Swann's Way (A La Recherche du Temps Perdu #1)

#525
Title: Swann's Way (A La Recherche du Temps Perdu #1)
Author: Marcel Proust
Translator: C. K. Scott Moncrieff
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 1970/1913
474 pages

At this time I would like to quote from that finest flower of the cinematic arts, Barbarella: "It amuses the Great Tyrant to resent the expense of feeding orchids to slaves." This, then, was my experience of the first volume of Proust's massive yet strangely static A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. It amused me to resent the effort of reading Proust, finally finishing a mere 28 years after I began. That's a lot of orchids.

As a story, I found it too interior and agonizingly self-scrutinizing for my taste, though I applaud Proust's thoroughness. Swann's Way was one of four books I began simultaneously on DailyLit, reading 1 to 3 segments a day for the last ever so many months. Although it wasn't my intention, all are encyclopedic, each in their own specially hellish and complete manner. I will characterize them as I complete them. Swann's Way, which I finished first, is a compendium of internal states and perceptions, exquisitely masticated until the fibrous pulp disintegrates in an undifferentiated mass that is not as sweet as one might have anticipated or hoped. It reminded me of a person I once dated when I was young. This person would say things like "When I get up in the morning to go to work, I think, 'What's the point? Why don't I just kill myself right now?'" And when this person would say these things, I would think, "Okay,  go ahead. It would be more interesting than this endless rumination on what tiny slivers of experience mean." You must remember that I was 13 or 14 at the time, and wouldn't have enjoyed an actual suicide. Still, Proust puts me in mind of being 13, not only due to the minute dissection of every nanosecond and potential action, but because of the excruciatingly preadolescent social behavior of almost every character, petite bourgeoisie or no. I've seen Proust hailed for his skewering of the rising middle class, but I must report in all honesty that it reads like a middle school lunchroom, replete with titters, frosty and unexplained snubs, crises of meaning and interpretation, and once in a great while a moment of relief that merely presages the return of unendurable social strictures. Imagine Swann as the band teacher, 35 perhaps but still at the mercy of those pimply smirks. Today's cold entree is orchids.