Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust
My rating: 4/5 cats
sorry, david. this book is better than swann’s way. to the extent that i may have to go back and give swann’s way three stars cats so that when i give this book four stars cats it doesn’t make them equals, and, having four books to go, i want to leave room for a five-stars cats anticipation. the first half of swann’s way had me understanding what people did not like about proust. there was a lot of me hating on the narrator and gacking over his precious daintiness. this one, though, phoar. it is true it took me a long time to read it, and it was partly because the lulling nature of his prose would cause me to drift off into my own batch of memories and i would realize that three subway stops had gone by, or ten minutes of my break had passed, or i was asleep (that happened a few times, not because it was boring, but because his style is so much like a gentle boat on a lazy stream and it’s all memory and dreamy and suddenly i am actually dreaming. that’s pretty powerful) and then, i realized my copy was defective, and eight pages were blank! that’s like two whole proust-sentences – gone! so i had to get a new copy and transfer all my bookmarks, marking passages i liked, such as:
In reality, 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, excruciating.
which is just gorgeous. and there is so much like that in this book – so much delightfully neurotic stewing and examining every delicate memory of first, and second, love. marcel is a thinkier prufrock waiting and waiting and thinking and hesitating and eventually pouncing, but like my cat when she’s just playing with me to please me; you can tell her heart is elsewhere. but everyone, not just you, david, said this book was a valley in between the literary heights of swann’s way and guermantes way, but i thought it was stunning. i am taking a proust-break for a moment, maybe two or three books worth, because i can see myself getting wholly immersed in the proustiverse and becoming too introspective and examining the minutiae of life and love and disappointments and that’s something you really want to space out and not digest all at once, for the sanity’s sake. but then i suspect i will not be able to stop until the bitter end. with brian’s (deleted) aborted wedding scene.
