Sodom and Gomorrah (In Search of Lost Time, #4) in The Year of Reading Proust

Nov 22, 2008 Manny rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: french, parody-homage, life-is-proust, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts, australia, not-the-whole-truth

As the train left Adelaide Central Station, I resumed my reading of Sodome et Gomorrhe, its interruption by the meeting with Mme de Maizonniaux having given me so many unexpected insights into the beauties of the Iaai language that for a moment I had almost imagined ourselves seated peacefully together on New Caledonia's vermillion sands watching the sun set over the wind-flecked waters of la baie de Koutio Kouéta while discussing the relationship between, as she referred to it, l'enfant Kaori a ...more

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Jun 11, 2013 Madeleine rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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

As Sodom and Gomorrah began, our Narrator was struggling to understand the nature of homosexuals while I was alternating between reading his early-twentieth-century musings and poring over sweetly triumphant images of same-sex couples rushing to "legitimize" their long-running relationships with celebratory midnight marriages. As the strange continent of "inverts" draws horticultural allusions and comparisons to covert societies in Proust's time, the LGBTQ community is finally being recognized i As Sodom and Gomorrah began, our Narrator was struggling to understand the nature of homosexuals while I was alternating between reading his early-twentieth-century musings and poring over sweetly triumphant images of same-sex couples rushing to "legitimize" their long-running relationships with celebratory midnight marriages. As the strange continent of "inverts" draws horticultural allusions and comparisons to covert societies in Proust's time, the LGBTQ community is finally being recognized in a way that signals the slow unravelling of ignorance and inequality in mine.

For the first three volumes, it was easy to lose any sense of cultural or chronological divide when faced with so many universal constants of humanity that all but waltzed off their pages and pages of lyrical metaphors; in S&G, we have a Narrator who recalls how the first time he saw an airplane overhead filled him with childlike wonder and lives in a time when it is apparently totally normal for a man to pick out his female companion's evening attire, which are but a few examples that, like unchecked homophobia, for the first time in my journey with Proust heralded a struggle to bridge the gap between when these volumes were written and when I'm reading them, bringing into stark reality just how much separates modernism from modern times, regardless of how well the common ground of so many other shared human experiences minimized the inevitable differences in eras and epochs. I finally felt the full extent of the distance -- literal and figurative, in time and physical distance, of the real and fictionally polished -- between the richly depicted, intricately crafted images Proust used to construct his Narrator's winding halls of memory and the world to which I belong. It was a jarring transition, for sure, but it was also a rather well-timed one: As the Narrator become increasingly aware of adult life's complicated emotions stirring inside and the societal politics constantly changing around him (not to mention the slow encroachment of technology, which does cast a shroud of smoky modernization on a world previously draped in pristine laces and cloud-soft velvets), I, too, got a taste of that irrevocable shift from a reasonably expected understanding to desperate reconsideration of an ever-shifting world.

This installment, sadly, is one I read in staccato bursts of precious free time. It is unfortunate because Proust is best savored like good wine rather than chugged like cheap beer, and I fear I spent more time drunk on his beautiful words than intoxicated by his narrative insight. In those exhausted but relieved hours at home, in those stolen wedges of at-work bookwormery, in whatever few minutes were spent in quiet solitude, I clung to Proust with the desperation of a booklover in the throes of both work-related burnout and the dreaded reader's slump. And while a frantic heart may not be the best way to approach words that are ideally enjoyed at a leisurely stroll, I do believe the Narrator's burgeoning sense of humor and need to slowly drink in his surroundings kept me grounded during chaotic times. While S&G may not have been my favorite installment, it is the one that affected me the deepest.

Among the revolving door of social obligations and self-indulgent observations that seem to occupy the majority of Fictional Marcel's abundant free time, I found myself most invested in his delayed reaction to his grandmother's death. Having never known the magnitude of a transgenerational love like that which Narrator shared with his maternal grandmother, I felt his palpable grief just as keenly as the slow-arriving but no less heartrending clarity of permanent absence that hit him upon revisiting a place that once played such an important role in demonstrating the fondness and compassion that can exist between a grandmother and her grandson. As the Narrator contemplates how different Balbec is without his beloved grandmother, as he muses on how much his own once-young mother has taken on the visage of her own mother now that the elder woman's death has left a role unfulfilled, as he retraces rooms that once were filled with his grandmother's presence, the concrete reality of past time being truly lost time came thundering down against a mostly familiar landscape that derives most of its changes from the players inhabiting it. It is odd that the grief is intense but short-lived, yes, but I couldn't help but write it off as the Narrator's decision to forge ahead with his life rather than mawkishly wallow in grief -- such are the intermittences of the heart, no?

I continue to find the romantic entanglements of these characters to be a high-school level of ridiculous. It seems like so few of the relationships presented thus far in ISOLT -- Swann and Odette; the Narrator and Gilberte (and also Albertine); Saint-Loup and Rachel -- are healthy, mutually affectionate ones, but it could also be that I have little patience for romances, even fictional ones, that are built on a foundation of obsession and possession rather than respect and genuine fondness. And, really, the affair between Morel and Charlus isn't anything laudable, I know, but I can't help but find it one of the most believable examples of heady lust in terms of its execution and its players' emotionally fueled behaviors. There is little else but pure attraction drawing Charlus helplessly toward Morel, who can't help but take advantage of (or be manipulated by, depending on your vantage point) the older gentleman's affections and gifts. Still, the greed with which Charlus tries to keep Morel to himself while all but undressing him in public, the satisfaction he derives just from coaxing the younger musician into his presence is…. okay, a bit much, yes, but also keenly evocative of an irrationally all-consuming, unrealistically intense first crush and the reluctant empathy of understanding such memories drag along in their wake.

Sodom and Gomorrah struck me as proof that the memories of our past can't help but be intertwined with memories of others, a reminder that there are always multiple perspectives at play -- and that, as the ending scenes with Bloch reinforce, not everyone's assessment of a situation will always be reliable or anything more than actions born of misunderstanding a sticky situation that was handled badly because there are no do-over options in real life and things only make sense when hindsight lays down the rest of the puzzle. ISOLT might be fictional, sure, but it is written as an account of life, and sometimes learning life's lessons means that truths can be as ugly as our lesser selves. ...more

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Dec 21, 2012 Karen· rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: in-french, 2013-year-of-reading-proust, mttbr-2013

Fluid becomes solid and then fluid again. Changing states, crossovers, transformations. Words produce pictures that turn back into words, black marks on a white page; dots, accents, commas, shapes of letters, enter through the cornea, the retina, the optic nerve, are processed into......... into what? Images, characters, narrative, scenes, landscapes, weather, tableaux, dialogue, spectacle, sensation. Reactions.

The cities of the plain:Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboim, Bela.
But Proust takes his t ...more

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

‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ is the volume of In Search of Lost Time, in which the theme of homosexuality begins to shift from the periphery of the narrator’s life, to being the main focus of his sexual self-discovery. Prior to there had been a few incidental references to this or that homosexual (or potentially homosexual) character, such as Vinteuil’s daughter or Odette. However the narrator not only discovers that homosexuality exists, but is rampant within French society, to the point of incredulity ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ is the volume of In Search of Lost Time, in which the theme of homosexuality begins to shift from the periphery of the narrator’s life, to being the main focus of his sexual self-discovery. Prior to there had been a few incidental references to this or that homosexual (or potentially homosexual) character, such as Vinteuil’s daughter or Odette. However the narrator not only discovers that homosexuality exists, but is rampant within French society, to the point of incredulity, as the narrator begins to discover, or suspect, every character of having some sort of sodomotic or sapphic design or desire. ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ is by far the weakest of all volumes of ‘In Search of Lost Time’, both because it lacks the poetry and verve of the other volumes and because the narrator tends to go off on tendentious and tedious rants about homosexuality and is the one volume in which you really wish that Proust had employed a good editor (or any editor at all).
Nevertheless, his exploration of often contradictory nature of masculinity and femininity, especially in the case of the ever fascinating Baron de Charlus and his budding relationship with Albertine and interactions with the members of the Verdurin clan form the core of the novel, as the narrator passes from adolescence to adulthood. The most touching scene in the volume is when the narrator realises that he will never see his grandmother again-never hear her voice, the soft rasp of her wrinkled knuckles on his partition, to see the soft wisps of her hair blowing in the breeze on Balbec’s beach and never be able to apologies for all the times he had hurt her. Nevertheless, just as the story is passing from winter to spring, so the narrator’s despondency isn’t interminable, in many ways In Search of Lost Time is a novel about renewal, about rediscovering yourself in an ever-shifting world, of discovering the incandescence of a Spring day;
“Beneath this azure a slight but fresh breeze was causing the reddening bouquets to shiver slightly. Then to the rays of sunlight there suddenly succeeded those of the rain; they striped the entire horizon, drawing their grey mesh tight round the line of apple trees. But these continue to raise aloft their pink, flowering beauty, in a wind now become icy beneath the shower of rain that was falling; it was a day in spring.”
The narrator is furthermore able to find beauty in Albertine, in her coquettish ways, in dark hair and mole which seems to be shifting to different places on her face, in her elegant dress sense;
“And so, on that particular evening, she threw me a glance, half smiling, half anxious, lower her little pink kitten’s nose. Indeed, overlapping with her grey crepe-de-chine skirt, her grey cheviot jacket made you suppose that Albertine was all in grey. But signaling to me to help her, because her bouffant sleeves needed smoothing down or pulling down for her to get into or out of her jacket, she took the latter off, and since her sleeves were of very soft tartan, pink, pale blue, greeny, dove-coloured, it was as if a rainbow has formed in the grey sky.”
Albertine radiates a rainbow like cacophony of colours, pink, blue and white, shimmering beneath a simulacrum of colours beneath the grey veneer of her dress, Albertine’s inner radiance is expressed in her dress, her beauty is brought out by the elegance of her style, hinting at Albertine’s artistic side, recognize by Elstir, but ignored by the narrator, who often paints her as being a little vulgar and common. Yet this volume forms the bridge between the narrator’s incipient love and obsession for Albertine and the chasm of jealousy and suffering he is about to endure in the next volume, in what is in many ways a deliberate echo of the relationship between Charles Swann and Odette de Crecy as described in the first volume. ...more

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Mar 14, 2013 David Cerruti rated it really liked it · review of another edition

At one level, the Dreyfus Affair cracks open.
At another, the closet door opens wider.

By now, I am accustomed to Proust’s writing style, his sentence structure, and his phrasing. This allows me to just flow along and enjoy it without those distractions. As a result, new distractions appear. Certain words and sentences jump off the page, capture my attention, and lead me on little day dreams. What sort of word jumps off the page at me? Here’s an example a few pages from the end: “exactitude.”

The

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Jul 23, 2013 Caroline rated it liked it

"But it was more because they had the faculty of arousing that love, of raising it to a paroxysm, than because they were its image. When I saw them, when I heard their voices, I could find nothing in them which resembled my love and could account for it. And yet my sole joy lay in seeing them, my sole anxiety in waiting for them to come. It was as thought a virtue that had no connexion with them had been artificially attached to them by nature, and that this virtue, this quasi-electric power, ha "But it was more because they had the faculty of arousing that love, of raising it to a paroxysm, than because they were its image. When I saw them, when I heard their voices, I could find nothing in them which resembled my love and could account for it. And yet my sole joy lay in seeing them, my sole anxiety in waiting for them to come. It was as thought a virtue that had no connexion with them had been artificially attached to them by nature, and that this virtue, this quasi-electric power, had the effect upon me of exciting my love, that is to say of controlling all my actions and causing all my sufferings. But from this, the beauty, or the intelligence, or the kindness of these women was entirely distinct. As by an electric current that gives us a shock, I have been shaken by my loves, I have lived them, I have felt them: never have I succeeded in seeing or thinking them." (719) [...] "I absolutely must marry Albertine." (726)

"Two or three times it occurred to me, for a moment, that the world in which this room and these bookshelves were situated, and in which Albertine counted for so little, was perhaps an intellectural world, which was the sole reality, and my grief something like that we feel when we read a novel, a thing of which only a madman would make a lasting and permanent grief that prolonged itself through his life; that a tiny flicker of my will would suffice, perhaps, to attain to this real world, to re-enter it by breaking through my grief as one breaks through a paper-hoop, and to think no more about what Albertine had done than we think about the actions of the imaginary heroine of a novel after we have finished reading it." (718)

On Albertine's gray plaid: "It's only the women who don't know how to dress that are afraid of colours," went on M. de Charlus. "One can be brilliant without vulgarity and soft without being dull. Besides, you have not the same reasons as Mme de Cadignan for wishing to appear detached from life, for that was the idea which she wished to instil into d'Arthez with her grey down." (698)

"He resembled an old book of the Middle Ages, full of mistakes, of absurd traditions, of obscenities; he was extraordinarily composite." ...more

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