PENGUIN In Search of Lost Time: The Prisoner and the Fugitive

It’s Proust, for goodness sake.

PLEASE READ MY EARLIER REVIEW FOR FINDING TIME AGAIN, it applies to this novel also.

good book, but not so much a fan of the line spacing in penguin books , maybe im getting old , but they could be more generous with the spacing,

Almost three decades ago, in 1989, I rented my first French gite (often, then, an old farmhouse that had been renovated, to varying degrees, for tourists). Certainly, it was not the plan, but the gite happened to be 12 km from the now hyphenated town of Illiers-Combray. Hyphenated, in honor of Marcel Proust’s magnum opus, with the latter part being the name of the town in his novel, which was set, in part, in Illiers, where Proust’s childhood home was. My family and I went to tour the home (the children were ages 4 and 3). We were the only people on the tour, which was conducted in French. Saw his bed, where the very young Marcel waited longingly for his mother’s goodnight kiss; saw the dinner bell, that in later years would be stolen; and was given the map of “Swann’s way” to the Pré Catelin gardens. Before the tour commenced, the “guardian” of his memory asked if I had read his work. I confessed that I had not. She was still polite, but I received a look that I might not be quite worthy of such a tour. Hey, afterwards though, I made sure I always kissed those very youthful kids goodnight, and I am now confident that it will not be the entire three decades before I could look the “guardian” in the eye, and answer in the affirmative: All six volumes! Albertine is both the “captive” and the “fugitive.” Far, far from Marcel’s first glimpse of her, along the beach at Balbec, in Volume 2, the “Budding Grove.” The unnamed narrator is finally actually named. Typical of Proust, in the conditional at first, before he ventures into the declarative. They have left the “Gomorrah” that is Balbec, and Albertine is living in Marcel’s home in Paris, but with a separate bedroom, which does little to mute the “tut-tutting.” The servant, Francoise, strongly disapproves. Marcel is obsessively jealous of Albertine, particularly concerned that she might be having relations with other women. He has her watched constantly. Marcel is considering marrying her, but recognizes he does not love her. His desire is enflamed only when he thinks he is losing her; if she declares her devotion to him, he loses interest. Hundreds of pages on this sad equivocation about human relations that Leonard Cohen summed up far more succinctly in his song, “Chelsea Hotel”: “…I never once heard you say, I need you, I don’t need you, I need you, I don’t need you, and all of that jivin’ around.” Endless subordinate clauses are the signature Proust style, easily recognized by any reader who makes it through volume 5. There is at least a 100-pages on the “pecking order” for one event at the salon of Mme. Verdurin, including her underhanded efforts to split Charlie Morel from M. de Charles. Aside from the machinations of the “gratin” of French society, and his relationship with Albertine, there are also ruminations on a variety of other subjects, such as the nature of sleep, the labors of street vendors, and the yellow wall in Vermeer’s “View of Delft.” Proust mixes propriety, with Albertine’s slang “me faire casser,” which the translator leaves in French…hum… no doubt in the spirit of “if you will excuse my French.” It is famously “Proust’s world,” which is a bit unmoored from historical accuracy. Woven throughout this work is the Dreyfus Affair, surely long finished when folks are flying in airplanes. Bergotte dies, and he serves as the model for Anatole France, who died in 1924, two years after Proust did. Surely the biggest omission is World War I, of which there is nary a hint – surely that event penetrated even the most cloistered of the salons of society ladies! If the reader begins to think that Proust’s observations are suitable for only the time and place of the Third Republic, he provides such up-to-date, “plus ca change” truths as: “But society’s finished, there are no longer any rules, any proprieties, in conversation any more than in dress. Ah, my dear fellow, it’s the end of the world. Everyone has become so malicious. People vie with one another in speaking ill of their fellows. It’s appalling!” And he balances the above cited slang of Albertine with a much more delicious description of that most beautiful of rituals: “I could see Albertine now, seated at her pianola, pink-faced beneath her dark hair; I could feel against my lips, which she would try to part, her tongue, her maternal, incomestible, nutritious, hallowed tongue, whose secret dewy flame, even when she merely ran it over the surface of my neck or my stomach, gave to those caresses of hers, superficial but somehow imparted by the inside of her flesh, externalized like a piece of material reversed to show its lining, as it were the mysterious sweetness of a penetration.” And then there was the 12 km drive back to the former farmhouse of a French peasant which had been built so that the larger farm animals would sleep in the house so that the peasant’s family could benefit from their warmth. Like WW I, something else omitted from “Proust’s world,” yet he still deserves the full 5-stars just for that one description of the most beautiful of rituals, with that meaningful and delightful adverb, “merely.”

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