In Search of Lost Time Volume V The Captive & The Fugitive

À la recherche du temps perdu #5

by Marcel Proust, C.K. Scott Moncrieff (Translation), Terence Kilmartin (Translation)

The Modern Library’s fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time contains both The Captive (1923) and The Fugitive (1925). In The Captive, Proust’s narrator describes living in his mother’s Paris apartment with his lover, Albertine, and subsequently falling out of love with her. In The Fugitive, the narrator loses Albertine forever. Rich with irony, The Captive and The Fugitive inspire meditations on desire, sexual love, music, and the art of introspection.

For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, France, Literature, French Literature, Novels, 20th Century

992 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1923

About the author

Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.

Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51.

Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

gore. juss. seriously - a perfect book. i am reviewing the captive and the fugitive. separately because even though modern library publishes them together in one volume, i don't want to lose this high i am on after reading the captive. what if the fugitive isn't as good!!?? i will not have the luster worn off my glee!

seriously, by the fifth installment, is anyone even paying attention anymore?? who remembers the fifth of anything?







but this one - i reacted to it the way most people reacted to swann's way. this is absolutely what i expected, in my most hopeful moods, proust would be.

that glorious minutia!! but this time, it is all about that awkward transitional period of a romantic entanglement where you don't want the other person anymore, but you don't yet want them to be with anyone else, either. but this character being who he is, he takes it a little too far and becomes freaking crazy with it, wanting the other person to make the break in order to assuage his guilt; thinking and thinking and thinking and strategizing. but along the way, making some really astute commentaries on human relationships and the love process.

i started out with this one, like all the rest, going bookmark-crazy every time i came across a passage i thought was lovely or reminiscent of something in my own life, but if i had kept it up, there would have been a bookmark on every page. at one point, i realized it was getting out of control, and i just gave up and decided - the whole thing is a bookmark.

a number of relationships come to an end in this volume - all handled rather poorly, and all fairly devastating. severance is rarely tidy, but lord there are some drawn-out situations, and this time morel wears the king douchebag hat...

this is about the slow poisonous nature of unfit relationships. the way that each participant is changed by the relationship itself into something opposite of what sparked the initial attraction. all the bitterness, the lies, the jealous accusations, and the unspoken fears. his psychology is so complicated and intense, but in this particular subject matter, frighteningly relatable for me.not that i am a crazy, but i have had relationships, blessedly long ago, that put me into positions that were as uncomfortable as anything written here.

i had an english teacher in high school who would distill every book we read to two phrases: it was "an allegory of society", or it represented "the universality of mankind", which never made any sense to me. not "the commonality of human experience", but "the universality of mankind". despite its clunkiness and its failure as a phrase to mean anything at all, it kept popping into my head when i was reading this. i have been the captive albertine, i have been the captive marcel (now that we can use the name; now that he has finally given a "name" in this volume) i have been morel, and charlus, and jupien's daughter (whose name i can't even remember right now) and all of them at one point in my life. relationships get messy. and proust writes them so well, it dredges up every memory i had of every failed relationship, but in a good, "phew" way.

and that ending! thomas hardy or saki couldn't have done it better. they would have done it shorter, but not better.am taking my three-book break now but i am rarin' to get into book 6. i don't even know if i have left enough room to review it in this space. oops. proustfail.




it says i have 16,141 characters left. is that enough?? i don't do math.

come to my blog!

[Adam Dalva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though these segments of Proust's novel are bundled together, I'm going to treat them as separate entities:

Though there are of course great moments - the first reveal, 3,300 pages in, of the protagonist's name, which is like the sun bursting through a foggy afternoon; the cliffhanger ending; the reappearance of certain traits of Marcel's great-aunt in Combray - THE CAPTIVE is my personal low point of I.S.o.L.T., a long, obsessive meander through the protagonist's most frustrating tendencies (jealousy, homophobia). When this book suffers, it's usually because Proust writes with authority and at great length about subjects about which he is fundamentally mistaken. The "captivity" of Albertine is a frustrating plotline, and at 550 pages, leaves the viewer little breathing room. It took me weeks to get through it.

But persevere, because THE FUGITIVE is extraordinary. It stands with SWANN IN LOVE as a high point of this great work. It's a series of 4 vignettes, each of which permanently modifies and smashes together characters who we have come to love (Albertine, Gilberte, Mama, St. Loup), to relish in (Charlus, Legrandin, Jupien and his niece), to distrust (Morel, Monsieur de Norpois). This sudden flowering of action and time and location (I won't spoil it) is the perfect counterbalance to THE CAPTIVE, and more importantly, continues the work of SODOM AND GOMORRAH in rounding out the novel's plot. Many seemingly minor scenes recur and are made complicated - many things that we have long been waiting for come to pass. It's a remarkable achievement.

I added 3.9 to 5.2 and rounded up. I can't imagine anyone would get this far and then give in, but if you find yourself floundering in THE CAPTIVE, have courage.

[Violet wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the part where Proust puts love under the scalpel. Sexual love. Proust seeks to show us that it is largely delusion. The romantic imagination acting as a magic wand. The transfiguring stardust possessing a limited shelf life. And how the romantic imagination can coax its owner into playing tyrant and jailor. The romantic imagination seen as a controlling mechanism of the mind. A disseminator of lies and delusions.

But it's Proust so ironies abound. Our narrator keeps Albertine under house arrest in a room of his apartment. A situation he keeps secret from friends and family. (Another indictment of Marcel's monstrous snobbery: Proust often ridicules snobbery in his book while at the same time falling prey to it just as often: it's a constant sub-plot). He pays servants to spy on her whenever she goes out. He suspects her of betraying him - but with other girls. Marcel has a distaste for the love that dare not speak its name. It's another example of his meshing of autobiography with fiction, of making Marcel Marcel and not making him Marcel. He goes on to deliver up a succession of lectures about the nature of love. But his feeling for Albertine strikes us as having more in common with a sickness than what most of us experience as love. Which is perhaps why these meditations on the nature of love sometimes ring false. Proust is much more Henry James than he is DH Lawrence, especially when he's denying his own sexual nature in his narrative.

Proust was a pioneer. He gets excited about things we now take for granted. In this respect there are times when you have to try to read him retrospectively. And of course Proust is all about life as experienced retrospectively. Sometimes it's like being in a hall of mirrors. Which of course is the nature of memory, the nature of trying to retrieve lost time. I often found myself marvelling at how many writers he has greatly influenced. It's extraordinary how many doors he opened for the novel.


Marcel finally makes it to Venice in this part. This turned out to be something of an anti-climax for me as reader. There are no epiphanies. Nor does he especially bring the city alive. I was looking forward to some sumptuous descriptions. Never happened.

I suppose I've discovered I'm never going to wholeheartedly love Proust. I can only read ten pages of him at a time. And often I find myself getting lost and confused in his labyrinthine sentences. He's one of very few novelists I don't always understand. In this respect he is more poet than novelist. I admire him most of all for the influence he had on some of my favourite writers rather than for himself. Onto the last part. But I know now this wouldn't be one of the books I'd take to a desert island.

[Piyangie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book comprises Volumes 5 (The Captive) and 6 (The Fugitive) of In Search of Lost Time. In these two volumes, we go through an important period of the narrator's life as he steps into adulthood from his impressionable adolescence. Thematically, the volumes center on love, desire, physical intimacies, and mental attachment.

In The Captive, we see our narrator embracing the first feelings of love and desire. He enters into a relationship with a girl named Albertine and lives with her in his mother's apartment. He basks himself in a blissful world of pleasures at first. But consumed by possessive obsession and suspicion, his romantic relationship with Albertine slowly becomes an intense torment to him. Throughout the story, we see the narrator, possessed with jealousy and suspicion, acting like a neurotic. He suspects Albertine of immoral behaviour with women and works himself to a frenzy by questioning her and employing other methods to ascertain the truth. As a result, his health suffers, and his relationship with Albertine ruptures.

The interesting question here is who the "Captive" is - Albertine or the narrator? In a physical sense, one could state that it's Albertine who is the captive since her every movement is watched and scrutinized, curtailing her personal freedom. But in an emotional and much stronger sense, it is the narrator who is the captive. His obsession that gives rise to constant jealous pangs and his suspicions that lead to overthinking and overanalyzing, make him a prisoner of his own senses.

In The Fugitive, the narrator learns of the death of Albertine following her departure. This effectively annihilates any future attempt at reconciliation. The narrator sinks in guilt and grief which he tries to soften with philosophizing his feelings. To his surprise, he realizes that he hasn't truly loved Albertine; he has only loved a woman of his own creation and imagination.

Here, the idea of "Fugitive" is twofold. On the one hand, it means the narrator's escape from captivity, his release from the emotional chains that bound him. On the other hand, fugitive means the fleeting nature of one's feelings. At one point, the narrator is obsessed with his love for Albertine. But with time, he falls out of love. When they part and she dies, his love rekindles in the guise of guilt and grief. However, when he realizes that he has loved only a woman of his own imagination and not the woman he had lived in flesh and blood, his emotional ties with Albertine severs, reducing her status in his heart to only a memory. With time, even that memory fleets.

The two volumes The Captive/The Fugitive deviate from the previous volumes of In Search of Lost Time with the story's focal concentration on the narrator. However, towards the end of The Fugitive, we meet some of the old characters and learn surprising new developments, furnishing an incentive to read the final volume.

Proust's writing is always the key attraction of In Search of Lost Time. The emotional journey of the narrator's falling in and out of love, his grief at losing her, and his recovery is written in a hauntingly beautiful manner. Even when one is exasperated at the narrator's conduct, when one is tired of listening to his long winding philosophizing about love and loss, one can still indulge in the luxury of his words and be comforted.

More of my reviews can be found at http://piyangiejay.com/

[Noel]

Recently, I reread a couple of essays in Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, one of them being “The Image of Proust,” which led me to track down Jacques Rivière’s lectures on Proust (published in The Ideal Reader). Rivière was one of Proust’s earliest champions and clearly had a crush on him, but his reading of him aligns so closely with mine that I thought I might make a few notes, on a subject I haven’t talked about in my reviews of Proust: love.

(The ordinary sense of the word “love,” already bruised from its use in Swann in Love, is beaten to a bloody pulp in The Captive. At one point, Proust notes: “Here I mean by love reciprocal torture.”)

Anyone who gets far into the Search becomes aware of Proust’s belief that we can never know another human being, only the illusion we build up in our own mind. The image of the other is like an Impressionist painting: it makes perfect sense from a distance, but dissolves into a weather of brushstrokes when viewed up close. As far as Proust is concerned, we are islands of candlelight in an immense ocean of darkness; only through lack of insight do we fail to see the uncrossable chasm that leaves us in eternal solitude.


Self-Portrait In Rose, by Cuno Amiet.

This has several consequences, but maybe the most disturbing is that, throughout this very long novel, there are no real characters, only projections of the narcissist narrator’s/Marcel’s/Proust’s own self. The effect in the last two volumes is rather like standing in a hall of mirrors with a mustachioed early-twentieth century Frenchman—or as a mustachioed early-twentieth century Frenchman, which is even more terrifying—with reflections of Frenchmen everywhere you look, adjusting their cravats, giggling and guffawing about aristocratic lineages and place-name etymologies.

If to “know” is an illusion, then nowhere is this more evident than in love. In Proust, love has virtually nothing to do with the characteristics of its object, even though its subject may think so. Rivière argues that a commonality between Proust and Freud is that for both, “love exists entirely ahead of time in its subject and that its assignment to such and such a person is provoked only by chance. … [B]oth lay great stress upon the fact that these are never anything but accidental, even if afterwards, the particular characteristics of the beloved object, having forced themselves upon the subject, can make him believe that they were what necessitated his choice, that no other choice was possible.” Proust would probably respond to the idea of people “growing in love,” instead of being hit by Cupid’s arrow, with hysterical laughter.

Rivière argues that another commonality between Proust and Freud (which is fundamentally the same as the previous one) is that for both, love, “before it attaches itself to anyone, is essentially anxiety, and that when this anxiety is increased, by an exterior, fortuitous cause, it becomes so very intolerable that resolves itself into love, which is then turned towards the being whom chance places within our reach at that moment” (hence the inevitably frustrated desire to know and possess the other):

“If you upset their plans for the day, they confess to you the pleasure they had concealed from you: ‘I did so want to go and have tea with so and so who I’m fond of.’ And then, six months later, if you come to know the person in question, you will learn that the girl whose plans you had upset, who, trapped, in order that you might set her free had confessed to you that she was thus in the habit of taking tea with a dear friend every day at the hour at which you did not see her, has never once been inside this person’s house, that they have never had tea together, since the girl used to explain that her whole time was taken up by none other than yourself. And so the person with whom she confessed that she was going to tea, with whom she begged you to allow her to go to tea, that person, a reason admitted by necessity, it was not her, it was somebody else, it was something else still! What something else? Which somebody else?

“Alas, the multifaceted eyes, far-ranging and melancholy, might enable us perhaps to measure distance, but do not indicate direction. The boundless field of possibilities extends before us, and if by any chance the reality presented itself to our eyes, it would be so far outside the limits of the possible that, knocking suddenly against this looming wall, we should fall over backwards in a daze. It is not even essential that we should have proof of her movement and flight, it is enough that we should guess them. She had promised us a letter; we were calm, we were no longer in love. The letter has not come; each mail fails to bring it; what can have happened? Anxiety is born afresh, and love. It is such people more than any others who inspire love in us, to our desolation. For every new anxiety that we feel on their account strips them in our eyes of some of their personality. We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow, and that its object is only to a very small extent the girl with the raven hair. But, when all is said, it is such people more than any others who inspire love.”

(Notice the perverse use of the royal “we” that draws us into his insanity.)

Jealousy isn’t an effect of love, but rather its cause. This why, in Sodom and Gomorrah, even though Marcel had just resolved to break with Albertine, when she makes a casual allusion to a female(!) friendship, he suddenly expresses a desire to (and this is only slightly paraphrasing) inflict torments on her, isolate her, keep her under lock and key, and take from her the little money that she has, which he fulfills in The Captive by holding her, well, captive in his parents’ apartment—secretly, of course, from his friends and relatives. This is crazy. Anyway, we might say that there’s a dual will to love. There’s egoistic love, the way a baby loves its mother, only for what she does for it and gives to it; and there’s altruistic love, the love that gives, that sacrifices, that truly cares for mother herself, which comes with years, and sometimes, as with Marcel, never comes at all. In Proust, love, as Rivière concludes, is entirely without altruistic impulses. It’s always selfish. Although Marcel is supposedly an adult, his behavior suggests that some vital aspects of his personality have been arrested at an Oedipal stage of development, strangling whatever woman he “loves” with the tentacles of codependency, bitter jealousy, and ultimately, hatred—like an octopus in one of those erotic prints of Japanese women pearl divers.

In fact, Marcel’s “love” for Albertine is explicitly portrayed as a restaging of the Oedipal drama of the novel’s opening pages, in which the young Marcel lay sleepless yearning for Maman to come and kiss him good night, and she didn’t come:

“It was no longer the peace of my mother’s kiss at Combray that I felt when I was with Albertine on these evenings, but, on the contrary, the anguish of those on which my mother scarcely bade me good-night, or even did not come up to my room at all, either because she was cross with me or was kept downstairs by guests. This anguish—not merely its transposition into love but this anguish itself—which for a time had specialised in love and which, when the separation, the division of the passions occurred, had been assigned to love alone, now seemed once more to be extending to them all, to have become indivisible again as in my childhood, as though all my feelings, which trembled at the thought of my not being able to keep Albertine by my bedside, at once as a mistress, a sister, a daughter, and as a mother too, of whose regular good-night kiss I was beginning once more to feel the childish need, had begun to coalesce, to become unified in the premature evening of my life which seemed fated to be as short as a winter day.”

(That trauma never left him. This, I think, is the fourth or fifth time he makes this connection in this volume and the last.)

Proust’s treatment of love deeply disturbs me, and somehow exasperates me even more than his treatment of society. For Proust, in love, there can’t be any interpenetration of selves. I don’t mean in the sexual sense, although that’s conspicuously absent from the novel, too. As with Charlus and Morel, Proust takes the time to suggest that Marcel and Albertine aren’t even having sex (“I was not perhaps her lover in the full sense of the word”—one wonders what else they could be doing, cooped up in that apartment, for hundreds of pages…). All this is a corollary of Proust’s view of life in general (what Rivière calls “a lacuna, or a deficiency” in his psychology); that is, that there can’t be “any contact between human beings”—as he’s maintained from the very beginning—“any transfer from one to the other, any giving or any receiving.”

Proust’s perspective seems to me quite distorted by a lifetime of unsatisfying relationships. At the risk of indulging in the biographical fallacy, I’ve read a great deal about Proust’s life (only because I’ve been reading this novel for so, so long) and can find in it explanation for some of the more, uh, bizarre aspects of the novel, such as, for example, Marcel’s insane jealousy over Albertine’s supposed lesbian affairs, probably a reflection of Proust’s fury when his bisexual male lovers went back to women, which if it makes sense in a gay relationship, doesn’t in a straight one.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

But in exchange for what our imagination leads us to expect and we give ourselves so much futile trouble trying to find, life gives us something which we were very far from imagining.

If you have come thus far in this search for time lost, here you may remember that, as unfeasible as it may seem, this is in fact but a part of a single work, one that built and built and has finally started to wind its way slowly down trains of thought already distilled, running on rails made efficient by readerly familiarity. It is not the end, not yet, but still there is the lingering sense of something other than the constant growth and spread of pure novelty of Swann, Flower, Guermantes, Sodom; rather than the youth of yore, the rites of maturation have begun. For the narrator is as gorgeously incisive as before, but in the throes of capture and flight he begins, truly begins, to consider others as being capable of the same inconsistent desire, the same instantaneous flutters of heart and habitus. Here, time begins its return.

The turnaround is slow, subtle, and fully explicated, as everything has ever been within the passes of these pages, but still much of a surprise, as while our narrator is a wonder with intimating at the countless facets of visual delight, relegating him to the category of 'spoiled brat' would be anything but too harsh a judgment. But, of course, his life has been a luxurious one, and it is a rare gift indeed to be considerate of others without ever having been forced to do so with little to no expectation of reward. If one wished to trivialize the matters bounded within the doubled novels of a single tome, it could be said that here, the narrator wins his toy long enough to become bored with it, and then has it taken away in such a manner that does not allow for any hint of retrieval, no matter how much the narrator wheedles or begs. But what is a mark of maturity if not the coming to terms with a incontrovertible refusal in such a way that enables a calmer, colder manner of evaluating the thwarting of future whims, fancies, dreams of any length and substantial measure? For if there's one thing to be said about having one's lifelong pursuits come to nothing, it's the resulting perspective and all the changes fortified on it.

In shorter, simpler terms, the narrator in the course of this 'chapter' of this over four thousand page 'novel' is reaching the aging complacency of been there, done that, but is not yet quite fully there. As this is Proust, what would normally be sketched out in a few sentences in other pieces of fiction is rhapsodized on for hundreds of pages, and what would merit only a passing glance is here expanded on to a glorious extent, to the point that one cannot simply read the changes the narrator's thought patterns undergo, the return of so many figures of his youth long ago given up for good, the application of experience painstakingly incorporated into the character to current circumstance, the slow giving way of future hopes to a more thoughtful measuring of the mix of past and present, but feel them. Life forces itself on the narrator once and for all, and with his spoiled sensibilities slighted, his anxious back and forth of flighty indecision decapitated in the street, he submits to the reality and comes out the better for it. His acute sensitivity to the flow of influence and infinite variety of observation protects him from the worst of protective mechanisms via calcification of personality, and while still fickle and overwrought, his path through life is no longer a linear one of ever constant horizons and ever rejected familiarity. Past and future are beginning to coalesce within his grasp, and the present is becoming less of a search and more of a complex interchange between self, time, and circumstance with every passing instance; a newness less pristine, a habit less condemned.

The sun has begun to set on the stage of this lengthy exploration of color, love, society, leaving a narrator beginning to learn that not all lost opportunities are worth forever mourning, that the paths of life led thus far are no less valuable for not having adhered to a past plan of action, however seemingly frivolous in nature or wasteful in scope of time. A beginning flicker of, yes, perhaps what one needs is not around the corner, an entirety necessitating a complete sacrifice of all that came before, but a hand in hand conjoining of accumulated self and subsequent surrounding. An acquiescence to the need of constant reevaluation, one inspiring and tiresome and inspiring again, fueled by nothing but a sense of one day looking back on it all and seeing something that, despite all the chaotic fumblings and discordant backtracks, shaped itself worthwhile. A day that has not yet come to pass, may never come to pass, will require so much for so long before coming to pass, and yet there is an undercurrent that will not be denied, a tidal flow that, for all its effacing tendencies on seaside shore, offers an integrated art of existence in flotsam left behind.

Composers do not remember this lost fatherland, but each of them remains all his life unconsciously attuned to it; he is delirious with joy when he sings in harmony with his native land, betrays it at times with his thirst for fame, but then, in seeking fame, turns his back on it, and it is only by scorning fame that he finds it when he breaks out into that distinctive strain the sameness of which—for whatever its subject it remains identical with itself—proves the permanence of the elements that compose his soul. But in that case is it not true that those elements—all the residuum of reality which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk, even from friend to friend, from master to disciple, from lover to mistress, that ineffable something which differentiates qualitatively what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in which he can communicate with others only by limiting himself to externals, common to all and of no interest—are brought out by art, the art of a Vinteuil like that of an Elstir, which exteriorises in the colours of the spectrum the intimate composition of those worlds which we call individuals and which, but for art, we should never know? A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Again, the writing is so delicious that I tended to forget what an idiot the narrator is. Maybe I'm being harsh, but if I'd been in Albertine's shoes I would have left him long before she did.
I have taken to reading this after I get home from work. I deal with some of the more difficult spects of peoples' lives, mostly towards the end. I immerse myself in Proust for a while and forget the tensions of the day. I'm not sure how Proust kept the standard of writing so high, but he has.
Proust revisits a number of themes throughout and in this volume the narrator in his obsession with Albertine seems to suffer the same sort of separation anxiety he used to feel as a child. His mother at this point is living elsewhere and disapproving of his relationship with Albertine. An interesting switch.
We get more of the marvellously silly Verdurin's and Baron Charlus continues to delight, but this volume really centres on the narrator and Albertine and whether or not she is having Lesbian affairs. Poor Marcel is bored with her and wants to break things off, obsessed with her, can't make his mind up until she does it for him.
The problem with reviewing this is I just keep remembering the Monty Python sketch; The All England summarizing Proust contest. If you haven't seen it, look it up; it's nearly as silly as the narrator.

[William2]

Notes.

Excellent news. I have finally found a way to read Proust - that is, out of sequence. I recommend it. I always found the early books about Marcel's childhood cloyingly unreadable. If you have the same problem, you might try the nonsequential route too. That said, regarding The Captive only, we learn that:

• Baron de Charlus is a scheming motherfucker.

• Morel, the Baron’s lover, is a reprobate and chiseler who fancies himself an honest hetero suitor.

• Superficially, narrator Marcel’s a snob, but let him plumb the character of those around him, and he understands them too well and almost without judgement. He puts us off by reverting to snobbery again, but the more one reads the more one wonders if it isn’t a mask.

[Orhan Pelinkovic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Proust realizes that: "The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection." Hence, he resolves to climb this steep, uncomfortable, slope throughout his novel. However, even with deep introspection, he wasn't able to overcome his retrospective and prospective jealousy in his relationship with Albert(ine). Was it jealousy or justifiable suspicion?

Parts of this novel were superfluous and redundant. In comparison to this 5th volume, the first few volumes exceeded in quality, despite the author and or his narrator/character finally achieving in this series his literary recognition. The various, already well-developed characters gradually adapted or expanded their sexual orientations which all seemed unnecessary, hopeless, and unconvincing.

Despite all of that the plot was realistic, narrative vivid, contemplations revealing, and the representation of relationships honest. Proust also shares his reflections on his loved and lost relationships and the process of grieving and forgetting, but most importantly forgiving. "I was suffering from a love that no longer existed. Thus does an amputee, in certain kinds of weather, feel pain in the limb that he has lost." All in all, I am looking forward to reading the last part of In Search of Lost Time.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This edition bundles volumes 5 and 6 together but I'm reviewing them individually below:

Volume 5: The Prisoner
There's a long (long) literary tradition of male authors writing obsessively about their jealous love for a woman whose elusive nature constantly renews his possessive desire: Catullus' Lesbia poems, Propertius' Cynthia poems, Ovid's deconstructive Corinna poems, Petrarch's sonnets to Laura, Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, Ronsard's Sonnets Pour Hélène... and in each case the unsatisfied desire for the woman is also the impetus and motor which drives his writing: possessing the female beloved would bring an end to the poetic/literary project.

Proust appends this fifth novel to that extended literary tradition with the disingenuous pose that his narrator is unique, but is also slyly looking over his shoulder at us to see if we are noting his literary clues: as the classical Latin and Renaissance precedents are built around the blazoning of the female face and undressed female body, Proust shows us his narrator unclothing Albertine: 'I would open her nightdress. The two high breasts were so round that they seemed not so much integral parts of her body as two fruits that had ripened there' - disintegrating and fragmenting her at the same time, destroying any bodily unity for something more artificial ('two fruits that had ripened there').

The implicit power of the male gaze is determined by the lack of reciprocity in Albertine, foregrounded especially in those scenes where the narrator watches her as she sleeps: 'there are some faces which take on an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they no longer have a gaze' - the more vulnerable and passive Albertine is, the more beautiful she appears in the narrator's eyes.

I think what I'm saying is that this is an especially literarily self-conscious book in the sequence, one which looks backwards at cultural constructions of unfulfilled (masculine) erotic desire as a pre-requisite for (masculine) writing just as the narrator's jagged pursuit of Albertine reflects that of Swann and Odette in book 1. The oscillating between indifference and paranoid jealousy is especially Catullan with its odi et amo vibe. With the final departure of Albertine at the end of the book, will the narrator finally transition into a writer? Or do we have to wait for volume 7?

It's worth saying that this volume in particular is open to all kinds of resistant and feminist counter-readings as the narrator keeps Albertine secretly in his apartments, sets up a network of chaperones and spies to watch her and report back to him, and fantasises about her lesbian encounters while watching her as she sleeps... How worried should we be that so many male-authored love narratives feature a woman with no subjectivity of her own and masculine behaviour that in real life would be considered paranoid, pathological, psychotic even, and stalker-y?

Volume 6: The Fugitive
The Fugitive is largely a reaction to, and in dialogue with, The Prisoner; a kind of antistrophe to the former section's strophe. It reminded me particularly of Hamlet in the way forward progress is constantly impeded, returning to repetitions of the past that create moments of stasis and paralysis before starting to crawl forward again.

Intimations that were suggested formerly become acknowledged now: that the 'prisoner' is also the narrator caught in the coils of neurotic obsession; just as he is also the 'fugitive' fleeing from the burdens of his paranoid love and the memories that pursue him; even from his former conceptions of self and reality that shaped his understandings of how to be in the world.

Importantly, the previous instabilities of personality and self are now brought into the open:

It was not Albertine alone who was only a succession of moments, it was also myself [...] I was not a single man, but the march-past of a composite army manned, depending on the time of day, by passionate, indifferent or jealous men' (p.456).

This revelation leads the narrator to finally recognise the extent of his subjective, contingent understandings that have been represented previously as facts:

'the egoism of love causes us to love people whose intellectual and moral features are the least objectively defined for us, we readjust them endlessly according to our desires and our fears, we cannot separate them from ourselves, they are no more than a vast and vague terrain where we externalize our affection' (p.461-2).

Albertine, he realises, has been no more than a self-constructed mirror of his own desires and he is now brought to realise the solipsism of his (of all?) desire - and the book that will spring from it.

The volume ends with a flurry of plot revelations but there's the sense that the real work in the consciousness of the narrator has had its breakthrough moment. Moving on to the final volume, will we finally witness the narrator writing the book that we have been reading?

[E. G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

--The Captive (In Search of Lost Time Volume V)
--The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time Volume VI)

Notes
Addenda
Synopsis

[Roy Lotz · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than a year has intervened between my reading of the last volume and this one; and yet I find that my reaction to Proust has remained constant. Constant, yes, and complicated.

I have this relentless back and forth, tug-of-war reaction to Proust, a mixture of the most intense admiration and absolute disgust. My thinking and writing bear the scar of his influence; it is a scar I wear proudly, but which still stings if I poke at it. Whenever I read Proust, I feel so irritated and sometimes so dreadfully bored—a palpable and suffocating boredom—that I want to tear my hair out by the roots; and when I finish I have the mad desire to yell vulgarities at the top of my lungs, both as a celebration and a way to vent pent up anger. But I keep coming back, I keep rolling the rock patiently up the hill, and I keep watching it tumble back down.

I have had difficulty identifying why I’ve had this reaction. In previous reviews I’ve attributed it to Proust’s Cartesianism: his entrapment in his own ego, his relentless subjectivity. But the fact that this book is so deeply rooted in the first-person does not adequately explain the Proustian effect. There are plenty of autobiographies and memoirs that do not produce this same sensation of being trapped in the writer’s head and buried alive by their cogitations. No, it is not the subjectivism alone. Although you wouldn’t guess it from Proust’s elegant, smoothly drifting prose, or his perpetually calm narrative voice, the upshot of his reams of analysis is not only Cartesian, but deeply cynical. This passage perhaps sums up the cynicism better than any other.

The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

For Proust, the essential error of human life is forgetting this inescapable subjectivity. This error is most obvious with love. We think we fall in love with other people; but we really fall in love with creatures of our own fancy. The "person" we love has only an oblique reference to the real person, and is mostly a collection of desires, hopes, fantasies, fears, memories, and other sundry emotions—a jumble of mental propensities only associated, by chance, with a physical being. Indeed, our beloved is not even singular; we have as many beloveds as we have moods. Proust goes even further. His bleak conclusion is that love not only has very little to do with the other person, but that love, far from a tender emotion, is just an expression of sexual jealousy.

In his Cartesian worldview, there is literally no action, however apparently generous and kind, that is not ultimately selfish. That is inevitable, since we can only ever know ourselves, and all our ideas of other people are just veiled ideas of ourselves. And can we even know ourselves?

Time is constantly stripping our identity away. Our thoughts can never stand still, but ceaselessly rush downstream, and the refuse is swept down the drain. We are trapped in our own perspective; and there is no stable point from which to come to grips with that perspective. The mind reacts to this existential instability by imbuing its environment with meaning, and then trying to control it. We fall in love—thus imbuing a specific person with all the magic charm of our thoughts—and then do our best to keep our beloved near us. Sexual jealousy is just this attempt to control the beloved; and love, for Proust, is just the anguished feeling that our beloved, whose presence helps us to define ourselves, whose physical continuity helps to fight our existential angst, might break away. This is why love evaporates for Swann after marriage, and for the Narrator after Albertine’s death; they no longer feel jealous. The tenderness of love and the rage of jealousy are, for Proust, just two symptoms of the same condition.

Without going into tedious argument, I will say that I disagree with this intense subjectivism. If you begin, like Descartes and like Proust, with the ego and then try to build the world back up again, you will find, like Proust, that you can’t and that you’re stuck with your own ego. But far from being the most solitary of animals, humans are the most social; and the very fact that the world doesn’t make sense when you take your solitary ego as the starting point—which Proust’s Narrator continually finds—is why you ought not to. Yes, we see other people through the distorting lens of our own personality—as any mortal creature must—but experience so often shows that we are much better judges of other people than they are of themselves, and even, in a way, we know them better than they know themselves—something impossible in Proust’s world.

This is not to say that there isn’t a great deal of truth in Proust’s perspective. Specifically, I think he is brilliant at showing how our happiness depends on our interpretation of events rather than events themselves. Like any patient historian, he catalogues all the ways that the Narrator interprets, misinterprets, and re-interprets Albertine’s words and actions; and he shows again and again that the Narrator’s emotional state depends exclusively on these interpretations, not on the words or actions themselves. He is happy when he thinks Albertine loves him, desparing when he thinks she is cheating (but did she ever love him, and did she cheat?); and he begins to get over her when he stops defining himself in reference to her.

As you might have guessed, art plays a large role in Proust’s worldview. For it is only through art that we can, just barely, break out of our perspectives and reveal ourselves to others. The phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata is the prime example of this, which reappears in Vinteuil’s septet, transformed, in a different context, with different emotional overtones, and yet unmistakably the same basic phrase of music. This phrase communicated the stamp of Vinteuil’s mind so unmistakably because, being the product of focused and impassioned artistic creation, it carries with it something of the composer’s unchanging soul, an identity impossible to discern using formal analysis but which is immediately recognizable nevertheless. (Proust was, you see, no advocate of the death of the author.)

It is only through this artistic communion that we can transcend, however briefly, the limitations of our perspective: “the harmony of a Wagner, the colour of an Elstir, enable us to know that essential quality of another person’s sensations into which love for another person does not allow us to penetrate.” The reference to love is crucial here, since for Proust love is the false idol that leads most people astray. It is only through art, not love, that we really get to know another person; it is only through art that the boundaries that separate mind from mind are bridged; and this, presumably, is why Proust is writing this in the first place. Here is Proust putting this into his own inimitable words:

… is it not true that those elements—all the residuum of reality which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk, even from friend to friend, from master to disciple, from lover to mistress, that ineffable something which differentiates qualitatively what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in which he can communicate with others only by limiting himself to externals, common to all and of no interest—are brought out by art, the art of a Vinteuil like that of an Elstir, which exteriorises in the colours of the spectrum the intimate composition of those worlds which we call individuals and which, but for art, we should never know? A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect of things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we really do fly from star to star.

Notice how intense is Proust's subjectivism here. Even if we go visit another planet, he thinks, we really only see ourselves. The exterior world has almost nothing to do with what we observe, think, or feel, and it is only through art, which opens up other perspectives, that we have a window to something new, a temporary escape from ourselves.

At present, I am not sure I agree with Proust about the ability of art to transcend the boundaries that separate consciousness from consciousness; and I certainly do not agree with his cynical views on love, or his subjectivist vision of human life. As a writer of prose, in short bursts I find him extraordinarily eloquent, and in longer sittings I find him soporific and tedious. His books simply wear you out. Proust himself died at 51 while completing the last volume; and his English translator, Scott Moncrieff, died at 40 midway through the same volume. I myself feel as if every page of Proust ages me internally. Time is not only a theme of this book, but an essential aspect of reading it. In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann says:

Can one narrate time—time as such, in and of itself? Most certainly not, what a foolish undertaking that would be. The story would go: “Time passed, ran on, flowed in a mighty stream,” and on and on in the same vein. No one with any common sense could call that a narrative.

But Proust comes perilously close to narrating time. His prose never changes pace, never speeds up nor slows down, but slides by like time itself, uniformly moving along, flowing, drifting, with the same mannerisms repeated again and again, the same sorts of observations, the same themes that repeatedly return—a placid voice narrating a story that makes me neither laugh nor cry, only yawn on occasion—and yet, and yet, you cannot make your way through these pages without being transformed, however subtly, in the process. Just as Proust’s Narrator feels as if great artists and musicians allow him to see the world with a hundred eyes, I feel as if I have lived several lives so far; when I put down Proust my bones ache and I feel weary, I feel weak and dizzy as if I were just breathing a thin atmosphere. And yet, and yet, who would change a word, who would alter a line, and who would consider any time spent in these pages to be lost?

[Bram · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve attempted (this is already generous) to review each volume of In Search of Lost Time, but every time I finish reading one, I feel like I should just skip it this time around. To put it in banal and melodramatic terms, this book has really meant a lot to me. I think I’ll leave it at that rather than give in to my desire to gush in Proustian sentences about all the emotions, thoughts, and nostalgia I’ve experienced solely from imbibing and osmosing Marcel’s thoughts and feelings. It has been one of the great gifts in my life. While not yet at the finish line, already I have little doubt that this will surpass War and Peace as my favorite book. I’m tempted to meander like this for awhile because the truth is that a couple unusual circumstances make it very difficult to review this two-volume set.

First, these volumes represent the late-middle part of one book and there are some major spoilers, although they probably wouldn’t be recognized as such unless you were currently somewhere between volumes three and four. This book didn’t even feel like a novel until the end of Sodom and Gomorrah, 2000 pages into the story. But after a relatively brief retreat in The Prisoner, the novelish aspects pick up significantly in The Fugitive, which delivers a couple metaphorical knockouts. In a word, I’d say these parts are “stunning”, but this is mostly based on the level of expectation (or lack thereof) that Proust is able to (not) build up. Often, authors resort to shocking or amazing experiences which the vast majority of readers can only imagine (and thus distort and embellish emotionally) to achieve such an impact. But Proust takes events that are minor or ordinary and imbues them with an unexpected power based primarily on a degree of unexpectedness that rivals that of real life. We rightfully expect plot development from novels, so this utter anti-expectation is almost never set up in fiction. But the first four volumes lull you into this state. And because Proust’s reveals can be so jarring—again, like ordinary life (even if you realize later that he dropped more than a few hints along the way)—they leave a serious mark if you're super-invested (guilty) in his seemingly plotless and over-privileged world. Although it’s nearly impossible to review any specific aspect of The Fugitive without giving something important away, and despite the fact that this was the first volume where the narrator’s major emotions and thoughts were somewhat foreign to me based on my own (lack of) life experiences, I was consistently moved just the same. I’ve probably said too much already.

The second reason these volumes are difficult to review is more personal. I read The Prisoner and The Fugitive while on my honeymoon, which probably sounds perfectly reasonable…unless you’ve read them. In which case, you probably think I’m a crazy or weirdly masochistic. To quote Mike Reynolds (haha! (1)), Proust is both romantic and anti-romantic (2). But the romantic side is mostly absent here. Or if psychotically jealous, controlling, and conniving behavior could be considered romantic, then that word will be forever pejorative to my mind. And yet, perhaps there is nothing more appropriate to read on one’s honeymoon or before deciding to plunge into a marriage. Like the person of faith who must examine every possible objection to their belief or give it up, the would-be spouse must willingly stare into the harshest realities of love, history, commitment, jealousy, honesty, and trust before making that relational leap. Proust demands this type of introspection.

Part (b) to this second reason of review difficulty has to do with Proust’s treatment of jealousy, one of The Prisoner’s (and the entire novel’s) major themes. I haven’t seen anyone suggest this before, but I suspect it’s true—your response to this book may strongly depend on how you relate to the novel’s treatment of this emotion, which I cannot imagine being surpassed in all of literature in terms of accurateness or completeness. While jealousy has not been a significant part of my life for some time, this hasn’t always been the case, and beginning with Swann’s Way, Proust pried loose many painful memories that I’ve begun scrutinizing for the first time in years. Some of these even induce small tremors of pain, although now I can mostly just savor the memory of this pain from a perfectly bearable and safe distance, having long since begun (and perhaps finished) the healing processes that Proust recounts so thoroughly. While I should apologize for being vague (I said this was difficult!), I cannot stress enough how much I’ve learned about myself and my life’s evolution in terms of love, jealousy, and every other conceivable emotion.

At the end of The Fugitive, things are suddenly rushed (you read that right), and the book takes a quick turn that makes the entire novel seem as if it’s half over rather than nearly finished. As I’ve only just begun the final volume, I can’t yet determine if this rushed and somewhat contradictory section is truly problematic (it segues quite cleanly into Time Regained at least), but perhaps this is the inevitable consequence of Proust’s untimely death, as I believe the final three volumes were published postmortem. The structure of In Search of Lost Time is already so strange and delightful to my reading sensibilities that I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to objectively critique this aspect of it. I’ve entirely given myself over to Proust’s work, and from this I continue to reap personal, philosophical, and emotional rewards of which I had never previously imagined.


References

1) Matt
2) Mike Reynolds/brian

[Y · Rating 4 out of 5]

Proust presents a tragicomic vision of, not just love, but all human emotions being tempting, thrilling illusions in the fragments of time. Hovering in the background of this tragicomedy is the questions of 'What induces people to abandon happiness in pursuit of the aestheticism (or in other words sadomasochism)?' and 'How to reveal the hidden drives?'. The protagonist's obsession with Albertine's Lesbianism illustrates the pursuit of these two mysterious questions.

Memory is the key to search for hidden meanings, for the unconscious. Temperaments, motives, emotions are more fully captured and revealed in fragmentary memory traces than in firsthand experience. It is through the illogical monstrousness of memory that we discover what people and things are really like. No author does it better than Proust in bringing out lovingly the tragicomic reality of human feelings, with delays, with impediments, with inconsistency, and with swirls of dreams that turn life into a work of art.

"For there is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief."

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jealousy and grief form the twin concerns of v5 (The Captive) and v6 (The Fugitive respectively. For me, what unites such explorations in these two books was the fragility of our inner and outer lives: we grow jealous because we anticipate losing those whom we love and we are beset by never-ending grief because we still cannot really believe that we have lost them (and pace Kundera, forgetting is our sole anodyne). Early on in The Captive (in which Albertine is installed in Marcel's family's apartments so that he can, out of his anxiety that it is some other woman and not himself whom she loves, keep tabs on her), Proust makes the following observation:

Sweet, gay, innocent moments to all appearance, and yet moments in which there gathers the unsuspected possibility of disaster, which makes the amorous life the most precarious of all, that in which the unpredictable rain of sulphur and brimstone falls after the most radiant moments, whereupon, without having the heart or the will to draw a lesson from our misfortune, we set to work at once to rebuild upon the slopes of the crater from which nothing but catastrophe can emerge. I was as carefree as those who imagine their happiness will last.

Proust says elsewhere that learning that happiness cannot last is a key lesson to learn, and even claims that if Albertine had not left him he would only have known half of life.

Indeed, the word "half" figures prominently in these two volumes, as people are always half-awake, half-asleep, lips are half-open to receive a lover's kiss, or eyes are half-closed to the half-light that reveals two lovers intertwined against a wall, or girls on the street are "half-human, half-winged creatures, angel or peri" (Persian mythical creatures of ambiguous valence). Perhaps because our human nature can only half-tolerate reality?!

Each new doubt makes us feel that the limit has been reached, that we cannot cope with it; then we manage to find room for it all the same, and once it is introduced into the fabric of our lives it enters into competition there with so many longings to believe, so many reasons to forget, that we speedily become accustomed to it, and end by ceasing to pay attention to it. It lies there dormant like a half-healed pain, a mere threat of suffering which, the reverse side of desire, a feeling of the same order that has become, like it, the focus of our thoughts, irradiates them from infinite distances with wisps of sadness, as desire irradiates them with unidentifiable pleasures, wherever anything can be associated with the person we love. But the pain revives as soon as a new doubt enters our mind intact; even if we assure ourselves almost at once: “I shall deal with this, there’ll be some way of avoiding suffering, it can’t be true,” nevertheless there has been a first moment in which we suffered as though we believed it. If we had merely limbs, such as legs and arms, life would be endurable. Unfortunately we carry inside us that little organ which we call the heart, which is subject to certain maladies in the course of which it is infinitely impressionable[….]

Here Proust is not yet even half-way to making his point (I had to end that blockquote somewhere), but the (un)fortunate thing about Proust is that he is almost unparaphrasable, unreviewable. The only way to deal with the book might be to re-read the darn thing, over & over, without end (as a favourite professor of mine did, with both ISOLT and Ulysses on his bedside table, taking turns), taking in each partial truth partially, so that we approach but never arrive at the true heart of things….

We live in parts, but our tyrant, that restless, relentless, sadistic colonizer, love, "is a demand for a whole" that can never be fully met. If we were to ever fully possess the beloved, Proust claims, then love itself would cease:

"We love only what we do not wholly possess."
"Here I mean by love reciprocal torture."
"Amorous curiosity is like the curiosity aroused in us by the names of places; perpetually disappointed, it revives and remains for ever insatiable."

I put off reviewing this book because there are so many ways to approach it--besides the many bits I underlined on the relations of art (in general, and novels in particular) to life, one other central metaphor is that jealousy is just tyrannical reason's (& its handmaiden in the above quot'n, curiosity) desire to know (& therefore to control) applied to love, for example, and by the end of the sixth volume we learn just how wrong reason can be... But I won't go into all of that--for the sake of brevity, you understand, as Polonius once said before soiling a pristine arras with stuff that "that little organ which we call the heart" traffics in…

Too much! Or not enough…Anyhow, it was somewhere in volume five, after being really, really irritated by the character Marcel's insane jealousy (jealousy and envy are the qualities I least admire in people, and am too slow to tolerate or seek to understand) that a light bulb suddenly went on over my head and I realised that as soon as I finish v7 this December, I will have to go back and start again, like my professor. I'm hooked.

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0076qrn

Revisiting, via BBC R4x, all the books in remembrance, our world has altered too.

[Lee Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

The longest book I've ever read, longer than those with many more pages. I don't mean the complete Search -- I'm referring to this volume, a mere 936 pages that took me forever. If I'm honest with this impression, I should admit that I find Proust sort of stupefying most of the time. I can only read 15 pages at a time without dosing off or reaching for my phone. But every once in a while there's an image or insight that makes it all worthwhile. I mean, the book is regularly studded with the best of things I look for in books, my copy is regularly dogeared, but this installment is dense and nutso. For the most part, Marcel is with Albertine but doesn't want to be with her ("The Captive"), but once she's gone ("The Fugitive") he's obsessed with her again, madly in love, until he learns of her sudden spoiler alert. Most of the musing seems to be about whether Albertine is getting it on with women. The finest section, up there with the description of the grandmother's death, describes Albertine asleep. It's not riveting but it's surely real good and maybe even the best ever. Other bits take off, especially about music and Venice but they're not as clear as the bit about Albertine sleeping. When Proust's prose clarifies an image, be it a little phrase in a concerto, pink hawthorns, an airplane rising into the sky, or his lover asleep, he's the best. For me, when he brings the aristocracy on stage, he doesn't totally falter at all but I fall asleep. Memorable bits in this include asking Andree if he can watch as she gets it on with another woman -- or at least gently caresses a woman's arm. Also, the revelation about M. de Charlus and Odette, and about St. Loup at the end. In general, like in Stendhal's "The Red and the Black," this depicts (more in summary than in scene) the tilt-a-whirl game-playing dynamics of the ending of an intense relationship. The gist is: say or do exactly the opposite of what you really want to say or do -- insincere concealment is essential to successful manipulation of a lover. As a non-reader, I hate that shit so much, but on the page, it's less frustrating/childish, although Marcel is starting to seem more and more to me like a manipulative obsessive sociopath. I mean, he can't seem to look at a young lady without wondering if she's a lesbian. In the end, it seems like he wrote 900+ pages of this volume so he could embed this bit of straightforward editorializing: "Personally, I found it absolutely immaterial from a moral point of view whether one took one's pleasure with a man or woman, and only too natural and human that one should take it where one could find it" (p 934). The violinist signs his letters to male lovers "Bobette" -- similarly I don't think I've ever really totally believed that Albertine (who at one points wants her "pot broken," a euphemism for buggery) is not actually an Albert -- Gilberte is a thinly veiled Gilbert and Andree is really an Andre. Also, Marcel at one point says he'll get the commoner Albertine a yacht and a Rolls Royce -- the class stuff maybe makes me less a full-on lover of this? The prose is fantastic at times, the insight impeccable, but everything's so high-falutin and a bit unbelievable, especially the society stuff. More later -- it's hard to summarize since I've already forgotten so much, which seems like part of the point of Mr. Proust's massive project -- over time Marcel forgets Albertine; I've forgotten the first pages by the time I've reached the end. One more volume to go in the fall, before I read it all again 10 years from now. Also, the bare thigh on the cover of this one has maybe been photoshopped to the point of seeming unhealthily thin?

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

alternately beautiful and frustrating, as all of Proust seems to be. Gorgeous descriptions, occasionally humorous anecdotes, angst-filled cries from Marcel, followed by heartless thoughts. quite a book.
Full review to come...

[Mala · Rating 4 out of 5]

The frocks that I bought for her, the yacht of which I had spoken to her, the wrappers from Fortuny’s, all these things having in this obedience on Albertine’s part not their recompense but their complement, appeared to me now as so many privileges that I was enjoying; for the duties and expenditure of a master are part of his dominion, and define it, prove it, fully as much as his rights. And these rights which she recognised in me were precisely what gave my expenditure its true character: I had a woman of my own, who, at the first word that I sent to her unexpectedly, made my messenger telephone humbly that she was coming, that she was allowing herself to be brought home immediately. I was more of a master than I had supposed. More of a master, in other words more of a slave.

A continuation of themes from Sodom and Gomorrah,but more obsessive,more paranoid & bewildering – an intellectual s & m of sorts where the captor himself becomes the captive. Love was never an easy game.If Proust's intention was to make the readers experience the claustrophobia of Marcel-Albertine relationship; he has greatly succeeded.

Three strands of thought stand out:

Albertine has lost her mystique,hence Marcel is bored. She is a captive; there's no longer a sense of conquest.

Suddenly,some hint of a rendezvous,some hidden agenda,& Marcel's jealousy rears its ugly head- Albertine must be safeguarded like a prized jewel- the wooing starts all over again.

Peace re-established,Marcel again loses interest in her & starts moping abt his lost opportunities with other girls,the demands on his time & attention which keeps him away from his artistic pursuits & so on:"(Albertine is) a treasure in exchange for which I had forfeited my freedom, my solitude, my thought.”

Now can you really blame Albertine for wanting to have some fun on the side?

Marcel is able to carry Albertine back to Paris & keep her under his watch but peace of mind remains forever elusive: only a sleeping Albertine,in her vegetative state can afford him some sense of possession:"when Albertine was asleep, she seemed to have recovered her innocence.(...) she looked as though she were trusting herself to me! Her face had lost any expression of cunning or vulgarity, and between herself and me, towards whom she was raising her arm, upon whom her hand was resting, there seemed to be an absolute surrender, an indissoluble attachment. Her sleep moreover did not separate her from me and allowed her to rétain her consciousness of our affection; its effect was rather to abolish everything else."


Marcel flip-flops between boredom & pangs of jealousy– possession denies one the thrill of the chase & causes boredom- the love object has no more mystery attached to it- why then he keeps torturing himself? It's cause Albertine's supposed hidden life keeps him on tenterhooks- "To these people, these fugitives,their own nature, our anxiety fastens wings. And even when they are in our company the look in their eyes seems to warn us that they are about to take flight. The proof of this beauty, surpassing the beauty added by the wings, is that very often the same person is, in our eyes, alternately wingless and winged. Afraid of losing her, we forget all the others."

A new knowledge of his failed affair with Gilberte broadens the focus of this jealousy- a hurt to his self-esteem that she was two-timing him with the full awareness of people in their circle- this kind of jealousy goes beyond pathological,people cheating on us while enjoying our largesse- who wouldn't be hurt by that? He further adds the musical weight of Wagner's leitmotifs to his arguements- jealous memories return to haunt the lover just like recurring musical themes so Marcel's behaviour is natural!

Besides,the more influential aspect is that he is getting used to their domestic arrangement- Albertine has come to mean more than a part-time lover:"It was no longer the peace of my mother’s kiss at Combray that I felt when I was with Albertine on these evenings, but, on the contrary, the anguish of those on which my mother scarcely bade me good night, or even did not come up at all to my room,(...)as though all my sentiments which trembled at the thought of my not being able to keep Albertine by my bedside, at once as a mistress, a sister, a daughter; as a mother too, of whose regular good-night kiss I was beginning again to feel the childish need, had begun to coalesce, to unify in the premature evening of my life which seemed fated to be as short as a day in winter."

Marcel's jealousy is thus very complex- it goes all the way back to a child's insecurity who wanted the comfort & possession of his mother,a less than robust health & a host of other life experiences that leave him vulnerable & cynical by turns- faced with this enigma,Albertine's response is equally complex- outward subservience & inner resistance- Marcel can never reach her core; her mind.

In a way,in Albertine,Marcel finds his Anima, his female side embodied in a sexually ambiguous girl who,likewise,remains equally prone to boredom & keen on variety of experiences.( In the present times,Marcel would get an apoplectic fit if Albertine took him to see this movie! ).

The second section didn't bring any relief either as my favourite character M.de Charlus got his comeuppance. I was reading an interview of Justice Stephen Breyer in NYRB titled 'On Reading Proust',& while his observations hold true for all the volumes in this series,in this particular case involving Charlus,this truth really hits home:
"It’s all there in Proust—all mankind! Not only all the different character types, but also every emotion, every imaginable situation. Proust is a universal author: he can touch anyone, for different reasons;(...) What is most extraordinary about Proust is his ability to capture the subtlest nuances of human emotions, the slightest variations of the mind and the soul. To me, Proust is the Shakespeare of the inner world."

M.de Charlus,usually known for his dramatic grandstanding,is seen faltering for words when hit below the belt by the frenemies,the Verdurins.
It might sound harsh but both Marcel,& Charlus needed the lessons that they were taught in this volume-i.e.never to underestimate the seemingly weaker side. The ending,loaded with irony,thus came as befitting!

It's pertinent to observe that one by one, the mentors in Marcel's life are passing away– first his grandmother,then Swann,& now Bergotte- time is slipping by & if Marcel wants his "little patch of yellow wall"- his View of Delft,he must focus on his creative life. The Vinteuil themed musical evening at the Verdurins,serves as a repeated reminder of this.It's through Art that Marcel will find his salvation,his raison d'être:

"(A future)promise and proof that there existed something other, realisable no doubt by art, than the nullity that I had found in all my pleasures and in love itself, and that if my life seemed to me so empty, at least there were still regions unexplored.”

In this relentlessly morbid narrative,there are moments of pure joy– the early morning music of the street vendors of Paris captures a slice of time,and Marcel's discourse on parallelism in art,music & literature is a treat- a guy who "talks like a book"!
Next time someone brings up Dostoyevsky; I'm going to quote Proust!

Quotes: as usual the most difficult thing in a Proust read is deciding which quotes to select & which ones to omit! Here are a few for your delectation:

On love,jealousy,& power equations!

"Love, what is it but space and time rendered perceptible by the heart.”
"we love only that in which we pursue something inaccessible, we love only what we do not possess."

"After a certain age, from self-esteem and from sagacity, it is to the things which we most desire that we pretend to attach no importance.(...)the true wisdom — forces us speedily enough to this genius for duplicity. All that I had dreamed, as a boy, to be the sweetest thing in love, what had seemed to me to be the very essence of love, was to pour out freely, before the feet of her whom I loved, my affection, my gratitude for her kindness, my longing for a perpetual life together. But I had become only too well aware, from my own experience and from that of my friends, that the expression of such sentiments is far from being contagious. Once we have observed this, we no longer ‘let ourself go'.”

"The proper thing to do would be to take the opposite course, to shew without arrogance that we have generous feelings, instead of taking such pains to hide them. And it would be easy if we were able never to hate, to love all the time. For then we should be so glad to say only the things that can make other people happy, melt their hearts, make them love us.”

"having no damning evidence to produce, and to recover my ascendancy, I hurriedly turned to a subject which would enable me to put Albertine to rout."

“Jealousy is often only an uneasy need to be tyrannical, applied to matters of love. I had doubtless inherited from my father this abrupt, arbitrary desire to threaten the people whom I loved best in the hopes with which they were lulling themselves with a security that I determined to expose to them as false.”

"The unknown element in the lives of other people is like that in nature, which each fresh scientific discovery merely reduces, but does not abolish. A jealous lover exasperates the woman with whom he is in love by depriving her of a thousand unimportant pleasures, but those pleasures which are the keystone of her life she conceals in a place where, in the moments in which he thinks that he is shewing the most intelligent perspicacity and third parties are keeping him most closely informed, he never dreams of looking."

Swann gets his tribute.
"Swann on the contrary was a remarkable personality, in both the intellectual and the artistic worlds; and even although he had ‘produced’ nothing, still he had a chance of surviving a little longer. And yet, my dear Charles ——-, whom I used to know when I was still so young and you were nearing your grave, it is because he whom you must have regarded as a little fool has made you the hero of one of his volumes that people are beginning to speak of you again and that your name will perhaps live."

Artistic life for greater authenticity:
"when I had myself longed to become an artist. In definitely abandoning that ambition, had I forfeited something real? Could life console me for the loss of art, was there in art a more profound reality, in which our true personality finds an expression that is not afforded it by the activities of life? Every great artist seems indeed so different from all the rest, and gives us so strongly that sensation of individuality for which we seek in vain in our everyday existence”

"The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is; and this we can contrive with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.”

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having made my way to the end of Volume 6 of, “In Search of Lost Time,” I find myself with only the last book to read. At one time, I felt I was laboriously climbing my way through them and now I feel almost broken hearted that the end is in sight… Such is the way that Proust winds his way, slowly creeping into your life, until I cannot imagine the end of the day without his words lulling me to sleep.

Although it does seem as though most of this work takes part in the head of our narrator, some of the themes would be very at home in a modern novel. For, in these volumes, we find that Albertine has been persuaded to move into our narrator’s home. There are vague promises of marriage, a lot of angst from poor mama and a fair amount of sneering contempt from the faithful Francoise.

You would imagine, after all the plotting and planning and manoeuvring involved to finally establish Albertine at his home, our narrator would be enjoying finally having her there. However, we readers have not come this far to imagine that to be the case. It is not long before he is attempting to control her every movement, delve into every possible behaviour of her past and use, frankly, every trick in the book to try to convince himself that she is not to be trusted; while veering wildly between utter devotion and totally despair.

In a sense, it is almost pointless to talk about what happens within the pages of these books. The joy is in inhabiting this world and of realising how much insight Proust had into the lives and hearts of his characters – both good and bad. I am about to embark on the last volume with both a sense of achievement and a sense of loss.

[Brady Billiot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely the most dense of his books so far. Such repetitive introspection but it all serves the purpose of painting such a realistic main character and his challenges with love, society, death and friendship.

Also everyone is just gay in these books lol

[Felek · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite volumes so far!

[Matthew Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

49th book of 2022.

So, I have a single volume of Proust's novel left. Volumes 5 & 6 centre almost entirely around Albertine and Marcel's relationship, and there is a large plot point that I can't discuss without spoiling it. That said, a lot of reviews for these volumes spoil the big event so if you don't want it spoilt, avoid reviews, especially since many of them do not have the spoiler tag. I, somehow, didn't see any of the spoilers and so the big happening surprised me. Obviously, time/memory continues to be the biggest theme of these volumes but I've been surprised in the last few volumes how often grief comes up too. I guess grief is intrinsically linked to time: whenever I think of grief I think of the old cliche, time heals. Maybe it's true. I was coming back from work the other day in my mate's car and I asked him if it still hurts him to think of his mother whom he lost at 12-years-old. He told me, Not really, no. Of course, he still thinks about her, but it isn't a sadness anymore, per se. If anything, he said, since she died, I just cry at films more easily. He has two young girls and any Disney film ending, he said, makes him cry. With grief there is the obsessive attempts to remember the person who is gone, and with that we circle back around to memory and the act of remembrance [of things past]. The only grief I've dealt with is losing my grandparents many years ago and when I lost them I remember feeling, above any kind of sadness, the weird sensation that they were indeed gone and if I failed to remember them, it would be as if they were never there. Proust explores all of this. I've heard the final volume is the giant philosophical crescendo, the insight into why he wrote this novel, what it all means, and how it all holds together as one giant arc and achievement.

Vol. 5 placeholder review.
Vol. 6 placeholder review.

[Brenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've only just finished The Captive, I didn't realize this title held both volumes, so I will have to update this.

The Captive - Volume 5
I admit, I had to read this volume twice. The first time I was not sold at all, gritted my teeth throughout, hated it more than not and just wished for it to end. The 2nd time I appreciated Marcel for the frail, young, sickly man he was. Finding love, but feeling all the pangs of love. Jealousy. Happiness. Excitement. Desire. But also, knowing your limits and wrangling how this affects the both of you.

Volume 5 is beautiful, haunting, touching, and also exasperating at times. We see the lovers dance. We wonder who is the Captive? We see the ironies of love, of life, of the differences and disparities between our hearts and our heads.

Besides, Marcel, we also have the society Madams and Mssrs, and the hypocrisy that usually fills the salons, more than anything.

In the end, I'm happy to have spent the time to read it twice, so I was able to appreciate it. And I did. I feel this volume and Marcel's telling us of his feelings and his vacillating, also mirrors a lot how I as a reader feel with his work. How the love is so strong, but also sometimes stifling, and sometimes you feel it's too much and you need to be done with it, and then the moment comes at the end and you're horrified because it's been done to you. Did you really wish for it?

The Fugitive - Volume 6 :
Volume 6 is now finished. What an irony. After spending 3/4 of the book in despair, and emotional distress, one letter brings all the reality home and the light goes on for Marcel. I do like how the end of the novel brings back some of our earlier characters.

[poncho · Rating 5 out of 5]

"For my taste, Proust explains much: 300 pages just to make us understand that X screws Y is way too much."
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Letter for Milton Hindus.

Well, you better get ready for 700 pages on sexuality, dinner parties, jealousy, memory, art and beauty. Though for my taste, those ‘over-explained’ pages are one of the several things I like so much about Proust’s work. I actually got to know about that quote from a film: Laurence Anyways by Xavier Dolan; and, even though I don’t agree with it, I found it funny. The quote is originally in french and I translated it myself — yes, sorry. But let’s move on to the concerning volumes.


The prisoner.

This volume is just so full of rage, fear, sadness, sexuality, frustration, comedy… It’s the ‘dark side’ of human nature in a nutshell (maybe it'd be more of a coconut than a nutshell). I feel like Sodom and Gomorrah was just the introduction for a deeper analysis on homosexiality, or rather on sexuality as a whole. André Gide said that Proust ‘portrayed only the grotesque and abject aspects of Sodom.’ Well, yes, I agree that homosexuality, unlike in a Proustian world where it represents a majority and a common thing, in the real world it implicates so much dejection and suffering, characteristics which in In search of lost time are left for the narrator, who is a frustrated heterosexual trying to deal with his jealousy for a person whom he doesn’t know how to please. However, it’s important to take into consideration that to talk about homosexiality, covering it all, would take more than a seven-volume work of literature. Can someone write and fully describe heterosexuality? Of course not, and so it happens with its inverse, for they are not as simple as that. Yes, most of the (very, very, very long) paragraphs depict homosexuality in a comical way; but not even laughter can last forever and we get some glimpses of outcast people. In Proust's favor, I'd say that while everyone saw aversion he saw inversion. Like he himself wrote in The prisoner:

"The closer one becomes to human beings and their existences, the more one is convinced that ready-made labels and classifications are too simple."
— Marcel Proust. The prisoner.

So one might think that Proust only wrote about homosexuality’s hilarious parts, but if we analyse it, there’s a Charlus being Morel’s ‘sugar daddy’, while the latter is just using him to make a career out of the former; there’s an Albertine, captive with someone who is obsessed with her, but who shall never understand her true feelings; and finally, we must not forget that Proust was a gay man himself, so if he depicted himself through the narrator, that means he might have suffered similar sorrows. Besides, from the moment he refers to his own sexuality as an inversion he’s trying to make it look poetic (or at least that’s how I see it).

“It is the homosexuality that survives in spite of obstacles, condemned, covered in shame, that is the real homosexuality.”
— Marcel Proust. The prisoner.

I found this particular volume so full of a variety of emotions: we got Charlus’s dispute with Mme Verdurin, resembling those battles on The Iliad, representing these two some gods, using the trojans (the parisians in this case) to try to show their (social) powers; we got Albertine’s «se faire casser le pot»; and last, but no least, we got the narrator’s realtionship with Albertine, based on obsession, jealousy, frustration and fear.

It was funny, though, to read Albertine's now famous expression because I had recently heard it, translated literarily into spanish. So that made me wonder whether such an expression had survived ever since and been imported directly from France to Mexico, or whether human wit goes overseas and has no bounds so people in Mexico saw too the relationship between a pot and that particular part of the body — I myself don’t see it, but I think it’s somehow funny; or maybe Proust is very well-known — okay, I doubt that too.

Even though this volume might the funniest of the previous four, I must confess that, at the same time, it really got me: I could see myself in the narrator having been in a similar situation of frustration on the unknown, on being unable to please the person you love. It doesn’t matter how hard we try to restrain a person, for the fear for they to escape and our obsession are simply enough to make us an even more powerless prisoner than the person we are holding back, depriving ourselves from the things we enjoy the most. But I did understand Albertine too, being unable to express herself, to be her true self; and I don’t think she’s to blame for the way things turned out, but neither is the narrator, for they’re just trying desperately to fit in somewhere they just won’t since they don’t have the means to do it — perhaps Albertine does, but that would mean to make a captive of herself. Besides, her life was a little bit sad and sorrowful, always being a tourist in other people’s lives. That made me think how lonely a treasure’s life can be.

So here it is, my review for The prisoner; I wrote it after I finished it, so there's still The fugitive left to be read. Let’s see what else I can add, or whether some impressions can change…


The fugitive.

(Sigh…) I’m having a hard time trying to review this volume with no spoilers, for it’s got a particular event from which the story will concentrate now on. However, while I was reading it it seemed to me as though time had stopped, as though there was a gap… no, not a gap, for that would mean discontinuity, but a pause in the story. It felt as though I was sitting by the narrator while he told me about his grievances. Time here is like a savage animal caged, on hold, waiting for its release until finally, in chapter 4, it is unleashed, but since it's so excited for being caged, it doesn't know where to go so he moves and bounces everywhere. The same thing happens here: first you are reading a lineal story that suddenly moves from a very long future to a very long past and back to present and so on and so on.

Proust’s prose, for my taste, is outstanding and exquisite in every single volume of his masterpiece, but I think there’s something special in The fugitive, something that makes it more fluid, as a flow of thoughts: simple yet so beautiful. Or maybe it was just the mood I was in when I read it — who knows. But what I can tell you for sure is that through Proust I’ve learned to read my own thoughts and to appreciate the beauty in everything: a single word, a single flower; like he said, the humblest things. When one reads him, he lends you his inner eye to see the world through his own point of view and that's magnificent.

To return to the story, it is very important to pay attention to the conversation between Albertine and the narrator after the latter comes back from the Verdurins' taking place in The prisoner, for both volumes, also known as Le roman d’Albertine (Albertine’s novel), are going to focus on this particular conversation: from its very words to the expressions, from what it seems to be to what it really is. It’s Andrée who later reveals all of this and if you think carefully about it, you can see how Albertine’s desperation and use for her famous ‘pot’ expression comes out of an urge of freedom, of her desire to be left alone, not being able to sacrifice her nature anymore for someone who might hate her (as Andrée said). Yes, according to her friend, Albertine thought that by marrying a non-invert person, she might stopped being one herself; but that is just as impossible as when people think someone becomes gay just by hanging out with gay people; maybe personalities can change, but sexuality is not something you acquire, it is something you are born with.

"I think that with you she had overcome her passions and kept postponing the day when she would yield again."
— Marcel Proust. The fugitive.

If you think Charlus's (a.k.a. sugar daddy) relationship with Morel was a little bit twisted because of the latter, just wait and read for whom he dumps the former (hint: it's a relative). This same relative turns out to be quite different that you may have thought. Poor narrator, living in a world where heterosexuality is off the radar. And like this fact, so many things begin to unravel, announcing an end to this odyssey.

I'll be almost a year since I began with Swann's way and I still remember how excited I was and I'm still so excited about being so close to the end, but sad at the sime time. This has been a totally worth reading and I think I am going to reread it someday (maybe not so soon, but someday). Who knows, this might be for me what Mme de Sévigné's letters were to the narrator's grandmother, right?

[David Lentz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Modern Library's Volume V deals with the relationship between Marcel and Albertine. It is a complex, psychological relationship to say the least. In the Captive, Albertine lives with Marcel in his apartment in Paris and in The Fugitive one wonders who is, in fact, more captive -- Albertine or Marcel. It would seem to be Albertine for whom Marcel possesses an obsessive love and concurrent fear of her sapphic penchant. But it is also Marcel who will sacrifice experience if he makes a commitment to her. Who is more free, the captive or the fugitive? Proust raises questions about how to serve best the artist's quest for beauty. In fact, how does one really ever "capture" the beauty of life in art or music or literature? Even in a masterpiece, is it not beauty the fugitive that usually dwells just beyond one's capture? Or like Vinteuil's septet or the music of Wagner or the painting of Rembrandt, is the best for which one can hope of fugitive beauty only a brief fleeting experience? Are the vast tracts of time spent to understand the beauty and meaning of life worth it? As a writer does he not habitually surrender life in order to capture it? Or is the pursuit of the capture of the beauty of life in fact where one realizes its most sublime value? One sees in Proust toward the end of The Fugitive a member of society who respects it but chooses by reasons of health not to position himself so visibly within it. Despite his family name and vast but dwindling fortune inherited from his beloved grandmother, he seems to become somewhat ultimately disenchanted with the intricacies of Faubourg-St. Germain society to which he devotes so much of his writing. He recognises society's shallow obsession with materialism and rampant snobbery but his own place in society is captured by its complex history and tacit rules and Marcel is inescapably a captive of his own culture. When Albertine is lost to him toward the end of the volume, as in the prior volumes, the story line's serial intrigue advances most. Characters from prior volumes reappear, reminiscent of Balzac, whom Proust adored, but like him they change,too, and usually for the worse over time. The great tapestry of the characters of Proust -- Albertine, Gilberte, Swann, Brichot, Bloch, Charlus, Morel, Saint-Loup -- ultimately surprise and usually disappoint him. As to nagging questions about Proust's own orientation, "Personally I found it absolutely immaterial from a moral standpoint whether one took one's pleasure with a man or a woman, and only too natural and human that one should take it where one could find it." I found myself wishing that Proust had written more about Bloch and Saint-Loup and Gilberte, and less about Albertine. But she was, like his work, the one obsession, the endeavor of which understanding he could never escape and never quite marry -- she was his beauty and his art. She was the breath of life itself from his pen and from his experience of life as seen through the eyes of a true genius.

[Inderjit Sanghera · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘The Prisoner and the Fugitive’ is the exploration of the narrator’s obsessive and passionate relationship with Albertine; it is a deliberate echo of the love affair between Charles Swann and Odette de Crecy, in fact all of the relationships explored in ‘In Search of Lost Time’ echo each other, from Charlus and Morel to Saint-Loup and Rachel, the theme of lesbianism, obsessive love and of sensitive and cultured characters falling in love with vulgar and vapid individuals, left dizzy via the vertiginous vortex of love. Yet the narrator, unlike the other characters, is able to transform his pain and experiences into art, so that his love affair is merely a coalescment of all other love affairs and heart-breaks and he is fulfilling the artist’s vocation (without yet knowing it) of transmuting life into art.

The novel begins with a wonderful description of waking up; “I could tell from the first street noises, whether they reached me muffled and distorted by dampness or twanging like arrows in the empty, resonant space of a wide-open morning, icy and pure. The rumbling of the first tram told me whether it was huddled against the rain or forging gaily towards a blue horizon.” The narrator is beginning to discover, isolated alone in his room, that the raw materials for his art are all around him, it is via his sensory exploration of the world around him that he will come to an understanding of life and just as the sonorous rumbling of a tram will bring back the memory of the rain, so the sunshine streaming through the narrator’s windows in the morning will rouse him out of his somnolence and bring back Albertine’s carefree and chincanrous whistling; “The sun suddenly turned this net of glass to yellow, gilded it and, gently uncovering in me a young man of former times who had been long hidden by habit, intoxicated me with memories, as if I had been in the open air looking at gilded foliage in which not even the presence of a bird was wanting.”

And so the narrator soars and glides, like the most intrepid of birds, over the characters and places which inhabit his novel-no writer has delved as deeply into the quiddity of things as Proust, has opened the reader’s eyes to the untrammeled beauty of the world like Proust is able to, from the sight of rain-dampened roof tiles; “when the roofs, briefly dampened by rain, then dried by a brief wind or a ray of sunshine, poutingly displayed a few drops, as they wait for the wind to turn again, preen in the passing sunshine the rainbow glint of their shot-silk slates…” to the description of the Duchesse de Guermantes’s dress; “I let myself be swept away into the atmosphere it created, like that of certain late afternoons muffled in a pearl-grey floating mist. If, on the other hand, the chosen gown were Chinese with a pattern of red and yellow flames, I saw it as a brilliant sunset; these costumes were not a trivial decoration which could have been replaced by any other, but an inescapable reality, poetic in the same way as the weather, or the light peculiar to a certain time of day.”

Proust’s super-sensory appreciation of the world, for all of its irrevocable wonders and irretrievable beauties of life was part of his own aesthetic guidelines. Proust felt truly original and great art was not to describe things as they are, but describing them as they have never been described for, hence the impressionistic vignettes with populate his novel, no other writer was able to imbue their characters with as much depth or as many facets as Proust. The central story within the novel, is the love story between the narrator and Albertine. The merits of Proust’s ideas on love aside, his exploration of his obsessive and disturbing relationship with Albertine, from the descriptions of her sleeping to real and imagined subterfuges he thinks she is guilty of, few writers explore the nature of love with as much depth and honesty as Proust does. For Proust falling in love was in reality just another form of falling in love with oneself, the soul of another person would always be unattainable and mystery to us, so it is our attempt to penetrate the barriers placed between us which causes us to fall in love, especially if we aim for something we can never possess-for Proust desire was centered in knowing we would never be able to obtain what we desired, or if we ever obtained what we wanted, being aware that there was a part of the other person which was forever mysterious and impenetrable, such as Albertine’s potential sapphic desires.

Yet, for Proust heartache and pain were central to the artist’s development; without it they would never have a complete view of the world and life. Proust is able to get over the shock of Albertine’s departure and death by visiting Venice; “Suddenly at the end of one of these little streets, a crystalline matter seemed to have produced a swelling. A vast, sumptuous campo of a size that I certainly could not have guessed, let alone found room for in this network of little streets, stretched out before my eyes, surrounded by enchanted places, in the pale light of the moon.” Unlike Balbec, or his visit to watch La Berma perform, Venice is able to live up to the narrator’s fantasies; this isn’t because of the intrinsic worth or beauty of Venice, but rather the narrator’s life experiences, joys and heartbreaks are able to mature him, to blur the line between reality and fantasy and make him realise that there is much beauty in his impressions of the world around him as the fantasies he creates; in fact, true art is a combination of the both.

“Venice, whose everyday reality was no less real than that of Combray and where it was a pleasure, as in Combray, to go down into the festive streets on Sunday mornings, but a street which was a whole stretch of liquid sapphire, cooled by soft breezes and so deep-dyed that my tired eyes could relax and look steadily at it with no fear that it might fade.”

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm shocked, shocked, that Goodreads readers seem to prefer this to the earlier volumes. I can see only three reasons for this: first, the people who would usually give Proust three or fewer stars aren't likely to get to the fifth and sixth books in the series, so only the truly masochistic fan-boys-and-girls are left. Second, people other than me really, really, really love offensively repetitious dribblings about jealousy, which makes up a large chunk of these two novels (although, I will say, not as large a chunk as I remember from reading it the first time).

The third, and, I hope, correct reason is that they are weighting the amazing parts of these books as heavily as I am (it's here that we get hints of the way that art redeems Marcel and potentially human history; there are some great maxims here and there), and they're weighting the bad, but non-jealousy related stuff as negatively as I am (I haven't gone back to check whether it happens in the other volumes, but the way the narrator generalizes here is pretty eye-roll inducing, that is, a botched adolescent love affair isn't a good basis for a metaphysics; nor, for that matter, is undigested Bergson a good basis for anything), but other readers do value the dribble. You can make all the arguments you want about self-referential use of the Vinteuil sonata being like Swann's love for Odette and the narrator's love for Gilberte and the Vinteuil septet being like the narrator's love for Albertine- really, go ahead. The difference is that, if we believe Marcel, the septet was better than the sonata. 'Swann' and 'Jeunes Filles' are much better than either of these two books.

UPDATE: I liked it more this time around, largely because I just skimmed over the stuff I knew I wouldn't like. The wisdom of age? Laziness? Yes?

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been reading Proust on and off for 30 years. I've read Swann's Way at least three times in its entirety; and its immediate successors a couple times each. Every time I've been stopped by The Prisoner (or The Captive in the Moncrieff/Kilmartin edition) and The Fugitive, but I finally made it through.

For me the problem has always been that Marcel's obsessive love for Albertine stretched credulity: the voice and sensibility of the narrator is so plainly that of a man who loves men, not women. This incongruity is one that lovers of Proust simply have to accept, and move on. It's worth the effort.

Reading Proust is a journey. There's no need to hurry – and like Montaigne and Shakespeare, Proust just gets richer with each reading. I've been making my way through the Penguin Proust since it appeared in 2002, enjoying the new translations. I also keep the classic Moncrieff translation at hand so I can switch back and forth. Moncrieff has been long criticized for making Proust more flowery than he actually is, but his version, as amended by Terence Kilmartin, holds up very well.

[BAM doesn’t answer to her real name · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh I just figured out I only have two books left!