Read in Romanian, Translation by Cristian FulasAudiobook in English narrated by John Rowe (Scott Moncrieff translation)I know it is impossible for me to write a proper review for Proust. I can only bow my head in front of his genius and be awed by his writing. That’s because you have to be a magician of words to pull off a 600 pages novel where nothing happens and the reader is glued to the page, wanting more. I could not understand my thirst to turn the page when the author was describing his f...

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, relationships in the family, hearsay and gossips, life of neighbour...

Proust is immortal. For he discovered a Hidden Way to transform our past, and, by extension, like the mystics of old - our souls - into a thing 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 a Budding Grove, 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 his own ancient model...

[Edited 4/2/23]Proust! Memories! Almost 5,000 reviews so I thought I would simply give examples of his writing if you have not read him before. Beautiful writing, lyrical, complex, maybe even occasionally convoluted. First the famous passage about madeleines:“And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of a little piece of the madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedro...

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 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 motivating force not only of Western philosophy and Christian theology but of much of Western literature. All of the volumes of In Search of Lost Time are an experiment in self-understanding, an experiment which incorporates something that is left out of much of modern science, particularly psychological science, namely the concept of purposefulness. Purposefulness is the capacity to consider purpose rather than the ado...

”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 have removed my initial three star rating for this and settled with a blank rating. This is because I cannot in any way say what I want to say about this book with goodreads stars. I had given it three stars because of my indecision, it seemed like a good idea to just stick my rating somewhere in the middle when I couldn't make my mind up. The problem is that on goodreads three stars means "I liked it", which, unfortunately, I didn't. Two stars means "it was ok", but that's not an accurate des...

'reality will take shape in the memory alone...’For 100 years now, Swann’s Way, 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 it’s honor among the timeless classics. In swirling passages of poetic ecstasy, the whole of his life and m...

so i figured i would finally read me some proust, get in touch with my roots or whatnot. and i have to say, for my introduction, it was kind of a mixed bag. the first part i had real problems with. i am not a fan of precocious or sensitive children, so the whole first part was kind of a wash for me. i know, that's terrible, right?? here is this Monument of Great Literature, and i am annoyed, as though i were watching some children's production of oklahoma, or any musical, really. (shudder) there...