Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust (in search of lost time Volume 1)
French fiction
Original title – Du côté de chez Swann
Translation by C.K Scott Moncrieff and Terrance Kilmartin (revised by D .J Enright )
Source – Personal copy
I have joined in the read-along of the Proust that is going along this year. I have done well to get so far, I am not the most organised at readalong which is why I haven’t done one since my rarther Shambolic Don Quixote many years ago which was a bit of a shambles. I have taken a two-pronged act on this book. I have read the modern library book and then listened to the free edition on Audible. This is the third time I have read the book. I will discuss Proust more in the other books, and I have five other posts to cover the man himself. Of course, this book has the most famous moment on the book, the Madeline moment. Of course, their book is about some themes in 5the books such as class, love, memory, a world in change, and family, so many it is hard to convey.
As she was the only member of our family who could be described as a trifle “common,” she would always take care to remark to strangers, when Swann was mentioned, that he could easily, had he so wished, have lived in the Boulevard Haussmann or the Avenue de l’Opéra, and that he was the son of old M. Swann who must have left four or five million francs, but that it was a fad of his. A fad which, moreover, she thought was bound to amuse other people so much that in Paris, when M. Swann called on New Year’s Day bringing her a little packet of marrons glacés, she never failed, if there were strangers in the room, to say to him: “Well, M. Swann, and do you still live next door to the bonded warehouse, so as to be sure of not missing your train when you go to Lyons?” and she would peep out of the corner of her eye, over her glasses, at the other visitors.
Young Marcel remebers the Swann visiting his family
The book shows the young boy Marcel, and when he has the famous cake, he returns to his boyhood years and summers at Combray. The many summers spent there, and of course, this is where we get introduced to Swann, the leading figure late in the book. We see the house where he spent his summer, his Aunt, one of those figures who knows everything, all the gossip and the world around her, and her ever-faithful servant for me, these good characters in Downton Abbey. Parisian families in the country have excellent descriptions of parties and the class system. But who is Mrs Swann? As she never came, the path he used to walk had names. The book then focuses on Swann, a man who is in demand but falls for a woman called Odette. He meets a family he has a metal with and becomes obsessed with not just that but also who she is meeting and what his very gesture means towards Swann. Then, in the later part of the book, we return to our narrator and his love for Swann’s daughter and his hunt for the mysterious Mrs Swann ? is she who we think she is? Now, an older woman with grey hair just stops, but is this woman the same in the middle part of the book?
The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
The last lines of the book I loved
I’m teasing a bit there, and this is just a quick view of the book it is a book you sink into the world of parties, artists, money, love and class. Where falling for one woman can cost a man so much. But this is also an age where their world is changing, but they don’t know it is also a world where you listen to music, look at pictures, read, and talk about all this. For anyone under thirty-five, this world may seem more distant than it did to me. I know there is a book of paintings in the book, which I hope to get at some point, but here is a question is the book about the music in the book that gathers it together. As I mentioned,e I am not a huge classical fan. But if there was a playlist of the music mentioned in the book, that would be great. I love the main narrator, a sickly book that loves his mother. Proust paints himself as this sickly boy in Cambrey awaiting a mother kiss so well. You feel for him when he doesn’t get one. Swann is a fascinating figure who makes everyone he seems to come into contact with talk about him. She also has this obsession with Odette, how she may have spent time with other men, and how she may view him. I no move on to within a budding grove. What did you like about Swann’s way ?
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