Swann's Way - Marcel Proust

   1913; 456 pages.  Volume 1 (out of 7) of Marcel Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past, aka Search of Lost Time (French title: Á la recherché du temps perdu).  New Author? : Yes.  Translator: C.K. Scott-Moncrieff.  Genre : Highbrow Lit; French Literature; Romance; Fictional Memoirs.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    A question: What’s your earliest recollection from your childhood?  How old were you at the time?  More importantly, what made the event stick forever in your mind?

    Another question: Does a certain song, or painting, or maybe an aroma, or even some particular landmark; ever repeatedly trigger a emotional response in your memory about something in your past?  Perhaps making you recall something like your first love or a long-departed pet, but maybe just something pleasurable, like your first taste of ice cream or pizza?

    If neither of those questions evokes a reaction in your mind, you probably should skip Swann’s Way.  Ditto if you can’t be happy with any book where you have to go searching for the storyline.

    But if these questions make eerie sense to you, and bring back long-buried memories (or short-buried ones, for that matter), then this book just might leave a major mark on your subconscious.

What’s To Like...

    Swann’s Way is a fictional memoir (is that an oxymoron?) and just the first of seven volumes in Marcel Proust’s opus Remembrance of Things Past.  It took him 14 years (1913-1927) to complete it, although to be fair, the devastating effect of World War One (1914-1918) on Proust’s native France was a delaying factor.

    Swann’s Way is divided into four sections, namely:

    Part 1: Overture (1%).  The narrator describes some of his childhood memories, including how he loved to have his mom kiss him goodnight and/or read to him.

    Part 2: Combray (11%).  Memories when he is slightly older, including going to church, visiting his Aunt Octave, taking walks in the countryside around Combray, and espying his first love, Gilberte.

    Part 3: Swann In Love (44%).  Mostly about Swann’s affair with Odette, including his doting on her, his jealousy, and his fears that she’s unfaithful.  The longest section, and a “novel within a novel”, it ties in with the narrator’s memoir by the fact that Gilberte is the Swanns' daughter.

    Part 4: Place-Names: The Name (90%).  The way the names of places (Balbec, Florence, Venice, et. al.) evoke images in the mind, even if one has never been there.  The narrator laments about how things have changed in the world since he was a child.

    Marcel Proust explores a slew of themes in Swann’s Way.  You can read about them in Wikipedia, but for me, the main ones were:

    A. The rigid social castes of 1910’s French society.  One simply did not associate with anyone from a lower social level.

    B. The aforementioned triggering of memories and emotions by music, a room’s décor, art, or even a cup of tea.

    C. The self-delusion that inevitably plagues anyone that’s hopelessly in love with another who’s far less committed to the relationship.

    I enjoyed visiting a time-&-place much different from ours.  There are gas heaters to warm your bedroom at night, a dessert of coffee-&-pistachio-ice, stereoscopes for viewing, alpaca coats to wear, an omnibus to get around town, fishing for minnows with a glass jar, and paying a penny to rent a chair in the park.

    Marcel Proust keeps you challenged with numerous references to art, music, literature, and even French history.  I had to look a bunch of things up, including the Merovingian kingdom, some guy called “Golo”, an lesser-known composer named Clapisson, and a malady called aphasia.  I was perplexed at first, but then chuckled at Swann’s/Odette’s little euphemism, “doing a cattleya”.

    The book was, of course, originally written in French, and this particular version was then translated into 1920’s English, not present-day American, so buildings have storeys, things are shewed, meagre, or savoury, people are skilful, and something may take for ever, or get done to-day.  At one point one of the characters becomes fascinated by figures-of-speech, with examples such as “whole hog” and “burning one’s boats”.  I am curious as to what those were in the original French.

    There is an instance of gay romance, which impressed me for any novel written in the 1910’s.  But according to Wikipedia, Proust himself was gay, which makes this less surprising, albeit only slightly so.  I did appreciate the importance that the narrator attaches to the pastime of reading books, especially highbrow ones.

    Oh yeah, one last thing.  The author’s last name is properly pronounced “Proost”, not “Prowst”.  I’ve been saying it wrong all these years.

Kewlest New Word ...

Jackanapes (n., slang) : an impertinent person (close to being archaic)

Others: Bioscope (n.); Viaticum (n.); Chevying (v.); Counterpane (n.) Crapulous (adj.); Trefoil (n.).

Kindle Details...

    The “public domain” version of Swann’s Way is always free at Amazon, and naturally, that’s the one I read.  You can buy an “illustrated” version for $7.99, or even the “graphic novel” version for $9.45.  Alternatively, you can buy the “complete” book (all seven volumes of it), which is 3000+ pages long.  Good luck with getting through that.   

Excerpts...

    “To think that, only yesterday, when she said she would like to go to Bayreuth for the season, I was such an ass as to offer to take one of those jolly little places the King of Bavaria has there, for the two of us.  However, she didn’t seem particularly keen; she hasn’t said yes or no yet.  Let’s hope that she’ll refuse.  Good God!  Think of listening to Wagner for a fortnight on end with her, who takes about as much interest in music as a fish does in little apples; it will be fun!”  (loc. 5150)

    But while, an hour after his awakening, he was giving instructions to the barber, so that his stiffly brushed hair should not become disarranged on the journey, he thought once again of his dream; he saw once again, as he had felt them close beside him, Odette’s pallid complexion, her too thin cheeks, her drawn features, her tired eyes, all the things which – in the course of those successive bursts of affection which had made of his enduring love for Odette a long oblivion of the first impression that he had formed of her – he had ceased to observe after the first few days of their intimacy, days to which, doubtless, while he slept, his memory had returned to seek the exact sensation of those things.  (loc. 6545.  One sentence, eleven commas, two dashes, one semicolon, one apostrophe, and one period.)

Snaps and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails, and dirty sluts in plenty,

Smell sweeter than roses in young men’s noses, when the heart is one-and-twenty.  (loc. 2064)

    Frankly, Swann’s Way was a difficult read for me, filled with flowery words, incredibly long and complex sentences that are saturated with punctuation (especially commas) and a plethora of clauses.  The second excerpt, above, is a typical example of this.  Quite often, by the time I got to the end of a sentence, I had no idea how it started.

    Everything is stream-of-consciousness, written in the 1^st-person POV by an unidentified narrator.  There are no chapters, just the four long sections; so it’s up to the reader to find a convenient place to stop.  It was difficult to keep from skimming, and reading it when sleepy was impossible.

    To boot, this Public Domain version was generated by scanning the pages of a “real” book, and nobody bothered to proofread the result.  So there are numerous scanner "oopsies".  “Mlle. Swann” becomes “Mile Swan”.  “Françoise” becomes “Franchise”.  “Ile de France” becomes “He de France”, etc,  And any smudge of fleck of dust becomes whatever letter the scanner thinks it most closely resembles.

    Nevertheless, I enjoyed the challenge of reading Swann’s Way.  Proust’s writing may be difficult, but it’s done extremely well, and this book is in no way a waste of one’s time.  Last but not least, hats off to the translator, C.K. Scott-Moncrieff because, as complicated as the sentences in English are, and as highfalutin as the vocabulary is, I gotta believe it was even worse in the original French.

    8 Stars.  I read Swann’s Way out of curiosity when it was referenced in two comics within a relatively short period of time.  I expected it to be a slog, and it did not disappoint.  I’m unlikely to read any of the subsequent six volumes, but I'm proud I persevered in reading the book the whole way through.

    There’s a Kindle feature that shows you what other readers highlighted, and over the first 10% of the book, there are several dozen entries so marked, and often listed as having been highlighted by more than 100 readers.  After that however, the e-book is devoid of any “highlights by others”.  I suspect that bespeaks of how many readers gave up before finishing the book.