The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust
My rating: 5/5 cats
gore. juss. seriously – a perfect book. i am reviewing the captive and the fugitive. separately because even though modern library publishes them together in one volume, i don’t want to lose this high i am on after reading the captive. what if the fugitive isn’t as good!!?? i will not have the luster worn off my glee!
seriously, by the fifth installment, is anyone even paying attention anymore?? who remembers the fifth of anything?
but this one – i reacted to it the way most people reacted to swann’s way. this is absolutely what i expected, in my most hopeful moods, proust would be.
that glorious minutiae!! but this time, it is all about that awkward transitional period of a romantic entanglement where you don’t want the other person anymore, but you don’t yet want them to be with anyone else, either. but this character being who he is, he takes it a little too far and becomes freaking crazy with it, wanting the other person to make the break in order to assuage his guilt; thinking and thinking and thinking and strategizing. but along the way, making some really astute commentaries on human relationships and the love process.
i started out with this one, like all the rest, going bookmark-crazy every time i came across a passage i thought was lovely or reminiscent of something in my own life, but if i had kept it up, there would have been a bookmark on every page. at one point, i realized it was getting out of control, and i just gave up and decided – the whole thing is a bookmark.
a number of relationships come to an end in this volume – all handled rather poorly, and all fairly devastating. severance is rarely tidy, but lord there are some drawn-out situations, and this time morel wears the king douchebag hat…
this is about the slow poisonous nature of unfit relationships. the way that each participant is changed by the relationship itself into something opposite of what sparked the initial attraction. all the bitterness, the lies, the jealous accusations, and the unspoken fears. his psychology is so complicated and intense, but in this particular subject matter, frighteningly relatable for me. not that i am a crazy, but i have had relationships, blessedly long ago, that put me into positions that were as uncomfortable as anything written here.
i had an english teacher in high school who would distill every book we read to two phrases: it was “an allegory of society,” or it represented “the universality of mankind,” which never made any sense to me. not “the commonality of human experience,” but “the universality of mankind.” despite its clunkiness and its failure as a phrase to mean anything at all, it kept popping into my head when i was reading this. i have been the captive albertine, i have been the captive marcel (now that we can use the name; now that he has finally given a “name” in this volume) i have been morel, and charlus, and jupien’s daughter (whose name i can’t even remember right now) and all of them at one point in my life. relationships get messy. and proust writes them so well, it dredges up every memory i had of every failed relationship, but in a good, “phew” way.
and that ending! thomas hardy or saki couldn’t have done it better. they would have done it shorter, but not better.
