Time Regained by Marcel Proust
My rating: 4/5 cats
take that, proust – i have finished you!!
summer of proust is OVER!!
if i were to make a collage of the final volume of proust, i would use the following images:
this one started off with some really tantalizing situations and then quickly backed off into more philosophical abstractions. dammit, proust, when you have gay bondage, stay with gay bondage!! and war!! these are exciting themes!! don’t drift off into thinky time!!
the frustration i have with this one is the frustration i have with philosophy in general. the confidence to take abstractions and generalize them into absolutes – it just seems arrogant to me. don’t tell me how to love, how to read, how to write – don’t say “we” do this, because i think sometimes, prousty, it is just you. although i am with you on this one:
It hurt me to think that I was obliged to look for them within myself, since Time which changes human beings does not alter the image which we have preserved of them. Indeed nothing is more painful than this contrast between the mutability of people and the fixity of memory, when it is borne in upon us that what has preserved so much freshness in our memory can no longer possess any trace of that quality in life, that we cannot now, outside ourselves, approach and behold again what inside our mind seems so beautiful, what excites in us a desire (a desire apparently so individual) to see it again, except be seeking it in a person of the same age, by seeking it, that is to say, in a different person.
he loses me halfway through, because of course, he is using this as a justification for continuing to seek out “a little amorous dalliance with young girls in bloom,” admitting:
I should always enjoy being invited to meet young girls, poor girls if possible, to whom I could give pleasure by quite small gifts, without expecting anything of them in return except that they should serve to renew within me the dreams and the sadnesses of my youth, and perhaps, one improbable day, a single chaste kiss.
aren’t the po-po already watching him because of all his dandling in the last book?? find more appropriate love-objects, please!
this book is very much preoccupied with age – with the drying of the blooms and the withering of the formerly beautiful…. this is my favorite passage:
There were women too whose graves were waiting open to receive them: half paralysed, they could not quite disentangle their dress from the tombstone in which it had got stuck, so that they were unable to stand up straight but remained bent towards the ground, with their head lowered, in a curve which seemed an apt symbol of their own position on the trajectory from life to death, with the final vertical plunge not far away. Nothing now could check the momentum of this parabola upon which they were launched; they trembled all over if they attempted to straighten themselves, and their fingers let fall whatever they tried to grasp.
no wonder he wants the young’uns to gather at his feet…
but again – i love his views on friendship:
Our friends being friends only in the light of an agreeable folly which travels with us through life and to which we readily accommodate ourselves, but which at the bottom of our hearts we know to be no more reasonable than the delusion of the man who talks to the furniture because he believes that it is alive.
proust=dick. in so many ways.
and those are all the quotes you are getting. go have your own summer of proust. when the other translations make their way over the ocean to my country, i am sure i will read these again, because reading the introduction, i find it hard to regard any translation as definitive – proust’s method of writing, with pasted-on flaps and tangents and overwriting and marginal scribbling and putting the same paragraph into many different chapters – he sounds like a mess, and anyone taking on the task of translation has my sympathy and admiration.
now for some crappy books!!
oh, yeah, my ranking:
1) the captive
2) the guermantes way
3) within a budding grove
4) swann’s way
5) sodom and gomorrah
6) time regained
7) the fugitive
