A Century after Proust - The Name is Proust, Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time i.e. Mine

From the Back Cover

On the surface a traditional "Bildungsroman" describing the narrator’s journey of self-discovery, this huge and complex book is also a panoramic and richly comic portrait of France in the author’s lifetime, and a profound meditation on the nature of art, love, time, memory and death. But for most readers it is the characters of the novel who loom the largest: Swann and Odette, Monsieur de Charlus, Morel, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Françoise, Saint-Loup and so many others — Giants, as the author calls them, immersed in Time. "In Search of Lost Time" is a novel in seven volumes. The novel began to take shape in 1909. Proust continued to work on it until his final illness in the autumn of 1922 forced him to break off. Proust established the structure early on, but even after volumes were initially finished he kept adding new material, and edited one volume after another for publication. The last three of the seven volumes contain oversights and fragmentary or unpolished passages as they existed in draft form at the death of the author; the publication of these parts was overseen by his brother Robert.

For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of À la recherche du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).

A Century after Proust

If you haven't read Proust, you have got nothing to worry about because his claim to fame is his book In Search of Lost Time, one massive 4000 page monolith that only the most determined or the absolute mad would attempt but if you have not heard of the name before this than you are no great reader of books.

This year marks the centenary of the death of Marcel Proust, the man who 5 score and ten years ago wrote what many consider the greatest novel of all time.

November 1913, was the year when Swann’s Way, the first of the books was published. In a time when  literary modernism was removing the frills of the Victorian novel, bringing with it simple writings with much less paraphernalia, Proust was going the other way and way down that road writing the most descriptive novel possible. His works showed a lack of interest in modernism, in mechanization,  alienation of workers or any novel uses of language(s). It was a very taxing time in France. Proust was writing in a period of immense social upheaval with the Second Empire of Napoleon III having collapsed around the time of his birth and in its place the Third Republic, the first democratic government in France which survived for some time. The upheavals and change generated entirely new styles of literature with most of Proust's contemporaries and predecessors from the aristocracy and the French intellectuals moved away from realism toward sober examinations of the workings of the mind. 

While seemingly out of touch with most of the wave of Modernism, Proust nevertheless manages to bring in a very nouvelle process in that Modernism that was still not very much there, hence it could be debated that Proust was in that sphere ahead of the times, making him stand apart from the rest as quintessentially modern; concerned with the intriguing exploration of memory, he pioneered a style of prose that is related to consciousness and that followed incidental, usually trivial memories as a roadmap for the processes of consciousness and identity. We can see these extremes deeply in his book. His syntax is particularly demanding and like unmonitored thought, trains of serialized associations are rendered in the book through unbelievable and even more unmanageable long sentences that like the trains of thought go on for pages on end and sometimes go on for scores of pages. This is something that has irked many of his reading detractors and I count myself as one from the same side of the tree.

No discussion of Proust can be complete without discussing his magnum opus and here we will look closely at the book and understand what works and what doesn't and how the book stands for someone who may not have read it. 

In Search of Lost Time

"In Search of Lost Time" is an eternal search for nuggets and Easter eggs, metaphorically.

This book was my personal quest during the C-19 pandemic induced lockdown. The lockdown got over, the book didn't, the virus mutated and here the century old book(s) seemed to mutate with every sentence. It was like the Blob, an ever increasing papyrus monster that seems to be expanding every moment that I was reading it.

Took up this magnum opus as a challenge as it seemed to be on everyone's bucket list and in most all time best book lists. The lockdown felt like the correct time to wrap the seven volume, 4000+ pages and One and a half million words tome. The numbers looked daunting and with the stamp of being the worlds longest novel, it was too tempting to miss this. I also picked up another suitable challenger as detailed below (a 10 volume 1.2 million words science fiction, but that's a different story).

I had planned to time this closure with the death centenary of Marcel Proust which was later this year in November 2022 but somehow managed to finish it early but I waited the few months to release my review of this ancient "Classic?"

So Stone me, Lynch me or Rip me apart what follows is my deep dive into the fountain of the book and my realizations that duly followed when I came up after finishing the book all dry.

This review of the book is a critical review although it is unsatisfactory to denounce a writer's lifetime achievement when he is not around to defend himself. There would be scores of fans and critics baying for my or the authors blood but ultimately the essence of defense of a book or for that matter any creation, comes from the creator, here the author, i.e. Proust.

Considering this I decided to make this review a little more nuanced so that my views and counter views are out there for posterity and also the fact that completing this singular tome is akin to climbing a Mt Everest or completing the Ironman Triathlon, all events that countless many complete but is still one which an even greater number do not have in their radar's or the dare to complete it from their bucket list.

For me the completion was a relief as I have an unfortunate habit, I do not quit on a book once I start however awful or tedious it is and some of my books have stayed years on my reading folders or shelves before I pick them up, dust them and complete them in a huff. Some of these books have given me immense pleasure when I have picked them on my second or third wind, surprising me with storylines that blossomed a little later for me than the initial 50-100 pages like for example, L. Ron Hubbard's 10 volume Dekalogy, Mission Earth book are a worthy challenger to Proust and for me started off with The Invaders Plan, a slow book for me but as I drew deeper into the story and the series, I started enjoying the books and eventually completed it and now parallel to reading Proust, and being a masochist at heart, I was re-reading it and am on the point of finishing soon. Hoping to print its review in December.

But as someone famous once said, "Life is too short and Proust is too long."

The book(s) are filled with prose and sentences that seem to go on for miles and you could be sleeping before you reached the necessary miles before you sleep.

One can be forgiven for wondering if things were lost in translation but then the world at large has been reading the translations for years and decades, so cannot pin this on the translation.

The book which has transcended time and it is important to understand the book from both sides, the cons and the pro's. I have listed some of them that I experienced here -

Some of the CON'S

The book is slow, tedious and a painful read.

The sheer volume of prose will knockout an average reader for ever.

The long winded sentences require you to jot notes to keep in sync with where you started and where you are headed.

Hundreds of pages dedicated to French snobbery and you have to have the constitution of a gastronome to digest them.

A book about time has an utter disregard for it.

Reading this requires investment of massive amounts of time and patience.

There is just too much attention to details, everything brought to fine bits and pieces and each in turn have their place in the sun, i.e. book.

Starts and stops followed by starts and stops and repeat.

The book's sheer size brings most efforts to read it to a grinding halt.

The problem is that the book seems so strange the second, third or nth time out because of its long drawn sentences, if you did not scribble notes in pace with the lines of the book, then you are lost and have to start all over again from the beginning instead of picking from where you left off.

You end up reading, re-reading the same volume over and over again and still not getting its gist, leading to abandonment and for the process to start all over again.

Some of the PRO'S

The book and the author are both highly misunderstood.

This was a groundbreaking novel in its time and helped break ranks and create a new genre.

Not everyone who has an opinion on this book has probably completely read it.

On occasions the books prose are beautiful and have a lyrical quality that can be appreciated if you are able to survive the onslaught of everything else.

The extra long sentences do have a lyrical quality to it.

The story covers a persons life from adolescent till his middle age and ends with his self-discovery as a writer.

The book is a treatise of the era from French history before the First World War and also dwells on the situations following a controversial topic in France during that time, the Dreyfus affair (a Jewish Army officer was wrongly convicted of spying and sent to Devil's Island and when proven innocent tore the societal fabric of the country, France).

The book gives us unique insights into life and times in France and also allows us to question the role of art, experience love with all its trappings of joys and sufferings, and comical gallery of portraits whose manias and characters are those that we still see today.

Most people seem to quit after covering 50-60 pages and this was the initial case with me.

Perseverance with the book allays the fears and some things could hook you in.

For me the world is divided into three kinds of people -

1. People who have read and love Proust.

2. People who have read and hate Proust.

3. People who have not read Proust.

Reading Proust even under duress needs a ultra-high tolerance level. Either you have a feel or are unfit for the same.

Personally for me the book was a disappointment of sorts and when seen in toto comparing the size and the time and effort put forward to the completion of the book, so for me it had a diminishing marginal utility, hence the 2* for the book(s). In Search of Lost Time i.e. Mine

This is a challenge not easily accepted and a daunting one at that. The very idea of spending months trying to unravel a book is one that only the brave can attempt or if the person is a research student. 

The returns that we get from anything that we read are what justify the effort. When the ends are not up to expectations then one ends of all the poorer. 

I quote Alfred Tennyson's poem as a sign for the challenge - 

I hold it true, whate'er befall;  I feel it when I sorrow most;

'Tis better to have loved and lost  Than never to have loved at all.

Please do not forget to post your comments. I am an equal opportunity person so would love to hear your love or your hate for the review or book in any order. Please write what you did not like or whether the book was an absolute disaster for you and why.

You can also follow/like my review at Goodreads here - 

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4930434443