In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower in One Year In Search of Lost Time ~ 2015

Jul 17, 2014 Renato rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: all-stars, absolute-favorites, 100-best-books-world-library, a-la-recherche-du-temps-perdu, 2015, 1001, 2nd-reads, reviewed, the-novel-100, proust

I've long debated with myself - and friends - the actual benefits of re-reading versus a fresh read of a new book. Would re-reading really bring me a considerable number of new reflections, ideas and opinions to add to the first impressions I've gathered on my first read? And wouldn't this time spent on this repeated task be better employed by reading a completely different book that would instead and therefore give me completely different reflections on different subjects I perhaps haven't touc ...more

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Feb 23, 2015 Sue rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, my-own-books-2015, proust, read-2015, fiction, france

In my second book of ISOLT, I find myself with both more patience and more impatience while reading. The glories of the writing are simply wonderful. The moments of insight sweep me away and I read them over again, once or twice to get their meaning completely. But there are some passages in between that test me, not yet to the point where I feel any threat of desertion but I do occasionally wish I could shake our narrator a bit, tell him to open his eyes perhaps a bit wider, take in more than o ...more

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Feb 12, 2008 Inderjit Sanghera rated it it was amazing

‘In the Shadows of Young Girls in Flower’, is the second volume of Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’. As a novel, it is in many ways split into two separate parts; the first part ‘At Madame Swann’s’ dispenses with the poetry of the earlier volume and decides to concentrate on the psychological themes which permeate Proust’s work; the second half, ‘Place Names: the place’ marks the return of Proust’s concerns with the natural world as he finally gets to visit Balbec, the seaside resort which he h ‘In the Shadows of Young Girls in Flower’, is the second volume of Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’. As a novel, it is in many ways split into two separate parts; the first part ‘At Madame Swann’s’ dispenses with the poetry of the earlier volume and decides to concentrate on the psychological themes which permeate Proust’s work; the second half, ‘Place Names: the place’ marks the return of Proust’s concerns with the natural world as he finally gets to visit Balbec, the seaside resort which he had spent most of his childhood fantasising about seeing and forms the best of Proust’s writing as he coalesces his psychological concerns with his ethereal observations on nature. They also introduce us to the three most important characters in the novel: the Baron de Charlus, Albertine and the Marquise de Saint-Loup, as well as the painter, Elstir
Indeed, it is via Elstir, who is a kind of composite of various naturalist painters, that Marcel begins to discover and create his aesthetic sense. Elstir teaches Marcel that beauty lies not in the object, but in the contemplation of the object and the translation of this into art-just as Monet was able to open our eyes to the ethereal and altogether ephemeral beauty of haystacks in the sunlight, so Elstir is able to open Marcel’s eyes to the gossamer like beauty of a sunset, glowing with an endless variety of harlequin colours, or even the altogether more quotidian beauty of a recently cleared dinner table;

“Since seeing such things in the water-colours of Elstir, I enjoyed noticing them in reality, glimpses of poetry as they seemed: knives lying askew in halted gestures; the bell-tent of a used napkin, within which the sun secreted its yellow velvet; the half-emptied glass showing better the noble widening of its lines, the undrunk wine darkening it, by glinting with lights, inside the translucent glaze seemingly made from condensed daylight; volumes displaced, and liquids transmuted, by angles of illumination; the deterioration of the plums, from green to blue, blue to gold…I tried to find beauty where I had never thought it might be found, in the most ordinary of things, in the profound ‘still of life’.”

Marcel’s mind is now ebullient with the beauty of the everyday, however Elstir has a more profound truth to teach Marcel; “Wisdom cannot be inherited-one must discover it for oneself, but only after following a course which no one can follow in your stead; no one can spare you that experience, for wisdom is only a point of view on things.” A constant theme throughout the novels is that Marcel is unable to realise his dream of becoming a great writer-both because he believes he lacks the talent to become one and also because he feels he lacks the proper subject. It is via Elstir that Marcel realises that the subject for his art is life itself and that the constant mistakes and pitfalls he falls into whilst creating his work of art have only served to enhance the profundity of his work, because they are wisdoms he has discovered himself. The utilitarian view of art propagated by Norpois, who is contemptuous both of Marcel’s favourite author, Bergotte and of Marcel’s delightful little vignette on the steeples of Combray, is ultimately sterile and worthless because it propagates platitudes discovered by others, rather than truths discovered by oneself.
Proust felt it was hard for people to process artistic originality because it contradicted what they believed (via art) life to be like. However, once a piece of art becomes accepted and mainstream, it ceases to be original and becomes part of the status quo; thus for Marcel great art is merely the translation of the endless amount of human experiences. The artistic movement known as impressionism, which for so long was ridiculed by the public and critics, had gained acceptance by the time Proust had become an adult (as reflected in the enhanced reputation of Elstir by the time Marcel had reached adulthood) and the principles of the movement play an important role within In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. The broad brush strokes of impressionism form Marcel’s view of the natural world, from its obsession with nature, to the play of light on a leaf or the bloom of a flower, the impressionists were concerned with how our brains process the fleeting beauty of the world; how our eyes see the sunset as red because that is how our brains have been trained to perceived sunset, when in fact a sunset contains all manner of fleeting and fabulous colours which our initial impressions may discern, but our “rational” senses eventually take over and transform the rainbow of sunset into a drab russet;

“The fact that it was Elstir’s intent, now to show things as he knew them to be, but in accordance with the optical illusions which our first sight of things is made of, had led him to isolate some of these laws of perspective, which were more striking in his day, art having been the first to uncover them.”
As a result, Proust’s prose picks up all the visual nuances of the world, the hidden images behind the “reality” of things, the secret of the world behind the integument created by our minds;
“Fancying that Baudelaire’s lines about ‘lounging on the esplanade’ or ‘in the boudoir’ applied to me, I was wondering whether his ‘sunbeams gleaming on the sea’-unlike the evening sunbeam, simple and shallow, a tremulous golden shaft-might not be those I could see at that very moment burnishing the surfaces of the waves to topaz, fermenting it to a pale, milky beer, frothing it like milk, while every now and again great blue shadows passed over parts of it, as though high above us a god was having fun moving a mirror about”
The trickery and mirages of nature and the way we perceive the world are not the only illusions, or disillusionments, which the narrator discovers within the novel. Marcel goes through repeated artistic disillusionments, firstly from him finally being able to see La Berma, to then meeting his literary hero, Bergotte and afterwards meeting the great artist, Elstir. In the case of La Berma and Bergotte, he realises that the reality didn’t live up to the pleasures he had imagined in finally seeing La Berma and meeting Bergotte; instead all he got was the disappointment in realising that La Berma’s performance in reality wasn’t the euphoric experience he imagine it to be and Bergotte wasn’t the man he imagined him to be-this conflict between reality and the imagination is central to Proust’s work, for Proust there would always be a disconnect between the two because our imagination is purely an internal process, whereas reality is something which exists externally to ourselves, but which we are always attempting to correlate with how we imagine the world to be-yet Proust’s solution to this is; 'If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time.” This is coupled with the fact that now that the narrator has finally gained entry into an artistic milieu, he chooses to forgo the company of Elstir and Bergotte in the favour of Gilberte or the straggle of young girls, including Albertine, who so captivate his imagination. Although Bergotte and Elstir are able to open the door to the narrator’s aesthetic senses, it is the narrators’ experiences, no matter how banal or profound, which form the basis of his art.

And what an art the narrator is able to mould out of the raw materials of his life! Just as the painter is able to create something magical and beautiful out of paint and canvas, so the narrator is able to describe the world in wholly original ways;

“it was just a part of its surroundings, with an accidental look to it, as though it was a detail of a late afternoon in which the dome against the sky had the mellow swell of a fruit ripening its golden pink in the same sunshine as touched the chimneys of the houses.”
“At that late morning moment, when rays of sunlight came in form more than one aspect and seemingly from other times of the day, breaking the angles of the walls, setting side by side on the chest of draws a reflection from the beach and wayside altar of colours as variegated as flowers along a lane, alighting brightly on the wainscot with the tremble of folded wings ready to fly away, warming like bath-water a country mat by the little courtyard window, which the sunshine festooned like a vine, adding the charm and decorative complexity of the furnishings by seeming to peel away he flowered silks of armchairs and unpick their braidings, that room where I loitered for a moment before dressing for our outing was a prism in which the colours of the light from the outside were dispersed, a hive in which all the heady nectars of the day awaiting me were still separate and ungathered but already visible, a garden of hopes shimmering with silver and rose petals.”

The narrator’s theories and experience of love also develop-firstly the touching scenes between the narrator and his grandmother, the scene in which she awaits his knocking in the morning is truly beautiful-yet this being Proust, things are rarely what they seem and Proust’s nuanced characterisations demonstrate that although the narrator feels a deep love for his grandmother, it isn’t without an element of shallowness or cruelty, as when he mocks her for wanting to take a photo for Saint-Loup. Secondly comes the development of romantic love, in the first part of the book, the narrator realises that falling in love is more an act of self-gratification; all love is a form of self-love and every time we fall in love we are merely falling in love with the same image clothed in different people over and over again. So the narrator’s bizarre and obsessive love for Gilberte, is destined to be repeated over and over again; firstly via a set of incidental peasant girls and milk maids and then via a gaggle of young girls he encounters on the beach in Balbec and finally on Albertine. And what wonderful images and metaphors he is able to conjure up out of his bottomless hat in regards to Albertine;

“All the way back to Balbec, the image of Albertine, flooded by the glow form other girls, was not the only one I could see. But just as the moon, after spending the daylight hours in the guise of a white cloudlet, more shaped and more stable than others, begins to come into its own as daylight fades, so by the time I was back in the hotel, it was Albertine’s image which rose to shine unrivalled above the horizon of my heart.”
“Her cheeks often looked pale; but seen from the side, as I could see them now, they were suffused and brightened with blood which gave them the glow of those brisk winter mornings when, out for a walk, we see stone touched and ruddied by the sun, looking like pink granite and filling us with joy”
Imagine the artistic euphoria, when you first begin reading Proust, the sunshine of his prose lighting up your eyes and mind! Like the impressionists, Proust was an artist of euphoria; he was able to catch life from new and innovative perspectives like Manet, like Monet he captured the variance of light on different objects, like Renoir he painted intimate and inimitable portraits of beautiful women, he shared Cézanne’s obsession with depth and dimensions and Degas’s obsession with movement and, as we will see later on, his interest in the seedier elements of Parisian society. Proust is the ultimate literary impressionist. ...more

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May 18, 2014 poncho rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, read-in-2014, read-in-2016, queerness

Proust did it again: he left me speechless. I would describe this volume as a kaleidoscope upon adolescence; it reminded me of a younger self, and yet it reminded me of my latest self too. As unusual as it might be, sometimes I couldn't help it thinking of this book as some french, literary modernist, chick flick, with a twist of a male protagonist, to whom I got more attached in this one. And again, as in Swann's Way, it felt a little melancholy that it came to an end—though I need to recharge ...more

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Mar 28, 2014 Renato rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: the-novel-100, 100-best-books-world-library, all-stars, proust, 1001, a-la-recherche-du-temps-perdu, read-more-than-once, absolute-favorites, 2014

Re-read this book in January 2015 and wrote a review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ...more

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Jul 29, 2015 Sammy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: books-of-my-life

"The most familiar precepts are not always the truest" -- Gisèle as Sophocles, writing to Racine.

The second volume of Proust's Great Novel(TM), À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (Within a Budding Grove, better - but more salaciously - translated as In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower) is no less magisterial than the last, although one suspects that many more people falter at the posts of this one, given as much of the book is to social commentary and increasingly oblique yet erudite discu ...more

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