Book Review: Swann's Way by, Marcel Proust

 

“When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly bodies.”

Reviewing Swann’s Way by, Marcel Proust has felt a bit daunting. It’s the first volume of a six volume piece of work - In Search of Lost time. This is a piece of work that, once read in its entirety, spans thousands of pages. Many people start Proust and then abandon it. Perhaps this won’t be as a review as much as it will be my thoughts on the first volume because, I think, that approached in the right manner, Proust is extremely doable. The reader just has to have right mindset. This is a piece of literature that requires one to nibble, rather than to bite massive chunks at a time. 

So, Swann’s Way… what exactly is this novel about? It does have a plot, though one could argue the the plot itself is rather loose or simple. The unnamed narrator spends significant time recounting his childhood memories from Paris and Combray. The narrator is involve with Swann’s daughter, Gilberte, which then leads the narrator to recount Swann’s love for a woman named Odette (not going to lie, I got Swan Lake vibes from this…) and then the narrator circles back around to how the ties into Gilberte. 

Whilst reading Swann’s Way, I can see how readers may get frustrated because the narrator goes into so much detail about other things around the basic plot - there are so many descriptive, often meandering passages about the narrator’s desire for his mother to kiss him good night, family gatherings, scenery, buildings, etc. However, these “detours” are really harkening to central themes that are all relevant to the central focus of Swann, Odette, the narrator and Gilberte. 

I buddy read this with mr friend Julia y f and as there are many topics/themes that one can focus on, we decided to hone in on the concept of memory, the distortion of reality, love and obsession in love. 

Swann’s Way spends a significant amount of time discussing memory - how memories are shaped, how we memorialize others and how our memories are often shaped by perception, rather than reality. 

“… remembering again all the places and people I had known, what I had actually seen of them, and what others had told me.”

Julia and I were both blatantly reminded of our buddy read from last year, A Legacy by, Sybille Bedford. This is a narrative that also discusses how our memories are really just a compilation of other people making impressions on us with their own recollections. 

“What I learnt came to me, like everything else in this story, at second, third hand, in chunks and puzzles, degrees and flashes, by heresy and talebearing and being told, by one or two descriptions that meant everything to those who gave them.” - A Legacy by, Sybille Bedford

“…even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people.”

Both the Narrator and Swann place Gilberte and Odette on pedestals and this distorts how they view them. They are seeing these women through rose-colored glasses and are completely willing to overlook their shortcomings and enhance, in their memories, the idealized versions of these ladies. 

“We try to discover in things, which become precious to us on that account; the reflection of what our soul has projected on to them; we are disillusioned when we find that they are in reality devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas…”

This segways nicely into how Swann’s Way also spends a lot of time discussing love and the obsession that often accompanies being in love. One is also overwhelmed with the sense that the object of one’s love should conform to our whims in desires, as we project our idealistic versions of that person onto them, often without the other party being aware of this. This constructs a bit of tension between the person we’ve fabricated in our minds and then being that is actually physically in front of us. 

“All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when - in this moment of deprivation - the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult so assuage - the insensate, agonizing need to possess exclusively.”

The way that the Narrator idealizes Gilberte is parallels the way Swann idealizes Odette - they both become a bit obsessive and it distorts who Gilberte and Odette are as characters and how they treat these men. 

“All the time I was away from Gilberte, I felt the need to see her, because, constantly trying to picture her in my mind, I ended up being unable to do so, and by no longer knowing precisely what my love represented. Besides, she had never told me that she loved me.”

While reading Swann’s Way, I couldn’t help but notice how frequently Proust writes about flowers and why he may have done this. I shared my hypothesis with Julia and she said I may be on to something (or I could be reading to much into the flower imagery and perhaps Proust just loves flowers…). In a way, flowers, especially flower heads that have a shorter life span than the roots and stems of a plant, are fleeting, much like our memories and thoughts. Yet, there is something about a flower that lingers in our memories - their scents, colors, etc. Also, depending on the type of flower, it may bloom again, reawakening what it was we loved about that particular flower in the first place, so really, this imagery lines up nicely with what Proust is saying about memories and recollections. 

So why read Swann’s Way and venture into Proust’s six volume work? Well for starters, it’s one massive piece of gorgeously written literature; it feels like lucid dreaming, the way the prose flows. Proust’ writing definitely has a cadence to it, and once you get into it’s rhythm, the pages fly by. Reading something like Swann’s Way does require patience; there may be days when you can only read a few pages and there are days where you can’t seem to put the book down. That’s the point. Swann’s Way is to be enjoyed, dissected, analyzed piece by piece. There were many times throughout this reading experience where I have to reread a passage multiple times, flag it, and then go back and reread it again. It’s possible that by the completion of this novel, the reader has actually already read it twice. It’s impossible to understand everything Proust is eluding to the first time around, and that’s ok - each reader will get something unique from Proust because it’s a piece of literature that harkens back to things that conjure up personal memories and feelings of nostalgia. You may recall your own youthful memories of love, infatuation, family, places and things. 

Swann’s Way was an extremely enjoyable reading experience and it up being way more approachable than I initially gave it credit for. I look forward to reading Volume II next year. I’m giving Proust some breathing room. And of course it’s always a pleasure reading with my friend Julia!

Rating: 4/5 

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