How many volumes of proust

As I tore through my first few quarantine reads, I was already anticipating my next book order, and grateful for the time I now had to do the thing I always wished I had more time to do. When summer began, my attention chafed. Momentum gave way to indolence as I watched yet another projected return-to-work date pass. My eyes would dart between words like the fruit flies sussing out the peaches and plums in my kitchen. I abandoned fiction for history, reading about the birth of modern China, the lead-up to World War I, and the Great Migration, but the allure of the distant past faded quickly.

When I switched to philosophy to spur my critical reading faculties, my will buckled after barely 40 pages of Nietzsche. In late June, following the killing of George Floyd and the ensuing protests, reading felt like a frivolous distraction. After months of seclusion, resounding political and human exigencies proved that I could shut the world out for only so long. I flicked through The New York Times on my phone, rarely reaching the end of an article.

As the pandemic continued, small changes flickered through my daily experience: a rented office space close by, the return of our nanny. I took brief comfort in noting that my movement patterns mimicked those of a subsistence farmer in an agrarian society, but soon felt penned in by the lack of mobility and the rote nature of passing time.

After failing to get more than a few pages into The Power Broker and Black Reconstruction , I realized that I was asking an awful lot of literature: I wanted a book affecting to the point of transformation; something to unsettle my notions of everything, or anything.

In this, however, the Penguin translators were anticipated to some extent by Kilmartin's and especially Enright's revisions of Moncrieff.

Not so in their handling of the impersonal pronoun "on", to which the Proustian narrator has such persistent recourse. There are three possible direct equivalents in English: in descending order of formality, "one", "we", and "you". Moncrieff overwhelmingly preferred "one", a preference which Kilmartin and Enright largely permitted to stand. The Penguin translators, by contrast, opt in the majority of cases for "we", and sometimes even for "you". As an example of how much less pursed and prissy, how much more direct and downright, this can make Marcel sound, consider the passage at the beginning of The Fugitive which describes his response to the news that Albertine has left him.

Yet if the measure of this new translation is to be its success in prising Proust from the clutches of the affected and the effete, I suspect it will go down as a missed opportunity.

It's no easy task, of course: in the photograph reproduced on the spines of the Penguin volumes Proust looks every languid inch what the volumes themselves set out to prove he isn't - a "purveyor of high-grade cultural narcotics". But the majority of the Penguin translators have made the task harder for themselves by choosing to tackle it with one hand tied behind their backs. For all Prendergast's talk of smashing "Proust-worship", many of them perpetuate it in one crucial respect; by treating the Proustian sentence as a sacred cow.

Proust's sentences are, of course, exotic and magnificent beasts which translators massacre at their peril. The point Proust is trying to make can only be experienced as opposed to realized intellectually if you have plodded through the seemingly endless series of anecdotes, asides and philosophical musings. Proust is trying to tell us how the experiences of our past slip away from our memory and, as such, no longer have any obvious impact on us. In some cases, i.

But it also isolates us from those moments of pleasure, of experiencing pure beauty. The only way to recapture lost time, Proust tells us, is through the involuntary memories that spontaneously arise from random sensory input the taste of a madeleine soaked in tea, the experience of standing on uneven paving stones, the clang of a spoon against a dish as it triggers the memories of the last time we experienced the same sensations along with the other physical and emotional sensations with which the catalytic sensation is associated.

The experience of these sensations is actually of a purer form than we experienced when they happened to us the first time, because they are not impeded by all the other competing stimuli that were impinging on us at the time. At the time, for example, we may have been disappointed that this resort was not exactly what we had in mind, we may have been worried about the health of a loved one, we might be distracted by concerns of our professional careers.

In this moment of recapturing the past, all that comes to us is the unadulterated form of the experience of pleasure. Of course, this is a pretty unreliable mechanism to tap into our past and, as Proust shows, it is fleeting as well. The only way to recapture the past in a lasting way is through the creation of a work of art: which is where the book comes in.

How does a writer depict an experience which is eventually forgotten, and is then perfectly recaptured years later? Well, you have to help the reader have the experience of long stretches of time, of the entirety of a long life lived, complete with all the hundreds of people and experiences and moments of inspiration and self-doubt that come with it. And, as Proust, through his magnificent prose lovingly reconstructed the scene, it came back to me with the full force of his original description.

He had succeeded in helping me recapture this literary event, and how beautiful the experience of it was! Please, if you have any interest at all in serious literature, do not be thrown off by the length of this book.

It is an unparalleled work of genius for which, as I hope I have argued successfully above, the length is an essential element.

If you make the commitment, you will be rewarded. View all 20 comments. Jul 31, Jessica rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: recherchers of temps perdu; rememberers of things past; snobs; size queens. Shelves: groups-of-people , leetle-boys , love-and-other-indoor-sports , favorites , wish-i-owned , happyendings , must-reread , hagging-out.

I took today off work because I need to put everything I own into boxes so I can move tomorrow, but obviously I can't begin doing that until I get some of these obsessive thoughts about Proust out of my system.

I mean, can I? I can't! After all, this house is where I read Proust -- wait, I read Swann's Way before I moved here, which is pretty nuts to think about -- and so how can I move without reviewing the whole thing? I do feel pretty traumatized after finishing this book. Sort of shells I took today off work because I need to put everything I own into boxes so I can move tomorrow, but obviously I can't begin doing that until I get some of these obsessive thoughts about Proust out of my system.

Sort of shellshocked and confused with all these half-formed thoughts and intense inexplicable feelings bouncing around in me, and I don't know what to do with them or myself. Yesterday I wound up sitting in my friend's bar explaining Proust's aesthetic theories, but that kind of behavior'll get you kicked out of most places, and is not really becoming a young lady. And obviously that's where this website comes in Reading Proust made me wish I were more of a scholar, so I could try to puzzle out some kind of literary context for what this book is.

I feel like people think of Proust as being stuffy and old-fashioned and all crusty and ancient, but I think a lot of that has to do with the subject matter a lost time with superficial resemblance to Jane Austen's milieu , so it's kind of shocking to remember what else was going on while he was writing this.

I know this is dumb and there're much better comparisons, but I kept thinking while reading this that it was like thinking your whole life that New York punk in the seventies was all about the Ramones and imagining you really got what was going on then from just listening to that Like you think you know what modernism is, it's like Ulysses or whatever, but then you find out it's got this completely insane cousin across the river who's just doing all these things that appear at first to have no relationship at all to everything you ignorantly thought you kind of understood at least a little bit before.

Again, I'm not much of a scholar and what I'm saying probably doesn't make any sense. To be honest, I don't even know what "modernism" means, I just know it sounds literary I think what I'm trying to get at is that the relevance of Proust's concerns to his time aren't immediately obvious because his approach to them initially seems so weird and unfamiliar. But then you realize, while you're in it, that Proust is actually so much of his time it's incredible, and that what he's saying and doing was hugely innovative and exciting at the beginning of the last century, and actually, I'd say, remains as much so today.

And I just kind of wish that I knew more about art and literature and whatnot so I could tie it all in better, since I sense there're all these fascinating connections and reference points, but I don't know what they are. I'd sort of like to sneak into some college class or something where they're reading Proust, and listen in, or at least steal their syllabus I feel like they don't.

I mean, I never heard of him when I was in college, or after. I really hadn't. I honestly had no idea who Proust was until I started hanging out on this website. Anyway, for me the most relevant contemporary writer I thought of while reading this wasn't a novelist.

A little background: I always really loathed the discipline of psychology and thought it was stupid. When I unwittingly enrolled in social work school, I was dismayed to discover that getting my MSW involved reading pages and pages of precisely this stuff I'd always looked down on My happy discovery was that Freud, at least, was actually a fabulous writer, and a lot of his ideas are totally fascinating and very beautiful.

What I realized finally is that I just resented psychology for its pretension of pretending it's a science. But actually psychology's concerns and sometimes even their expression are hugely significant -- among the most significant -- and kind of wonderful.

In fact, I decided, I love psychology, as long as it knows its place and realizes it's an art, not a science Freud said he wanted his case histories to read like short stories, so I think he understood this. Proust, of course, took this to an extreme, by exploring essentially the same territory, not in a short story, but in an extraordinarily long and in some ways kind of ridiculous novel.

In Search of Lost Time is about the development of the mind, the experience of consciousness, the influence of past events and relationships on one's emotions and behavior I completely lost my shit reading the last couple pages of this book, and broke down on some fundamental level in a way I imagine was akin to what you can get from really top-shelf psychotherapy.

Towards the end of the book, Proust explains everything he's been trying to do, and just did, in writing this novel. It's his theory of art and specifically of literature, and it's pretty hard to argue with since you've watched him just do it.

One of the things that Proust says is that readers of his book "would not be my readers but readers of themselves, my book serving merely as a sort of magnifying glass, such as the optician of Combray used to offer to a customer, so that through my book I would give them the means of reading in their own selves" p.

I guess that could sound unexciting, ripped out of context, but he really does do this, and it truly is astounding. I felt throughly convinced by Proust's theory of what art is for, and as far as I'm concerned he was totally successful in accomplishing his aims. Like psychotherapy, ISoLT attempts to dive into the murk of the unconscious past to retrieve experiences and cognitions that have become inaccessible.

Proust dives in and swims down to the bottom, and he finds them, and he grabs them, and he brings them back up and then hands them to you Which is pretty nuts. I mean, it's intense. I feel fucked up from it. I thought I wanted to talk about this book, but maybe I just want to pack up my shit after all. I really do want to review this book, but maybe it's too soon? It's a really insane novel, and there's tons of stuff in it I'd really love to dork out about on here I might come back and say something more coherent later on, when it's all settled down a bit.

I guess the only thing I need to add right at this moment is that I really felt like Proust gave me this particular combination of the things I need most. I really can't read anything too difficult or serious, and to anyone who's considering giving Proust a try -- I can't emphasize this enough -- forget what you heard: this book is anything but a ponderous drag.

It's silly and hilarious and smart and bizarre, and there's tons of fashion and sex and depravity and satire and insane plot twists that don't make any sense. I personally have a very short attention span and I cannot and do not read anything that isn't vastly entertaining. Except for The Captive, which is only somewhat entertaining. This is not to say that it's for everyone, and I can see how lots of people would totally hate this.

I mean that. It could. I'm a completely different person now than I was when I started. So what if this means I'm now an obsessively jealous, elitist, antisemitic, agoraphobic pervert who speaks exclusively in run-on sentences? I think I'm better for it, and you might be too. Jan 27, Paul Bryant marked it as to-read-novels. Marcel : Oh, that really reminds me of something Marcel's friend : Oh yes?

Marcel : ….. I can't quite put my finger on it No, it's gone. Marcel's friend: Oh well. It probably wasn't that important. View all 17 comments. Oct 02, Roy Lotz rated it it was amazing Shelves: novels-novellas-short-stories , highly-recommended-favorites , supermassive , francophilia. In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. I struggled with Proust, on and off, for three years.

I read these books sitting, standing, lying down, in cars and on trains, waiting in airports, on commutes to work, relaxing on vacation. Some of it I read in New York, some in Madri In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. By now this book functions as my own madeleine, with different passages triggering memories from widely scattered places and periods in my life.

I am surprised I reached the end. Every time I put down a volume, I was sure I would never pick up another; each installment only promised more of the same and I had already had more than enough; but then the nagging sense of the incomplete overcame my aversion and, with mixed feeling, I would pick up the next one and repeat the experience. Throughout this long voyage, my response to Proust has been consistent—I should say consistently inconsistent—alternately admiration and frustration.

What I do know is that my reactions to this book have proven tempestuous and I have yet to spur myself to write a fair review. When approaching a novel of this size and complexity, it is difficult to know where to start.

Can In Search of Lost Time even be called a novel? In a writing class my instructor told us that any story needs to have a protagonist, an objective, a series of obstacles, a strategy for overcoming these obstacles, a sequence of failures and successes, all of it culminating in a grand climax that leads directly to a resolution. But, like the slender skeleton of a peacock buried under a mountain of feathers, this outline serves as a vague scaffold over which are draped colorful ornament; and it is the ornament that attracts our attention.

In most novels, any given passage will serve some dramatic purpose: characterization, description, plot. However, there are times when the author will pull back from the story to make a more general comment, on society, humanity, or the world. These comments are, very often, pungent and aphoristic—the most quotable section of the whole book, since they do not depend on their context.

I know of no speck so troublesome as self. Proust goes even further in the direction of analysis, totally overwhelming every other aspect of the book with his ceaseless commentary. No event, however insignificant, happens without being dissected; the Narrator lets no observation go unobserved, even at the cost of being redundant. This endless exegesis, circling the same themes with relentless exactitude, is what swells this book to its famously vast proportions.

Tolstoy, no laconic writer, used less than half the length to tell a story that spanned years and encompassed whole nations. The story Proust tells could have been told by, say, Jane Austen in pages—although this would leave out everything that makes it worth reading. Austen and Proust also share an affinity for satirizing their worlds, although they use different means for very different ends.

A new religion was needed. Even the physical world was becoming unrecognizable—populated by quantum fields and bending space-time.

Granted, Proust may have been only peripherally aware of these historical currents, but he was no doubt responsive to them, as this novel amply proves.

In this book, Proust sets out to show that our salvation lays in art. This means showing us that our salvation does not lay in anything else. He does this subtly and slowly. First, as a young man, the Protagonist is awed by high society. The names of famous actresses, writers, composers, and most of all socialites—the aristocratic Guermantes—hold a mysterious allure that he finds irresistible.

He slowly learns how to behave in salons and to hold his own in conversation, eventually meeting all the people he idolized from afar. But when he finally does make the acquaintance of these elite socialites, he finds that their wit is exaggerated, their knowledge superficial, their opinions conventional, their artistic taste deficient.

In short, the allure of status was empty. And not only that, temporary. In the final volume, Proust demonstrates that status waxes and wanes with changes of fashion, often in unforeseen ways. By the end of the book, Rachel, who began as a prostitute, is a celebrated actress; while Berma, who began as a celebrated actress, ends as a broken down old women, still respected but no longer fashionable.

The Baron de Charlus, an intensely proud man, ends up doffing his hat to nearly anyone he runs into in the street, while the rest of society ostracizes him.

Status, in other words, being based on nothing but mass whim, is liable to change whimsically. The Protagonist does have a genuine affection for his mother and grandmother; but these are almost the only genuine bonds in the entire long novel. When Proust looks at romantic love, he sees only delusion and jealousy: an inability to see another person accurately combined with a narcissistic urge to possess and a paranoia of losing them. The archetypical Proustian relationship is that between Swann and Odette, wherein Swann, a figure in high-society, has a casual dalliance with Odette, a courtesan, and despite not thinking much of Odette, Swann nearly loses his mind when he begins to suspect she is cheating on him.

He marries Odette, not out of romantic passion, but in order to gain some measure of peace from his paranoid jealousy.

This book, as Harold Bloom points out, is wisdom literature, firmly rooted in the introspective tradition of Montaigne. But Proust is more than introspective. A true Cartesian, Proust is solipsistic. And much of his rejection of worldly sources of happiness, and his concomitant embrace of art, depends on this intensely first-person view of the world. Our personalities, far from being stable, are nothing but an endless flux that changes from moment to moment; each second we die and are born again.

There are as many versions of you as there are people to perceive you. Thus we never really know another person. Our relationships with friends and lovers are really relationships with mental constructions that have only a tenuous connection with the real person: The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds.

Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying. You might think that this is a shockingly cynical view, and it is; but Proust adheres to it consistently. Here he is 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 delusions of the man who talks to furniture because he believes that it is alive… And love, of course, comes off even worse than friendship: Almost everyone was surprised at the marriage, and that in itself is surprising.

No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.

Of course, status and love do bring people happiness, at least temporarily. But Proust is careful to show that all happiness and sadness caused by these things have nothing to do with their reality, but only with our subjective understanding of that reality.

Depending on how we interpret a word or analyze an intention; depending on whether we hold someone in esteem or in contempt—depending, in short, on how we subjectively understand what we experience—we will be happy or sad.

So what should we do? Normally we are trapped by our perspective, thinking that we are viewing reality when we are actually just experiencing our own warped mental apparatus. For in the despair that opens up during these crises, we can give up our fantasies and partake in Proustian mysticism.

This mysticism consists in reconnecting with our basic sensations. To do this, Proust does not, like the Buddhists, turn to meditation on the present moment. Instead, he relies on art and memory. Normal language is totally inadequate to this task. Our words, being universally used, only convey that aspect of experience that is common to everyone; all the individual savor of a perception, its most essential quality, is lost.

But great artists—like the fictitious Vinteuil, Bergotte, or Elstir—can use their medium to overcome the usual limits of discourse, transmitting the full power of their perspectives. Even so, this artistic communication can only act as a spur for our own introspective quest. Shorn of illusory happiness, inspired by example, we can probe our own memory and experience the bliss of pure experience. Memory is essential in this, for Proust thinks that it is only by juxtaposing one experience with another that we can see the perception in its pure form, without any reference to our conventional reality.

This is why moments of involuntary memory, like the madeleine episode, are so important for Proust: it is in these moments, when a present experience triggers a long-buried memory, that we can re-visit the experiences of our past, free from delusion, as a pure impartial spectator.

The final Proustian wisdom is essentially contemplative, passive, aesthetic, able to see the ironies of human life and to appreciate the recurring patterns of human existence. And his style is exactly suited to this purpose. Meditation aims to break out of this rather unrealistic mindset by focusing on the present moment. He takes the narrative tendency of the novelistic imagination, and stretches and stretches, pulling each sentence apart, twisting it around itself, extending the form and padding the structure until the narration is hardly narration at all, until you are simply swimming in a sea of sounds.

By doing so, Proust allows you to feel the passage of time, to make time palpable and real, and to feel our memory processing and being activated over and over again in response to passing sensations. Of course, like any religion of art, it is objectionable for manifold reasons: it lacks any moral compass, it is elitist, it is purely passive. Not only that, but Proust connects with his religion a solipsism that is questionable on philosophic grounds, not to mention cynical in the extreme.

It is a cold, antisocial, unsympathetic doctrine, with appeal only to disenchanted aesthetes. But of course, this is ultimately a work of art and not of philosophy; and so In Search of Lost Time must be judged on literary grounds. When it comes to the criteria by which we judge a usual novelist—characterization, dialogue, plot—I think Proust is somewhat weak.

There is, of course, little plot to speak of. And although Harold Bloom thought that Proust was a rival of Shakespeare when it came to characterization—a judgment that baffles me—I felt very little for any of the people in this novel.

It always seems as if I am overhearing Proust describe someone rather than meeting them myself. But of course one cannot appraise Proust using these standards. This novel is, above all, audacious.

It is a modernist tour de force, which turns nearly every novelistic convention on its head. More than that, it is a novel of ideas, which puts forward a radical view of the human predicament and its own answers to the perennial questions of life.

It is wisdom literature rooted deeply in tradition, while being absolutely original and uncompromising in its newness. It is both intensely beautiful and intensely ugly—hideously sublime.

For anyone who can pull themselves through all its pages, it will leave them deeply marked. I know I have been. Mar 12, Manny rated it it was amazing Shelves: french , too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts , life-is-proust , celebrity-death-match. Celebrity Death Match Special: In Search of Lost Time versus Harry Potter The francophone world was stunned by today's release of papers, sealed by Proust for years after publication of the initial volume of his famous series, which finally reveal his original draft manuscripts.

In the rest of this review, you can find out what Proust's books looked like before his well-meaning but unworldly editor decided that French literateurs would prefer something slightly different. Mar Celebrity Death Match Special: In Search of Lost Time versus Harry Potter The francophone world was stunned by today's release of papers, sealed by Proust for years after publication of the initial volume of his famous series, which finally reveal his original draft manuscripts.

Marcel Proust and the Magic Cookie Traumatised by years of living in the cupboard under the stairs and never getting a goodnight kiss from Aunt Petunia, Marcel can't remember a thing about his childhood. One day, he eats a magic cookie and it all comes back to him. Marcel Proust and the Change of Plan Marcel is briefly involved with Hermione, but decides, after a heavy petting session goes wrong, that it's not such a good idea after all.

He spends a nice summer holiday at the seaside where he meets Ginny or possibly someone else. A star-struck Marcel falls for it and starts stalking her everywhere. In the end, he sees through her ruse and realises that she's just a hack journalist.

Marcel Proust and the Cottaging Baron Marcel is astonished to discover Lucius Malfoy and Hagrid [The rest of this paragraph has been withdrawn following legal advice] 5. Marcel keeps cross-examining her about what she's doing when she claims to be attending meetings of Dumbledore's Army and accuses her of having a lesbian affair with Cho Chang. When Ginny denies it, he rants at her in page-long uppercase sentences.

Marcel Proust and the Deceased Girlfriend Ginny is killed in a freak broomstick accident when she falls off her Nimbus Marcel is very sad for a while, but then returns to interrogating Cho about what was really going on. Marcel Proust and the Commercial Success Although Voldemort's forces are poised to strike, Marcel's thoughts are elsewhere. He's always wanted to be a bestselling novelist but can't think how to get started. As the Death Eaters storm Hogwarts, he suddenly understands that he just needs to write down all the things that have happened to him, changing names and a few details, and he will sell a zillion copies plus movie rights.

View all 33 comments. US-based William C. Distinguished professor emeritus of French at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the year-old professor is in the middle of a project of Proustian proportions—he is revising and annotating C. Edited excerpts from an email interview:. I had always heard of the famous writer, but it was only in graduate school at the University of Georgia US that I began to read Proust, not in a course, but because he was one of the many authors on the reading list that I had to read to prepare for the oral exams for the MA degree.

I was That was a long time ago. I believe that I read it fairly quickly or rather I was reading it steadily. My favourites were the Narrator, Swann and Charlus. The Narrator because he is the hero and his first-person voice is among the most engaging and seductive in all of literature. Charlus because he is the most colourful and outrageous and entertaining character in the novel and perhaps of all the characters in the genre.

It is rich and complex and demands an attentive reader but I find Proust very engaging, obviously, and his prose has the quality of poetry or music. By the way, I was always reading it in French.

I never read it in English until many years later when I began teaching it to undergraduate students here at the University of Alabama. I usually read it from start to finish, not dipping in here or there.