviii) except, that is, for the love between a mother and son (symbolized in SWANN'S WAY by a memorable goodnight kiss, which leaves the young narrarator longing to tell his mother, "Kiss me just once more")(p. 15). SWANN'S WAY is not a feel-good novel, to be sure; for Proust, there are no limits to human suffering. He believed that any intrusion upon one's solitude is damaging, that we can only understand our pain if we approach it from a distance, and that friendship is somewhere on a scale between fatigue and ennui (Bloom, GENIUS, p. 218).

In the end, Volume I of Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME is about the lost and wasted years of human existence, and it prefaces things to come in subsequent volumes. There is a satisfying intellectual profit to be derived from the narrative of SWANN'S WAY. Proust reveals through his use of small illuminations that one may find rewards beyond the worldly ways of the human condition. Serious readers will find uncommon pleasure in the experience of reading SWANN'S WAY. For me, reading SWANN'S WAY is the best example of what it means to read "a good book."

G. Merritt

This constant play between perception through the senses, the idealized image, and their interaction, and the character's responses to this constant flux of the real and the imagined, is the central theme of this text. The central character of the second chapter, Swann in Love, is hopelessly seduced by the coquettish, Odette. She draws Swann into her world and, over time, her indifference and listlessness, her unpredictable irritability and at times chilly manner towards him, causes Swann to suffer. But the reader gets the impression that Swann tends towards masochism, and in a perverse way, enjoys the pain. Swann's taste in women has always tended towards those below his social station - the shopgirl, the worker's daughter or the prostitute. These liaisons are always carried out in secret for the obvious reasons. However, in spite of Odette's lack of education and birthright, the aristocratic male finds her extremely attractive. She is a mistress with natural class and possesses that necessary skill of discretion. But is Swann actually in love with Odette, or the idealized image? When the actual woman and the idealized one do not meet, his expectations are dashed and he continues to suffer. Swann's friends anonymously attempt to tell him about Odette's seedy past, but this action only further embeds him into his reserve to somehow return to the pure love they once shared. And so the tale continues...

This is the first book of Proust's seven-volume magnum opus, A la recherché du temps perdu. To my mind, the second section, 'Combray', is the most sensitive and beautiful description of early youth in modern literature. The last chapter is a kind of poetic lament of that innocent time period before the ravages of the Great War, which irrevocably changed the world forever. One cannot sing the praises of this novel enough.