The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 20 November 2006
by Marcel Proust
This dense, daunting and ultimately rewarding book is volume three of Proust's epic A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Here, as always, the reader again wades chest-deep into Proust's ornate language (sticking, here, to C. K. Scott Moncrieff's canonical translation) and intricate reflections upon life and society around the turn of the 20th century. As one grows familiar with Proust the man and the writer, and as one becomes hypnotized by the legendary length and language of the writing, the books become something of a companion, creating an atmosphere of tone and thought. The book is fiction, of course, but also tends to closely follow the persons and personalities of many real figures in French society during Proust's youth. He was a historian of an upperclass culture that was vanishing in the years after the first world war. And, in this book, his story ever grows, while also becoming more particular and idiosyncratic. The title of the first volume, Swann's Way, referred to a path taken on walks through the town of Combray (the real town of Illiers) in our narrator's youth. The title of this book refers to another such path in an opposite direction. In the first, we read of a middle class man who wheedles his way into society and then marries a famous cocotte. The Guermantes Way, becomes another path into society, via the drawing rooms of the upperclass denizens of the Faubourg St. Germain. Our narrator, now living in a wing of a building overlooking the Guermantes mansion, looks into a window, sees a banquet in progress, and dreams of the ethereal beauty to be found there. When he finally finds himself in the room, becoming well-known and a more frequent guest at these never-ending dinner parties, he also learns that the great aristocrats have feet of clay, and engage in conversation as mundane as any shopkeeper's. But he remains entranced by the mythical beauty of the names they represent, descending to them over a millennium. This all unfolds during a long passage in the second half of the book. In the first half, Marcel spends a long vacation in the town of Donciéres, where his friend Robert de Saint-Loup is stationed as a soldier. This passage is full of meditations on the place of the military in society, and of the meaning of the notorious Dreyfus affair to specific parts of society as a whole. Saint-Loup continues to have troubles with his mistress. Marcel encounters Albertine who, unlike herself in the previous volume, is a much more willing romantic partner. Vividly, tragically, Marcel's beloved grandmother dies. And Charles Swann appears again, in a bittersweet coda that also serves to dramatize the selfish shallowness of upperclass society. It is all interwoven into Proust's analysis of society and memory. It broadens and deepens the whole multi-volume project. If it isn't as engrossing as the first volume, it must also be seen as but a fragment of a whole masterpiece.
Also by Proust: [Swann's Way] [Within a Budding Grove] [Sodome et Gomorrhe] [The Captive] [The Fugitive]