The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust
My rating: 4/5 cats
how can a sociopath love society so much??
because, make no mistake, that is what we are dealing with here. in this third installment, our dear narrator graduates from being a feeble child, from being a lovesick adolescent into a manipulating, stalking, social climbing creature who learns a lesson in disillusionment. cheers.
for all his bookish intelligence, his overthinking, his lofty words, at the end of the day, he is just a pale sticky thing masturbating in society’s stairwell.
this is his idea of true love:
I was genuinely in love with Mme. de Guermantes. The greatest happiness that I could have asked of God would have been that he should send down on her every imaginable calamity, and that ruined, despised, stripped of all the privileges that separated her from me, having no longer any home of her own or people who would condescend to speak to her, she should come to me for asylum.
THAT would be his greatest happiness?? dude…
I was less sad than usual because the melancholy of her expression, the sort of claustration which the startling hue of her dress set between her and the rest of the world, made her seem somehow lonely and unhappy, and this comforted me.
he is such a little shit.
so then how does he get to simultaneously have such refinement and linguistic elegance to make these beautiful observations:
For the fact of the matter is that, since we are determined always to keep our feelings to ourselves, we have never given any thought to the manner in which we should express them. And suddenly there is within us a strange and obscene animal making itself heard, whose tones may inspire as much alarm in the person who receives the involuntary, elliptical and almost irresistible communication of one’s defect or vice as would the sudden avowal indirectly and outlandishly proffered by a criminal who can no longer refrain from confessing to a murder of which one had never imagined him to be guilty.
this is how salieri must have felt that a wanker like mozart was given such talent. (and yes, i get all my history from peter shaffer)
i do love proust, but it is not the way i love anyone i want to spend a lot of time with, nor is it the kind of love you feel for distant relations, where you kind of have to love them. i don’t feel an obligatory book-lover’s love for him; he moves me so often that i know my love is genuine, but he also kind of sickens me.
because he writes these gross scenes:
My food was brought to me in a little panelled room upstairs. The lamp went out during dinner and the serving-girl lighted a couple of candles. Pretending that I could not see very well as I held out my plate while she helped me to potatoes, I took her bare forearm in my hand, as though to guide her. Seeing that she did not withdraw it, I began to fondle it, then, without saying a word, pulled her towards me, blew out the candles and told her to feel in my pocket for some money.
you just know after the money-in-the-pocket routine, he went home and had himself a good scrawl, kevin-spacey-in-se7en kind of way, in notebooks piled to the ceiling. ‘marcel’ pursues women the way he pursued his mother, with this obsessive need that once obtained is quickly discarded, as a scene in this book which i will not spoil for others makes most apparent. (incidentally, mommy is only mentioned once or twice in this volume – we are all grown up now)
and why does that serving-girl scene gross me out so much? because i love byron, and he is known for his “falling upon chambermaids like a lightning bolt.” so, what, ultimately, is the difference between byron and this guy? is it just a matter of proactivity vs passivity? because if byron had said that about a serving wench, i would have just sighed, “oh, byron…” but this guy – suddenly pulling out his one tough-guy move, it makes the skin crawl. it’s sleazier somehow. he hasn’t earned my belief as an irresistible lady-killer, and comes across instead as kind of rape-y. i picture him as a tiny, pale truman capote creature in the corner, smirking and complaining about the draft while trying to look down ladies’ blouses and calling it love.
unrelated to the last paragraph, the whole time i was reading this book, all i could think of was this song,
one of my all time favorites. this is a perfect song about the purity of nostalgia and hero-worship and all of that, with a different ending than proust offers, but i think, a more sweetly poignant ending. who knew there was a bigger downer than morrissey? it is a different situation entirely, of course, but the impulse of infatuation with someone you only know through reputation – these society women were the rock stars of their times.
why am i dwelling so much on morrissey? cuz he is my madeleine.
this all sounds like i didn’t like this book, but that’s not true. i am just focusing on what i felt the most strongly about. the first 200 pages were not terribly fun for me, despite an unprecedented number of bookmarks indicating my favorite passages. and then – dialogue! it was like a revelation – that’s what has been missing! from then on i liked it a lot more, but less so than the previous two volumes. i am giving it four, but shhh it really means 3.5.
the parts that were good were very very good, and reminded me of another favorite non-book related piece of entertainment, but let’s be honest – there were some dull bits here.
in a novel about the emptiness of the social elite, the impulse is to side with, at least emotionally, the narrator over the shallow society types. but here, you really can’t, because his fawning judgmental inertia is not heroic. he has done nothing to earn my love or readerly hurrahs. there are no heroes here. it is france.
