Reading the Classics: The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust

The Proust Project is nearing completion, finally! I actually finished The Captive/The Fugitive in January and due to severe sleep deprivation at the time my memories are not exactly in 3D surround sound so bear with me if I get some things mixed up. . .

 The Captive was the first volume of In Search of Lost Time to be published after Proust's death, and boy, does it show. I've grumbled that Proust could have used an editor before, but with these volumes the passages of gorgeous description and witty insights into the human condition were even fewer and farther between. It doesn't help that as the volumes deal with themes of possessiveness and jealousy and Marcel's love/hate relationship with Albertine, the whininess quotient goes throught the roof. Oh, the drama!

Marcel spends the first book obsessing over whether Albertine is cheating on him with her lesbian lovers and alternitively whining about how bored he is with her. Proust then unceremoniously offs Albertine (spoiler alert, I guess?), and the next book is spent wallowing in the loss of this Great Love (Hah!). When compared with the description of the loss of Marcel's grandmother earlier in the story, the loss of Albertine feels quite hollow, but I'm not sure if that's intentional. Something about the structure feels off, too. After hundreds of pages of very slow going, suddenly a whole bunch of major plot events are shoved into a few paragraphs like an afterthought.

I've pretty much loathed Marcel from very early on, but if you didn't despise him before, this volume will send you over the edge with his casual misogynism and the crap he puts Albertine through.  (That passive-aggressive letter!) I was genuinely happy that Albertine finally left and put us all out of our miseries. All in all Proust's view of love is pretty depressing, all lust and obsession and pathological jealousy.

There is a positive, though. I finally understand the structure Proust uses. (Yes, there is a structure!) He takes a scene and then expands on it in the way memories work, via free association. I felt that this was the easiest to spot in the bit where Marcel looks at his sleeping lover and contemplates his situation. I'll have to try this approach for myself soon, maybe in a short story.

Only one more volume to go! I might actually finish this year, after seven years!

The Proust Project: Round Four

Yep, started reading Sodom and Gomorrah, and I'm back in that special sweet spot between frustration and exhilaration. I want to like the book, I really do, but Proust doesn't make it easy. Between the tedious simile about the bees and flowers that goes on and on, the impregnable walls of text (Dude, have you ever heard of paragraph breaks?),  dialogue hidden inside long paragraphs, and pages-long sentences, I just want to throw the book at the wall and never pick it up again.

But then this happens:

"Although it was after nine o'clock, it was still the daylight that was giving the Luxor obelisk on the Place de la Concorde the appearance of pink nougat. Then it diluted the tint and changed the surface to a metallic substance, so that the obelisk not only became more precious but seemed more slender and almost flexible. One felt that one might have been able to twist this jewel, that one had perhaps already slightly bent it. The moon was now in the sky like a segment of an orange delicately peeled although nibbled at. But a few hours later it was to be fashioned of the most enduring gold. Nestling alone behind it, a poor little star was to serve as sole companion to the lonely moon, while the latter, keeping its friend protected but striding ahead more boldly, would brandish like an irresistible weapon, like an oriental symbol, its broad, magnificent golden crescent."

- Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust 

Wow. Just, wow. That's some gorgeous description.

Guess I'll shut up and keep reading then.