Read in Romanian, Translation by Cristian FulasAudiobook in English narrated by John Rowe (Scott Moncrieff translation)I know there's no way I can write a proper review for Proust. All I can do is bow my head to his genius and be completely awestruck by his writing. You have to be a true word wizard to pull off a 600-page novel where basically nothing happens, yet the reader is glued to the page, craving more. I couldn't figure out why I was so desperate to turn the page when the author was just...

Marcel Proust is a weaver – he weaves his narration from memories of the past, dreams, and threads of irony…A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the sequence of the hours, the order of the years and worlds. He consults them instinctively as he wakes and reads in a second the point on the earth he occupies, the time that has elapsed before his waking; but their ranks can be mixed up, broken.Memories of childhood: relatives, family relationships, hearsay and gossip, the lives of neighbors, ...

Proust is immortal. He discovered a hidden path to transform our past and, by extension, like the mystics of old, our souls, into something of enduring beauty. The past can be regained and transmuted, as by St. Teresa of Avila, into an Interior Castle. Or, as Proust says in *In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower*, a magic lantern show. Few of us are old enough to remember magic lanterns. They were the original still photo projectors, developed at the turn of the twentieth century. My dad had h...

[Edited 4/2/23]Proust! Memories! With almost 5,000 reviews already, I thought I'd simply share some examples of his writing if you haven't experienced it before. Beautiful, lyrical, complex, maybe even occasionally convoluted prose. A true classic of literature. If you're looking for thoughtful book reviews, keep reading!First, the famous passage about madeleines from Marcel Proust's *Swann's Way: Remembrance of Things Past, Volume One*:“And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was tha...

Those consumed by the wasting torments of merciless love/ Haunt the sequestered alleys and myrtle groves that give them - VirgilAt first, you avoid it as if nothing is happening—the prose is so dense that you feel anxious that the initial pages are just about the narrator’s issues with sleeping—For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, my candle scarcely out, my eyes would close so quickly that I did not have time to say to myself: ‘I’m falling asleep.’ But then, as you brave through the...

Childhood ExpectationsThe Delphic maxim Nosce te ipsum, "Know thyself," is the driving force behind not only Western philosophy and Christian theology but also much of Western literature. All the volumes of *Swann's Way: Remembrance of Things Past, Volume One* are an experiment in self-understanding, an experiment that includes something often left out of modern science, especially psychological science: the concept of purposefulness.Purposefulness is the capacity to consider purpose rather than...

”At the hour when I usually went downstairs to find out what there was for dinner...I would stop by the table, where the kitchen-maid had shelled them, to inspect the platoons of peas, drawn up in ranks and numbered, like little green marbles, ready for a game; but what most enraptured me were the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and pink which shaded their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible gradations to their white feet--still stained a little by the...

I've removed my initial three-star rating and replaced it with nothing. Goodreads stars simply can't express my feelings about this book. I initially gave it three stars because I was undecided, thinking a middle-ground rating was best when I couldn't make up my mind. However, on Goodreads, three stars means "I liked it," which, unfortunately, wasn't the case. Two stars means "it was okay," but that doesn't accurately describe the genius required to write this either. Frankly, Marcel Proust is ...

So, I finally decided to tackle some Proust, get in touch with my intellectual side, or whatever. And I gotta say, as an intro, it was a bit of a mixed bag. I really struggled with the first part of Swann's Way: Remembrance of Things Past, Volume One. I'm just not a fan of overly sensitive or precocious kids, so that whole section was pretty much a wash for me. I know, terrible, right?? Here's this Monument of Great Literature by Marcel Proust, and I'm just annoyed, like I'm watching some awful ...

‘reality will take shape in the memory alone...’For 100 years now, Swann’s Way: Remembrance of Things Past, Volume One, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, has engaged and enchanted readers. Within moments of turning back the cover and dropping your eyes into the trenches of text, the reader is sent to soaring heights of rapture while clinging to Proust prose, leaving no room for doubt that this is well-deserving of its honor among the timeless classics. In swirling passages of poet...