The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 2 September 2008
by Marcel Proust
With this book, we enter the home stretch of Marcel Proust's massive seven-volume novel, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (as published by the Modern Library in the 1930s). The whole work, itself, was assembled over years and not necessarily in any particularly linear order. The writing reveals the meandering but brilliant mind of its author. It also reveals a layer of obsession not fully realized by his intricate and often frustrating prose. At the end of the previous volume, Sodom & Gomorrah, Marcel fled to Paris with his lover, Albertine. He was determined to leave her, to abandon plans to marry her, but allusions to what might have been lesbian affairs trigger his profound and obsessive jealousy. He'd rather keep a woman who bores him to tears than to let her go out and live what our narrator feels to be a lacivious and dissipated existence. He can't bear to lose her to another woman, and thinks of potential liasons constantly, concluding, in effect, that all women are potential lovers to Albertine. In this book, he keeps her a virtual prisoner in his sprawling Paris flat. All the time, he is reasoning his way toward splitting with Albertine, but every tiny suggestion of her hidden homosexual desires throws another chain over her, tying Marcel ever more closely to her, though all the time complaining of her as tedious and boring. The reader can be forgiven for finding Marcel pretty annoying in his repetitive obsession, his determination to abandon Albertine repeatedly foiled by his disturbing jealousy. In the end, though, we also detect a revealing quality to Proust's writing. He is exposing an obsessive nature with which he is clearly intimately familiar. Dare we suggest this is part of his own autobiographical tale? Albertine's story brackets a long night at a party given by Mme. Verdurin, one of Proust's enduring upper-class characters. There, Charlie Morel, the young violinist and protoge of the Baron de Charlus, gives an inspiring concert of a sweeping septet by Venteuil, the author of the love's theme of Swann's love for Odette de Crécy. The concert offers Proust an occasion for another of his long digressions on the nature of art and how it expresses the ineffable qualities of existence. But the party, itself, is the scene for another tragedy. Baron de Charlus, who is himself a well-known homosexual, has long since taken Morel under his wing, bringing him into society and displaying his musical talents. But he is jealously protective of the young man. He is also arrogant and preening, taking over Mme. Verdurin's party, much to her annoyance. She contrives to take Morel away from the Baron, in a famous scene of exposure and humiliation. The denoument of that episode, however, is left for later volumes as Proust returns us to that claustrophobic apartment where Albertine is a prisoner. Marcel lavishes her with gifts, squandering an inheritance on her, all the while plotting to dump her at the most convenient opportunity. (Proust, himself, was in an obsessive relationship with a young man, for whom he purchased an airplane in which the lover would eventually die.) Marcel contrives to leave for Venice, abruptly abandoning Albertine and expecting her to be gone when he returns. His worst fears, are realized, though, when events don't play out the way he plans, and the book ends with the thud of fallen spirits. And so, in this volume of his massive novel, Proust explores his themes in depth, from character to the passage of time, from homosexuality to the culture of class structure that was passing into history. The book is frustrating to read, mainly because of Marcel's obsessive dithering. But there are scenic gems throughout its somewhat repetitive story. In the meantime, Proust has begun bringing the story full circle, making many references to the times and the places set out in Swann's Way. He even refers Albertine's growing coldness to Marcel to the episode of his mother's missing goodnight kiss. We begin, too, to see the course Marcel will take to the moment when he finally sits down to write his great work.
Also by Proust: [Swann's Way] [Within a Budding Grove] [The Guermantes Way] [Sodom and Gomorrah] [The Fugitive]