The Guermantes Way (In Search of Lost Time, #3) in The Year of Reading Proust

Nov 22, 2008 Manny rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: older-women-younger-men, life-is-proust, french, the-goodreads-experience

In the first two volumes (I argue, anyway, in my review of A L'Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs), Proust was most interested in putting romantic relationships under the microscope. He returns to that theme later on in the series, but in the third book he is primarily concerned with picking apart the concept of wit, more exactly, esprit, something that has always been terribly important to the French upper classes. If you want an easier tour of the subject, you might like to check out Leconte's ...more

99 likes · Like · see review

Mar 13, 2013 Madeleine rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: blogophilia, our-libeary, maybe-it-s-time-to-live, 2013, head-in-the-clouds-nose-in-a-book, there-s-no-i-in-group-read

No longer confined to orbiting his parents and living for the freedom of a solitary walk, no longer living in thrall of adolescent hormones and grappling with the strange new worlds blossoming both within and without himself, The Guermantes Way finds our Narrator thrust ever forward into adulthood and the disappointing discovery that grown-ups rarely behave like adults, especially when the pride of ancestral inheritance is on the line and there are duplicitous societal niceties to abide by, whil No longer confined to orbiting his parents and living for the freedom of a solitary walk, no longer living in thrall of adolescent hormones and grappling with the strange new worlds blossoming both within and without himself, The Guermantes Way finds our Narrator thrust ever forward into adulthood and the disappointing discovery that grown-ups rarely behave like adults, especially when the pride of ancestral inheritance is on the line and there are duplicitous societal niceties to abide by, while the utterly insignificance and inanity of it all are underscored to devastating though understated effect by the first real taste of loss that this age usually carries with it. This third volume of In Search of Lost Time captures the period when our window to early 20th-century Parisian society is finding his place in it, though, true to his nervous, writer persona, he seems content to observe (now with the emergence of a sly humor) rather than engage with these exalted figures whose human forms slowly pale in comparison to the larger-than-life names he has aggrandized in youth.

It is, I imagine, intentional that battlefield philosophy receives generous attention early in this volume, as everything that follows is revealed to rest upon a framework of military-caliber tactics, from love (or what passes as love within the confines of Proust's created world -- ye gods, do any of these characters know what a healthy relationship actually looks like?) to facing the Grim Reaper as he counts down the minutes to one's predestined departure from this mortal coil to the carefully plotted choreography of maintaining superficial acquaintances to simply navigating daily life among even second-rate society when each moment brings a new potential for detonating reputationally ruinous land mines. If my piecemeal knowledge of foreign-language pronunciations isn't too far off the mark, I'd go so far as to suggest that the first syllable of the titular name is tellingly reminiscent of the French word "guerre."

I am so grateful that the (still somewhat and charmingly naive) Narrator is beginning to see through the shiny veneer of the socialites with whom he spends so much time and is slowly discovering, through both his own astute observations and whatever decidedly reliable tidbits are churned out by the rumor mill, what dirty secrets are hidden just below the surface and who has a limitless number of faces he or she presents according to present company and circumstance -- not to mention the public knowledge that is simply not spoken of unless it's being rehashed in hushed voices. If these vast stretches of recounting one gathering after another weren't full of the Narrator's observations about who's lying to whom, marital fissures slowly widening right before the public's eye, the double-talk that flatters one while slandering another (or are simply backhanded compliments cruelly served to one unlucky individual) and other betrayals of the his unwillingness to swallow the facade presented at these salons, I would have been bored to tears, page after page of gorgeous language or not, because I just don't care about such petty triflings in real life. A moment of the Narrator's blunt honesty echoed my own sentiments while handing them back to me in a beautifully rewrapped package while also illustrating that he was just as bored as I was in danger of becoming if not for his wit, beautiful prose and keen insights making it all worth the effort:

I scarcely listened to those anecdotes, something like the ones M. de Norpois used to tell my father; they afforded no food for my preferred patterns of thought; and, besides, even had they possessed the elements they lacked, they would have needed to be of a highly exciting nature for my inner life to be aroused during those hours spent in society when I lived on the surface, my hair well groomed, my shirtfront starched--that is to say, hours in which I could feel nothing of what I personally regarded as pleasure.

He does offer such a poetic presentation of these long hours listening to others' witticisms grow stale with every retelling, of gossip masquerading as current events, of current events being reduced to small talk (thanks for the Dreyfus affair primer, V.!) that it was easy for me to forget that the Narrator just wants to lose himself in his hosts' collection of Elstirs (which he does with abandon when finally given the opportunity, like the awkward animal lover who spends most of a party in the corner drunk on liquid courage and cooing not to an attractive stranger but to the party-giver's cat -- not that I have any personal experience there), catch a play and maybe finally start tapping into the creative juices that just won't let the words flow smoothly from his mind to the page. Society is no place for a sensitive man with an artist's soul, as even the most celebrated wit at the salon will eventually turn him into a plaything or a vehicle of immortality, as great painters are demonstrably reduced to mundane portraiture that will only be nitpicked by unappreciative minds for failing to capture the subject's outer beauty and inner glow adequately enough to pacify an aging ego that is fighting the nullification of death with the frivolity of social escapades.

As a sobering reminder of such an inevitability, this volume also sees the loss of the Narrator's beloved grandmother (it's not really a spoiler if the book in question is nearly a century old, right?), whose stroke and rapid decline allow her one last gesture of undying love, as she suffers in valiant silence so as to not upset her family and amends her few voiced complaints to meaningless utterances should they be overheard, lest she further worry those she's about to leave behind. The visible wreckage gathering in the Narrator's mother as she watches her own mother's life ebb away is heartache set to words and makes for one of the most sorrowful sequences I've ever observed as a reader, but also serves as a testament to the humanity with which Proust animates his already estimable writing. The Narrator's own first taste of loss that runs deeper than simple interruption of a mother's nightly affections is the natural foil to the artificial high-society world he so often finds himself in, which emphasizes the skewed perspective of the latter and permanent void of the former.

It seems that a book about recapturing lost times through recollections of the past is bound to memorialize the dead as well as serve as the predictable offspring of a society that is so obsessed with itself that it gleefully, and often maliciously, recounts its own clever turns of phrase when it's not reliving a favorite adversary's shameful misstep. Because if that's not the epitome of living in a moment before it hurries into the fading past, what is? ...more

31 likes · Like · see review

Feb 12, 2008 Inderjit Sanghera rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

The Guermantes Way is the third volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. It is the most poetic volume so far, the volumes in which, with the tacit encouragement of Elstir and Bergotte in the previous volume, that the narrator finally discovers his aesthetic sense and becomes subconsciously aware that the source of his great novel will be taken from the raw material of his life.
From a narrative perspective, The Guermantes Way is the chronicle of the narrator’s integration into upper-class Pari The Guermantes Way is the third volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. It is the most poetic volume so far, the volumes in which, with the tacit encouragement of Elstir and Bergotte in the previous volume, that the narrator finally discovers his aesthetic sense and becomes subconsciously aware that the source of his great novel will be taken from the raw material of his life.
From a narrative perspective, The Guermantes Way is the chronicle of the narrator’s integration into upper-class Parisian society, via the Guermantes family who he had spent his adolescence fantasizing about. The nature of memory is again a key theme within ‘The Guermantes Way’, as the narrator ponders the dull monochrome of voluntary memory versus kaleidoscope of involuntary memory.
“For a second, rehearsing the warbling from a distant spring-time, we can extract from it, as from the little tubes of colour used in painting, the precise tint-forgotten, mysterious and fresh-of the days we thought we remembered when, like bad painters, we were in fact spreading our whole past on a single canvas and painting it with the conventional monochrome of voluntary memory. Yet, on the contrary, each of the moments that composed it, in order to create something original, a unique blend, was using those colours from the past that now elude us, colours which, for instance, are still able to fill me with sudden delight, should the name of Guermantes…chance to restore to me the mauve colour, so soft, to bright and new, which lent the smoothness of velvet to the billowing scarf of the young Duchesse, and to her eyes like inaccessible and ever-flowing periwinkles lit by the blue sun of her smile.”
Involuntary memory is the spark which ignites the flame of the narrator’s past, the embers of which drift and fall effervescently onto the page, transformed from bland memories into art.
Indeed-for such a long novel-as far as “action” and “plot” in the conventional literary sense are concerned, nothing really happens in In Search of Lost Time, in which a soiree can take up two-hundred pages and meditations of the semantic origins of aristocratic surnames fifty. As Nabokov stated, In Search of Lost Time is a fairy tale, yet no writer had ever been able to create characters and a world with such depth and meaning as Proust. For Proust it is powers of imagination which allow us to create and contemplate beauty. His family moves next to the Duchesse de Guermantes and the narrator feels his fantasies about the magic of the Guermantes name slowly unravelling as they become part of his day-to-day reality. Yet, whilst contemplating her name, he is able to recreate the magic associated with the Guermantes name by realizing the importance lies in the contemplation of the object, not the object itself, which is always secondary;
“Yet scarcely had I left her presence than these vanished glints had come together like the pink and green reflections of sunset behind the oar that has disturbed them, and in the solitude of my thoughts the name had been quick to appropriate my memory of the face.”
There is a vitality and vivacity to the narration, so at odds to the narrator’s insouciant nature, or, rather, it is the narrator’s insouciance, in his carefree contemplation of the world, that he is able to transform everything around him into something magical and beautiful.
Clouds are described as; “In the square the evening sky set little pink clouds on the pear-shaped turrets of the castle, matching the colour of the bricks, and the harmonious effect was completed by the softening reflection of the light upon them.” The cooing of pigeons; “iridescent and unexpected like a first hyacinth gently tearing open its nourishing heart to release its mauve and satined flower of sound, and, like an open window, letting into my still shuttered, darkened bedroom, the warmth, the brightness, the fatigue of a first day of fine weather.” And the morning sun as “I could already see the morning sun shining on the slope of Fiesole, warming me in its rays; they were so strong that, smiling, I had to half-open, half-shut my eyelids, which, like alabaster lamps, were filled with a pink glow.” And so the mind of the reader is filled with the pink glow of Proust’s prose, his mind awakened by the deciduous beauty of sunlight reflected in swift-moving river or the fast-melting snowflakes on a cherry tree, you almost feel like you have been somnambulating through life, in which a clouds is just a cloud and a pond a pond and you wouldn’t dream of noticing the mellifluous magic of the moonlight or of the face of a beautiful woman so that it resembles a painting by Cezanne; “as I let my gaze wander over the lovely pink globe of her cheeks, whose gently curving surfaces merged into the first low folds of her beautiful black hair, which ran in animated ridges, rose into steep foothills and molded the hollows and slopes of its valleys…”
The theme of love is further developed within the volume, as we learn of Saint-Loup’s love for his mistress, the intelligent though trashy and vulgar former prostitute, Rachel. As mentioned in my review of Swann’s Way, most of the themes and plots within the novel are contained within the first 100 or so pages, so that Saint-Loup’s obsessive and unexplainable love for his mistress echoes that of Swann’s or Odette’s and, later on, the narrator’s for Albertine, which is still in its incipient stages. For Proust, other people are merely conduits for imaginary traits and characteristic which our minds envelop them with and jealousy and unattainability are the sparks which set the flames of love ablaze. In Search of Lost Time in many ways resembles Borges’s Library of Babel, a world of constant repetition of the same ideas told in different ways. Some of the most poignant and beautiful passages however, concern the death of the narrator’s beloved grandmother. When the narrator is introduced to his now almost catatonic grandmother just before she dies, he fails to recognize her, as her personality has been divested by death of all the things he love about her. Yet, in death, she is transformed back into a young maiden, triumphing over the vestiges of time and death, just as Proust himself is able to overcome the limitations of memory and time via his art and recreate and transform his life into something magical and transcendent.
...more

12 likes · Like · see review

Jun 24, 2013 Marieke rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, audiobooks, 2013, french-lit, proustiana

Whoa...I was listening and then boom it was done. I think I won't waste time picking up with the next volume... ...more

2 likes · Like · see review

Nov 25, 2012 Caroline rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

How can Proust be so mesmerizing? I'm glad it's so long, so that i have more time to experience it. ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Jan 10, 2014 John Beck rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed, fiction

http://andalittlewine.blogspot.com/20...

Would I have made it through The Guermantes Way without the plot synopsis and page reference numbers in the appendix?

More importantly, would the third book of Proust's In Search of Lost Time have scuttled my entire project to read his masterpiece?

The Guermantes Way was a bit like reading Leviticus (which I did in a different phase of self-abuse). It was dull, obsessively detailed, and light on characters. To be sure, Proust fills his book with important pe ...more

Like · see review

Jun 11, 2013 Will rated it really liked it

More than a bit tedious, but I guess that's the point of this "society novel." Society is tedious, like M. de Charlus(!) warned our young lovesick horndog narrator as he started venturing out into the world of Parisian high society. Some moments of horror, some moments of erotic tenderness, this little episode in the grand ISOLT narrative has it all. ...more

Like · see review