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Swann's Way (1913)

Author Info:

Marcel Proust
1871-1922
(Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin)(revised by D. J. [Dennis Joseph] Enright 1920-)

    [O]ne must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more
    interesting than those one thinks up oneself.
        -Marcel Proust

    Infirmity alone makes us take notice and learn, and enables us to analyze processes which we would
    otherwise know nothing about.
        -Marcel Proust

    Allow me to tell you that even though you are approaching fifty, you've stayed what you were
    when I first knew you, namely a spoilt child.
        -Lionel Hauser, Proust's stockbroker

    The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have a broken leg in order to have the opportunity
    to read In Search of Lost Time.
        -Robert Proust, Marcel's brother

    My dear friend, I may be dense, but I fail to see why a chap needs thirty pages to describe how he
    tosses and turns in bed before sleep.
        -Alfred Humboldt, Ollendorf publishing house

    At the end of seven hundred and twelve pages of this manuscript, after innumerable griefs at being
    drowned in unfathomable developments and irritating impatience at never being able to rise above
    the surface--one doesn't have a single, but not a single clue of what this is about. What is the point
    of all this ? What does it all mean ? Where is it all leading ? Impossible to know anything about it !
    Impossible to say anything about it !
        -Jacques Madeleine, Fasquelle publishing house

    A mother's boy who never really grew up, a part-genuine, part-imaginary invalid totally incapable
    of looking after himself, a reluctant homosexual who may never have known genuine fulfilment, he
    spent his early manhood in Parisian high society and then retired, hermit-like, to his famous
    cork-lined room, where he turned day into night and night into day.
        -John Weightman, Books Unlimited review of Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life

    About a book published only a few months earlier, people never speak to me without mistakes
    proving either that they've forgotten it or that they haven't read it.
        -Marcel Proust

(Reviewed:21-Feb-01)

Grade: (D+)

Websites:

FILM :
    -FILMOGRAPHY : "marcel proust" (Internet Movie Database)
    -ARTICLE : PROUST IS FILMED AT LAST (ARTHUR HOLMBERG, NY Times)
    -ESSAY : Making up for lost time : His work is elitist and meditative, but a new film has brought Marcel Proust fresh fame. Andrew Marr revisits the great French author's home to celebrate his comeback (Electronic Mail & Guardian za)

D. J. ENRIGHT :
    -D.J. ENRIGHT(1920- )
    -ARCHIVES : "enright" (NY Review of Books)
    -POEM : THE NOODLE-VENDOR's FLUTE By D.J. Enright
    -POEM : Dreaming in the Shanghai Restaurant (D. J. Enright)
    -REVIEW : D.J. Enright: Speaking in Tongues, NY Review of Books
               Destiny by Tim Parks
    -REVIEW : D.J. Enright: Life Is Beautiful, NY Review of Books
               Lovers for a Day: New and Collected Stories by Ivan Klíma
    -REVIEW : D.J. Enright: Modern Love, NY Review of Books
               The Reader by Bernhard Schlink and translated by Carol Brown Janeway
    -REVIEW : D.J. Enright: Lone Wolf, NY Review of Books
               The Mad Dog by Heinrich Böll and translated by Breon Mitchell
    -REVIEW : D.J. Enright: Welcome to Moor, NY Review of Books
               The Dog King by Christoph Ransmayr and translated by John E. Woods
    -REVIEW : of Heshel's Kingdom by Dan Jacobson (D. J. Enright)
    -REVIEW : of THE STORIES OF HEINRICH BOLL By Heinrich Boll (D. J. Enright, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of NOTES OF AN ANATOMIST By F. Gonzalez-Crussi (D. J. Enright, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of THE SPACE OF DEATH A Study of Funerary Architecture, Decoration, and Urbanism. By Michel Ragon (D. J. Enright, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : Helen Vendler: Life Itself, NY Review of Books
               Collected Poems, 1948-1998 by D.J. Enright
    -REVIEW :

Comments:

Orrin welcomes reader comments on his reviews.

Add yours here.

let me guess what happened here, orrin. you got bored a couple pages in, didn't understand what was happening, and decided that you'd just use others' negative commentary, considering you hadn't understood enough to form your own.

good job on another brilliant review, orrin. another brilliant review, where a commenter overshadows you as a literary genius by comparison. splendid work, my man. keep us amused.

- May-14-2003, 05:01

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Thanks. I found the last volume in the newer Modern Library edition and I'm going to give it a shot. though with teeth clenched. :)

- oj

- Feb-11-2003, 18:15

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Well, if one doesn't make it through Swann's way and all the rest, then I suppose one won't get the full effect of it, and it will seem a hopeless muddle, but I thought that Remembrance of Things Past was one of the finest literary works I've ever read. Not, perhaps, as a novel--as a novel, it is reported to have a wonderfully fugal structure, but it's so long that one doesn't get the effect of it--but as some other sort of artistic work.

The last volume is particularly moving, and expresses very beautifully (even in translation--my French is too poor to attempt it in the original) a sense of both terrible loss and continuity after the horrors of the Great War. It's the same sort of sentiment you see running through Tolkien, and even the later Waugh, and even though it is not expressed with anything like an economy of words, it is still there, and because of the prodigiously long build-up, the overall effect of those last three hundred pages or so is quite stunning. Very moving.

Or at least, it was to me when I read it in HS. Perhaps it would be different now.

- Tae Jensen

- Feb-11-2003, 13:14

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Swann's Way (1913)

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